(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The God You Hate”,
originally shared on May 21, 2026. It was the 414th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams
of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Of all the gods that people worship in the world, how do Christians know that the God they worship is the true one? Today, we’re going to find out.
When someone says
that he’s going to die and then rise from the dead to live forever, and he says
that no will take his life but that he will give it and then take it back
again, and then that happens, you’d think that nothing in this weird world
could ever approach that for weirdness.
Fifty days after
Jesus rose from the dead, the most important day in human history, he changed
the world. Again. It was the Day of Pentecost.
Last Sunday was my
birthday. I turned 78. Birthdays are a big deal to some, though I find that
they mean less to me as I grow older and that time seems to be speeding up.
My hero in church
development, Lyle Schaller, once said that when you are talking with a
congregation about long-range planning, you have to remember that a year means
different things to people in different demographics.
For example, a
7-year-old is convinced that there are at least 750 days between birthdays,
while a 70-year-old knows that there are no more than 125.
The Day of
Pentecost is the last Sunday in the Easter season.
The word
“Pentecost” comes from the Greek word for “fiftieth”. The Day of Pentecost
described in the Bible was on the Jewish festival of Shavuot, held on the
fiftieth day from the first day of Passover. Then, it celebrated the offering
of the first fruits of the winter wheat harvest at the Temple in Jerusalem.
This was Herod’s
Temple and the massive Temple complex covered 35 acres. People from all over
the world came for this celebration and also to see the building, a wonder of
the world at that time. The crowds were massive, with some estimating crowds of
250,000 people!
The disciples were
hiding in a house in Jerusalem, and then this happened in Acts 2:1-4,
2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together
in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a
violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided
tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.
4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other
languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
It’s interesting to
note that in both the Hebrew language in which what we call the Old Testament
was written and the Koine Greek language in which the New Testament was
written, there are two words, “ruach” in Hebrew and “pneuma” (from which we get
our words “pneumonia” and “pneumatic”) in Greek, that have the same three
meanings for both words: wind, breath, and spirit.
On the first Day of
Pentecost, the sound of the wind came and the breath of God that brought life
from clay to make human beings was present, and the Holy Spirit, “filled the
entire house where they were sitting.”
Tongues of fire
rested on each of the disciples.
Why didn’t their
hair catch on fire?
I remember when one
of the member families in a church I served lived in a house on the edge of
open country and a wildfire came to their neighborhood one howling windy night.
The fire department arrived to fight the fire and recommended that everyone on
their cul-de-sac leave. This family decided to stay and fight the fire with
their garden hoses for as long as they could.
Some were on the
roof, and some were on the ground, watching for embers and extinguishing them
with their garden hoses.
At some point, the
fire ran up the side of a palm tree, and when it reached the dry top, the tree
exploded! Embers blew everywhere around the area and one of them landed on the
head of a neighbor who was also on the roof of his house.
He apparently used
a significant amount of hair spray and had a lot of blown-dried hair on the top
of his head because when his hair started burning, he didn’t feel it right
away.
So, our member and
his sons yelled at him, “Your hair is on fire!” but it was so windy he couldn’t
hear them. So, they continued yelling, “Your hair’s on fire!” and he didn’t
hear them. But a firefighter standing on the ground heard them, saw the guy
with his hair on fire, turned his fire hose on the guy and knocked him off the
roof!
Why weren’t the
disciples running around in a panic when they saw tongues of fire on each
other?
Because it was holy
fire. God was present in that holy fire.
Remember when Moses
encountered the burning bush in the wilderness, in Exodus 3:2-6?
2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of
fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not
consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight
and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the LORD saw that he had turned
aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said,
“Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your
feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said
further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at
God.
The tongues of fire
that didn’t consume the disciples’ hair was the presence of God. And what
happened next” We saw in the 4th verse of today’s Gospel
reading, “4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in
other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
They left their
refuge and went out to where the people were. They began to proclaim the good
news of Jesus Christ. They began their ministries with nothing but the Holy
Spirit because it was all they needed.
So, what had just
happened?
Remember the Tower
of Babel?
