Pentecost : A joy that cannot be contained.

 Today is an important day for the Church and also for us. Pentecost is the day when we remember the amazing events of the disciples being filled with the Holy Spirit and talking in different languages. It is a day for joy and excitement as we think of the difference that God can and does make.

It reminds us of the amazing moment when a group of scared disciples, who had been waiting as Jesus had told them, suddenly had the most incredible experience of God. It has been called the birthday of the Church. So Happy Birthday to us all. It is a joyous time.

The disciples had been through so much. They had followed Jesus, seen Him crucified. Then, just when they would have been wondering how they would cope without Him, He appeared. He had been resurrected. After a time of confusion, they spent time with Him. Then, just as they were getting used to life again, He ascended to heaven. He had promised the Holy Spirit, but they needed to wait. The room they were in needed to be locked because otherwise they could have been attacked. The people who had been against Jesus would not have been happy with them talking about Jesus. They were in danger.

If the disciples had left the room where they were waiting, they could have been killed or at least attacked. After all, they had seen Jesus, their leader, crucified. They showed patience and they waited. Jesus had promised them a comforter and an advocate. Who knows what they were expecting, but a great rushing wind, tongues of fire resting on them, and suddenly speaking in other languages was probably nowhere near what they thought would happen.

The shock, excitement, and joy must have been infectious. This was not a normal day, and after having been scared to leave the room where they were, they ran out into a huge crowd of people, being rather noisy, I expect.

It’s hard to keep a sense of joy to yourself, isn’t it? And what’s more, it’s catching. The excitement would have been clear. Pentecost itself was life changing for all those present; people followed Jesus. They worshipped together after, and these believers kept growing in number. What they had experienced was infectious. So infectious that thousands more believed on that day.

The Church is a gathering of believers worshipping God, and this is what all these new believers became part of. Part of what we would call the Church. A worldwide movement of people worshipping God. This is amazing: through the work of God in the lives of the disciples, the message of God reached out further and further from this group of previously scared believers.

The disciples, empowered by the Spirit, went out, and suddenly there were more and more believers. They, like us all, became part of the body of Christ in the world. The Church, a gathering of believers.

At that first Pentecost, the believers went out to tell people all about Jesus. As they did this, they suddenly found themselves able to speak in other languages. Their message didn’t change, just the communication.

As the people of God, our message is the same as that preached at Pentecost. It hasn’t changed; we communicate differently at times. We use very different words from those used generations ago, but the message is still the same.

That message is that God loves everyone, and to people who are lost, to a dying world, we can proclaim that God loves us and He loves them too. At Pentecost, God gave the gift of tongues to the disciples for one purpose, and that was for the purpose of communication. The gift of tongues is the ability to speak in another language that we don’t know ourselves. Because God wanted each person present to hear the message in their own language, He performed a miracle. He gave the apostles the gift of tongues so that they could communicate His message. If you can remember the story of the Tower of Babel, when everyone spoke the same language and felt they didn’t need God but were suddenly all speaking different languages, this is almost like a reversal. A reminder that we do need God to help us communicate.

This is great; after all, God has commissioned us to share His message. This means that we need to be ready to find the best way to communicate with others the great news of knowing God. We share the Gospel in our own way. We just need to be ourselves and let the joy of being a Christian show for others to see.

I remember I used to have a book called, ‘How to be a contagious Christian.’ This book said that by the way that we live, we can share our faith, and we should do this with joy. We have the best message ever.

As Christians, we are part of the worldwide Church, and we all have work to do. This work is to tell others about Jesus. On the Day of Pentecost, there were thousands of new converts, and they suddenly shared something that had never been shared before. This was the amazing gift and good news of Jesus. These believers had been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. They were filled with the power to tell others about Jesus. They were full of joy.

We are to be full of the joy and contentment of knowing that God created us, saved us from our sins, and walks with us every day, giving us power through the Holy Spirit so we can be more like Him.

I worked once in a University chaplaincy. It was great fun, and I learnt lots from the other Christian denominations I worked with. One thing which stuck out was from the Pentecostals I worked with.

This was that if someone said God is good to the people in the Pentecostal Church, they would reply, “All the time.” To which the person leading the service would then say, “and all the time,” to which they would respond, God is good. This is quite brilliant. The whole point that in everything God is good. Not just this, but think of the joy that comes from sharing that fact over and over.

