This is my sermon from The Day of Pentecost 2024, a day that included a very special baptism. I offer it with the usual disclaimer that I don’t use notes when I preach so it is “more or less” what the congregation heard. We are using Dr. Wilda Gafney’s, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The lectionary was Isaiah 44:1-8; Psalm 104:1-4, 10-15, 27-30; Romans 8:14-27; and John 14:8-17.
Today, in addition to being the day of Clara’s baptism, is the Day of Pentecost, the day we sometimes refer to as the birthday of the Church because it’s the day when God’s Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples as they were cowering in an upper room (or so we’re told in other parts of Scripture) not quite understanding how they were going to go on living life in the ways they had felt compelled to when they were sitting with Jesus, breaking bread with Jesus, healing with Jesus, and doing all the things they had been doing with Jesus for the three years of his public ministry, at least as far as we know it.
The Day of Pentecost is the day when the Spirit enlivens them to live their lives as Jesus would have them live, without needing the physical Jesus with them, living their lives with the understanding that to follow God’s commandments – to love one another as we are loved, to free the imprisoned, to give food to the hungry, clothing to the poor, shelter to the unsheltered, sight to the blind – to do all of those things that Jesus told us are part of how we love God because we show our love for God in the ways we show our love for God’s people. That’s the day -today, Pentecost – when the disciples accepted the Spirit in their lives in a way they hadn’t before and the Church as we know it today, for better or for worse, was born.
What is also remarkable about this is that, in the reading from Acts we’ve heard in other years, we’re told that there are throngs of people outside, people from all nations and all languages, people who didn’t know each other and didn’t understand each other and would’ve thought they had very little in common, and suddenly they could understand each other. This was possible because what the Spirit does for us is enliven our very core. She enlivens the very essence of who we are as children of God. When we live our lives with that essence as the wellspring, then the things we think divide us don’t because we’re not looking for obstacles, we’re looking for life, we’re looking for love.
Paul says to us that we don’t necessarily even need to know what we need or what we want or what we desire, because God’s spirit already does. When we don’t know how to pray -whether it’s for ourselves or the problems of the world or for our friend or whatever it is- when we don’t know how to pray, when we open ourselves to the Spirit, the Spirit does it with us, and for us, and in us.
And that really is how we should live as the Church, as the Body of Christ. Not so much focused on what we think or what we want or any of that, but rather on what we discern God would have us do or how God would have us be in any circumstance or any moment in time.
Today, in just a few minutes, we’ll be baptizing Clara, who, at the ripe old age of seven, wants to be baptized. Now, she was about five and a half when she said to her mother, “we need to start going to church.” I’m not sure she even understood what church was, but, lo and behold, we now have two new families in this parish because a five-and-a-half-year-old listened to what I can only imagine was the voice of God, even though at five and a half, she probably wouldn’t have thought it was the voice of God. But she knew that she wanted to come here and be a part of a church community.
Today we are baptizing her and as we do this we will be invoking the Holy Spirit, not to come and to be a part of her for the first time, or a part of us for the first time, but to welcome her, to welcome her in the spirit of adoption we just heard about, to welcome her into the household of God in ways that we believe will shape her life, will inform the ways she lives her faith, will help us be a better church than we could have been yesterday.
The Spirit is with us. Today the Spirit, who is capable of doing things and doing new things at the same time, will be doing the same things she always does: being present in our midst, nudging us to invite her into our lives and our hearts, and she’ll be doing a new thing. She’ll be making us different than we were yesterday because, in addition to Clara being welcomed, we will remember our call to be welcoming.
You will have a spoken part. I’m going to ask you a question and I expect a faith-filled, resounding, “We will!” in answer to that question. In that moment, I invite you to open your hearts, maybe to more than where they are in this moment, to where the Spirit is calling you. I invite you to listen to how the Spirit is nudging you to live your faith in ways that are as bold and as forthright as a five-and-a-half-year-old making the decision that coming to this church, to being part of a community of faith, was something she just needed to do.