After the Flood,
people began to repopulate the earth, but they didn’t spread out. The all had
the same language, and they were all concentrated in one place. This
homogeneity and concentration led them to be full of themselves. The same
hubris that does we human beings in again and again.
They decided that,
since they knew how to make strong bricks and mortar, they could build a tower
tall enough to let people walk into heaven without God. And how did that work
out? We see in Genesis 11:8-9,
8 So the LORD
scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left
off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD
confused the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them
abroad over the face of all the earth.
So, what does that
have to do with the Day of Pentecost? That Pentecost story continues in Acts
2:5-8,
5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven
living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered,
because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed
and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8
And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?
The consequence of
the attempted building of the Tower of Babel is reversed! This isn’t speaking
in tongues. People from all over the world came together and heard the same
Gospel message being proclaimed in their own human languages.
This is more like
the Star Trek simultaneous translator, where creatures could communicate with
every other creature in the universe in their own language in real time.
On the Day of
Pentecost the disciples spoke in their language, but the Holy Spirit
made it so that every other person present from all over the world heard the
same Gospel message of Jesus Christ in their own language at the same
time.
We see, on the week
of this last Sunday in the Easter season, yet another example of oneness
under God’s grace and by God’s doing, in the Holy Spirit!
I would guess that
there are many languages spoken among the members of our churches. English?
Spanish? Swedish, German, Chinese? Tagalog? Vietnamese? Korean? Armenian?
Persian? Norwegian?
And yet, we all
understand one another at the deepest level through our common relationship
with the one true living God in the Holy Spirit.
I’ve been trying to
learn Mandarin after serving a Chinese and Taiwanese church in Monterey Park
for several years. And I want to help build bridges at a time of global
tensions and to help support the growing numbers of Christians who speak
Mandarin, the most spoken language in the world. But it’s hard for me to not
just speak but to think in Mandarin, because it’s not my native language.
My grandmother told
me that after her family immigrated from Norway, they lived in a part of
Wisconsin where there were many Norwegian people, and her family spoke
Norwegian at home. Eventually, she remembered, they decided that they would
switch to English because they were in America now.
But she told me,
her mother, my great grandmother, always prayed in Norwegian because she wasn’t
sure that God understood the new language as well as he knew Norwegian! 😊
We speak many
languages today because we come from other languages, or we have learned other
languages. And, like the first disciples, we want to reach the world with the
one language that unites everybody: the unifying presence of God in the
language of the Holy Spirit, because we have been given good news to share!
But good news can’t
be good, unless we first know the bad news, and that’s where we fail and why
our message doesn’t connect with the world today.
I watched a video
online recently that reflected on a familiar “gotcha” question, one formatted
to make Christians look ridiculous merely by asking it.
It came from a page
called “Wdysia”.
It began, “I have a
question for Christians. Of all the thousands of Gods in the world, which one
is the real God?”
The answer was
immediate: “The one you hate.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
replied the questioner.
The answerer
replied, “The one with actual power and influence in the world. The one whose
word testifies against the world that it’s evil. The one that you
simultaneously shake your fist at as you deny his existence.
You know which God
is the one true God. It’s the one you desperately hate.”
The questioner then
replies, “OK, so why would I hate God?”
The one being asked
replies, “Because you’re evil.”
That’s the
uncomfortable truth. We are born separated from God. That’s what it means when
we say that we are born in sin.
Martin Luther, the
16th Century Church reformer, is credited with restoring the Good
News, the Gospel, to the Christian Church, because the Roman Catholic Church of
his day had given the people only the bad news: that you were facing
eternal punishment unless you did enough good to make up for the bad that you
had done in your life. Luther knew that he couldn’t humanly do that. He thought
for sure that he was going to hell. So, as one of his mentors pointed out, he
hated God.
Luther studied the
whole history of salvation in the Bible and recovered the really Good News of
what every page pointed to: the cross, including this passage from Paul’s
letter to the church in Rome, in Romans 5:8,
8 But God
proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Jesus, fully God
and fully human being, gave his life for us on the cross. He took his
life back again and rose from the dead in his Resurrection, for us! He
had created us for a living relationship with God in which every human being
has the stamp of right and wrong on their heart and knows when God is
missing. We are saved by God’s grace through God’s gift of faith. All that is
good news.