God is good - all the time, all the time, God is good. I pray that we will all know that, as well as remembering that God loves us and will never leave us. To Him belongs all glory now and forever. AMEN

Blessing the Land, Living the Faith

 Today is Rogation Sunday, a day when we traditionally ask for God’s blessing on crops, and as we look around us and see the beautiful countryside by which we are surrounded, it is easy to be thankful to God for the beauty of this earth.

The word rogation comes from the Latin rogare, which means to ask.

Today I want to think about rogation, and what it means for both us and for our world. You all know that I love words, and I am pleased to say that everything I want to say this morning begins with the letter P. I am going to think about Prayer, Practice and Praise.

PRAYER – We hear a lot about prayer, but one story tells of a little boy who was sent to his room because he had been naughty. After he had been there a little while, he came out and informed his mother that it would all be ok now because he had said a prayer. The mother was pleased and said, “If you ask God to make you good, He will help you.” “Oh, I didn’t ask Him to help me be good,” replied the boy. “I asked Him to help you put up with me.”

Prayer is about asking; it is about talking to God. God knows what we need before we ask Him; this does not mean that we should not ask. In the reading from the Gospel this morning (John 14:15–21), we were reminded of Jesus’ command to love. I was reading about this passage the other day, and the writer of what I was reading compared loving with learning something new. In the same way that whenever we learn something new, we need a teacher. So, she said that as we continue to both learn and to continue loving, we are to look to our teacher Jesus.

We will always need to ask for God’s help. We will need to love unconditionally; this is hard. Some people will disappoint us, some people will hurt us, but we are to love. Jesus, our teacher, promised extra help in the Gospel reading. This help was the Holy Spirit.

At our birthday gathering on 24th May, we will remember the impact of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the reading today, the Holy Spirit was described as an advocate. I love this description because it means that when we ask for God’s help and strength, we know we have an advocate.

On this Rogation Sunday, as we ask God to bless our land, so we can ask Him to help us to love others as He would. We must also ask God to bless all those whose lives cross with ours; we can ask Him to help those who are in need; we can ask Him to make us better able to be like Him. We should ask for strength to proclaim His name to those who need to know Him; we must ask for the strength of God to help us to work for Him, bringing hope, the resurrection hope – that is everlasting hope – to the world.

PRACTICE – By seeking to be more like God and to pray for change and hope, we have a responsibility. A responsibility to – for want of a better phrase – “practice what we pray.” That is not to just ask God for something and do nothing about it ourselves, but to actually seek to do more. By this I mean not to just pray for a better world, but to seek to make the world a better place. We will do this by being more like God, by offering hope and support to all those who need it. We will do this by listening to God, and through reading the Bible more to find out the ways that He would do things and to do this ourselves. To give of our time, money and willingness to listen to God and act on His word.

In the reading we heard from the book of Acts (17:22–31), Paul used his best reasoning to impress the people of Athens so that they would come to believe in Jesus. He used what was around him, such as the altar to an unknown God, which had been put there just in case there was a god they missed when they were praying. It sounds ridiculous to us, but to the Athenians at the time it made perfect sense. Paul had a visual image he could use to state his point, and as he did this, he was able to tell people about Jesus in a way that they would understand.

This is to be our practice as well. We have nature around us that we can use as a way to thank God. We can also use it to explain that the intricacies of a flower come about ultimately because of a divine creator. Something so beautiful must be from God.

As we practice loving as Jesus would, so we can practice using our beautiful scenery as both a way to give thanks to God but also to tell others about His creation.

PRAISE – When we ask God for good things, we are always to give thanks. To praise God that wonderful things can happen so that even when it seems unlikely to us, we can remember that God can step in.

As we ask for God’s blessing in PRAYER, as we seek to do our bit in PRACTICE, so in PRAISE we can remember that this Rogation Day, and always, we are to PRAISE God because He alone is worthy to be praised. In the Gospel reading we were not just reminded to love others, but we were reminded that we are loved. God loves us, and He accepts us as we are. This is amazing and certainly something to want to praise and to give thanks to God for.

As we pray for our area, the world and all those around us, we are reminded that we too can and should not just pray but practice being more like God and telling others about Him. We are to praise Him for all that He both has done and continues to do for us and this world. May we seek to be a blessing to others through love, may we always share that love, and may we praise God and give thanks for all that He has done. Amen.