“I Will Pour Out My Spirit”

A Pentecost Sermon Based on Acts 2:1-18

Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, June 8, 2025

When I was little, I remember church as a quiet, solemn place. We sat up straight in big wooden pews, dressed in our Sunday best. The warm jeweled light filtered through the large stained glass windows as it had since the time of our great-great uncle, who had helped build the church. We were not supposed to squirm and definitely could not talk! There wasn’t any children’s sermon in those days, or children’s bulletins either. Every Sunday was much the same, and no one expected it to be any different.

I’m not sure we Presbyterians would have liked that first Pentecost. The violent wind would have blown out the altar candles and scattered the choir music and church bulletins, tongues of fire on people’s heads would have caused great alarm - someone would have rushed to get the fire extinguisher. And speaking in other languages? People in the pews talking and making noise? A fisherman preaching? (Was he approved by the Committee on Ministry?)

How is this chaos “decent and in order” as we Presbyterians like it?

Most people prefer a tame, predictable God, one that appears only on Sundays, or, at least, only when we pray or are in some great need. We don’t want a God who appears in a violent wind, or flames, or strange behavior, such as speaking in tongues. In her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard writes:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit drew those first believers out to where they could never return. They began that day as a small group of Jesus’ followers, waiting patiently in Jerusalem, as he had asked them to. Just a few weeks before they had been hiding behind locked doors. Then came the rushing violent wind and tongues of fire. Now they were proclaiming aloud the good news of Jesus to whomever would listen! Peter, who, out of fear, denied three times that he even knew Jesus, preached a bold sermon, concluding with the words, “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.” By the end of that unforgettable day, they had baptized 3000 converts. The baptismal service must have lasted all afternoon! They were a small and quiet group no more. The Holy Spirit gave the disciples the courage to step out of their comfort zone, and they could never step back.

When God’s Spirit moves us, we, too, may find we are thrust out of our comfort zone, to do something we ordinarily would not do, to go somewhere we might not ordinarily go.

I think about our friend, the late Dr. Mark Jacobson and his wife Linda, who devoted their lives to establishing hospitals in Tanzania, working together with the church there. As a young man, just starting out, Mark visited Africa and saw the needs. He heard Jesus’ call, and left his promising career in the U.S. to work in rural Tanzania. He started at a mud-brick clinic that he built into a large modern institution, now a regional referral hospital. He established a program to help disadvantaged children get much-needed surgeries – for cleft-palate, club-foot, broken bones or severe burns that had healed improperly. This program, along with several others that he began, still exists today. The Holy Spirit moved him to dedicate his life to a cause greater than himself. God is always doing the unexpected, if we have ears to listen.

I told you this next story a while ago, but some of you are new, so I will tell it again. Nineteen years ago this summer, Joe and I, along with nine-year-old Christa, headed to Africa with three suitcases apiece. We had sold our condominium, put the rest of our things in storage, and left.

It was a great leap into the unknown, but it was the best thing we ever did. How did this happen? Like most things, the Spirit led us gradually. Ten years before, Joe, who worked at the Water Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey, had been invited to join a group of volunteers drilling water wells in Haiti. He loved it. He recalls how the people rejoiced and their priest danced as clean, fresh water bubbled up to the surface from a newly-drilled well. It was their third attempt at finding water. They had almost given up, but Joe’s team was successful. This was where his talents and the world’s needs met, as Buechner famously said. Soon he was making plans for the next trip to Haiti, and the next. After seventeen short-term mission trips in less than ten years, he was ready to leave his secure government job to work full-time bringing water to the thirsty in developing countries. Of course, he and God still had to convince me to leave my ministry as associate pastor and take our young daughter to the Central African Republic, but that’s another story. The Holy Spirit doesn’t always work dramatically in wind and fire, but often in quieter ways.

Sometimes we just have to let go of our fears and be open to where God is leading us. The miracle of Pentecost is not as much about the unusual signs and miracles that happened that day, but rather that nearly 2000 years later the Spirit continues to move in people’s hearts. The Holy Spirit may not always come with wind and fire, but it can still change lives.

The Holy Spirit can also change the life of the church and community as well. The twelve disciples were all Jewish, all spoke the same language, and shared the same culture. That day in Jerusalem, they were suddenly joined by thousands of people from many different lands, all speaking different languages, with different cultures. There were people from all over the known world – from Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and as far away as Rome – a culturally diverse group. It sounds a bit like San Jose, doesn’t it? At least fifteen different languages are mentioned in Acts 2 (we left out the verses where they are listed, so as not to make Paul read all the tongue-twisting names),

yet everyone present that day could understand the message of love and forgiveness the disciples were bringing.

         From the time of Abraham, God made it clear that his blessings were not just for one tribe or nation, but the whole earth. Back in Genesis 12, God tells him, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” The ancient prophets foretold a time when people from all nations would come to worship the one true God. At Pentecost, we begin to see these prophecies come true. People from many nations hear of the love of God in their own native language. We don’t know how this miracle occurred, yet God made it clear on Pentecost that everyone is included in God’s plan. After Pentecost, we can no longer use the excuse that someone is different to exclude or ignore them. Pentecost teaches us that everyone belongs, that everyone is invited to be a part of God’s family.

This is a radical change for humanity, one we are still trying to live into. Fear and suspicion of those who are different seems almost hard-wired into our brains. Ill-intentioned people take advantage of this fear and suspicion to divide us.

We still have work to do in cooperating with God’s vision of a world in which people of all races, cultures, and languages embrace each other as family. Indeed our congregation, made up of people who themselves or their ancestors came from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America – our church – Santa Teresa Hills – is itself a sign of hope. We have been brought together by the work of the Spirit. If you are discouraged about things that have been happening in the political sphere, reflect on the existence of our congregation and the witness we bear to God’s all-encompassing love.

That first Pentecost day ended with people from many languages, cultures, and social classes praying, hearing God’s word, and eating together. This diverse group of people cared for one another, opening their homes to strangers to share a meal with them. As Acts Chapter 2 closes, there is no fire, no wind, and no miraculous speaking in tongues – in fact, they probably needed people to translate the conversation at the dinner table. Strangers from many lands eating together may be the biggest Pentecostal miracle of all.

At the communion table, as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we re-enact this love-feast that must have taken place that Pentecost evening, when all 3000 new believers, along with the faithful disciples and followers who had reached out to them that day, celebrated communion together.

So whether as individuals or as a church, the Holy Spirit impels us to move beyond our comfort zone, to extend our boundaries, to challenge us to move into new areas of ministry and service, or to bring us together with those who are different from us. Without the Spirit, our divisions and fears define us. With the Spirit, we are all children of God, one family. The good news is that God has promised to pour out the Spirit freely to all who will receive it. We are empowered to lower our walls, our defenses, to allow the Spirit to sweep into our lives, our congregation, and our community, and we will never be the same. Amen.

With thanks to Bishop Mike Rinehart, whose writings on Pentecost inspired some of these ideas.

Sermon ©Deborah Troester 2025