The reason, I
think, that this great Good News doesn’t connect with people today is because
they don’t ever hear the really bad news. They don’t know why the Good
News is good news.
And they don’t want
to. Positive personal self-esteem is what we strive for, it is the highest
value in our culture. People don’t know that they are naturally lost and
condemned sinners. People, including many Christians, go to church just to be
entertained, to be pleased, and to be told that the Good News, the Gospel, is
that God made you just the way you are and loves you just the way you are. The
cross is offensive to many in our culture. It always has been to many.
No one knows when
Jesus will return in judgment and, even though we long for it to finally come
and usher in a new heaven and a new earth, the lead-up is not going to be
pleasant. So, I’m not terribly comfortable when I am reminded of Paul’s words
in his second letter to a young pastor, in 2 Timothy 4:3,
3 For the
time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having
itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own
desires,
The Bible tells us
that we are sinners, that there’s no good news without knowing the bad news.
Martin Luther said that only way to heaven was through the Savior, but that
people needed to first internalize the bad news before the good news could mean
anything to them.
That’s why he said
that both the religious Law, by which we see our condemnation,
and the Gospel, by which we see our salvation by faith through grace,
are needed to see the whole meaning of the scripture at the cross.
But, if we don’t
know the Good News, if no one has told us, we may only see God as a vengeful
judge, and we hate him for making us feel guilty and for justly condemning us
in our sin.
It’s like saying
that 42 is the answer. It’s meaningless unless we first know the question.
Our response, the
message of the Day of Pentecost, is that, in our broken world, filled with
uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, the war in the Iran, threats of world war,
rising homelessness, fear of crime, environmental calamities, gun violence, and
a teetering economy, all signs of human sinfulness, God’s answer is the gift of
Jesus.
In a culture that
is fragmented, even pulverized, where we often find it impossible to speak
about how to resolve these issues without soon shouting at each other, all
signs of human sinfulness, God’s answer is the gift of Jesus.
We are separated
from one another, even from our true selves, because we are separated from
Jesus. The closer we get to Jesus, the closer we get to one another, until we
are all one in Jesus.
How does the Day of
Pentecost story end? Peter speaks to the gathered crowd and shares the good
news of Jesus. And then this happens in Acts 2:37-42,
37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and
said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” 38
Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift
of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for
all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he
testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves
from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were
baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. 42 They devoted
themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread
and the prayers.
The Day of
Pentecost, the Birthday of the Christian Church through the coming of the Holy
Spirit, that we will celebrate this coming Sunday, comes on the fiftieth day
after Easter in the Christian Church.
But, in God, all
time is the present. The Holy Spirit continues to call, gather, and enlighten
the whole Christian Church, the Body of Christ, on earth. We are equipped and
sent into the world with everything we need to be the church.
I saw a story
online some time ago about a professor who said that he wanted to create a nice
cozy atmosphere in his classroom with a fireplace video, so he hooked it up.
But when the video appeared on the five large video screens on the walls, he
said that it looked like he was teaching in hell! 😊
That’s the
destructive kind of fire.
The fire of the
Holy Spirit is the fire that does not consume but instead gives life.
Human beings had
rejected God and brought evil into the world. We broke the relationship with
God that we had been given by God at Creation. We lived in sin, and many still
do.
Jesus paid the
price on the cross to restore that relationship for all who repent and believe
and are baptized. The resurrection showed that Jesus is God and that he could
reconcile human beings to God by his death. And his resurrection means that we
too will rise. Our eternal life began in our baptism through the faith
that came as God’s gift. That’s Good News!
Christ is risen! He
is risen indeed! Alleluia! And because he is risen, we too shall rise to
newness of life now and to life everlasting!
May this coming
Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, be a celebration of the Holy Spirit and a
recommittal of your Christian Community to the sharing of the good news of
Jesus Christ.
Be formed and be
guided and be defined by it every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment