Preached on the day of the Pentecost, Sunday, May 31st at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Lectionry texts this sermon is based on can be found here.
Well, here we are at Pentecost… It has been 50 days since Easter Day, and today, Eastertide comes to a close. In our liturgical calendar, there is a chronology to the way we order our worship life. The liturgical year begins in Advent as we wait for the birth of our Lord. Then there’s Christmas followed by Epiphany, then Ash Wednesday and Lent, all of which culminates in Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and then Easter Day followed on by the season of Eastertide and for 50 days we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. After 40 of those days is the Ascension, then the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Our liturgical life has a chronology, and so too does our God. From the beginning, there was God the Creator, who in the fullness of time called Abraham and the children of Abraham into a special relationship, then in due time came Jesus; the Word made Flesh, a new Incarnation of God. Then after Jesus rose from the dead and returned to the Father, the Holy Spirit came to sanctify and inspire us to continue Jesus’ mission on earth until he comes again.
This is not to say that God’s Holy Spirit was 
absent from the world before the Pentecost. Far from it. In Genesis, we hear how the Holy Spirit moved over the waters at the creation. In the later Hebrew Scriptures, the Spirit of God is often seen descending upon a single individual to inspire and motivate that person to great deeds in times of need. Such was the case with Gideon and Saul. Then, with the ascendance of King David, the Spirit of God was experienced as an ongoing presence that was bestowed on the chosen leader, the anointed one. After David, the prophets began to predict the coming of a messiah, one anointed with the Spirit to lead Israel again as David had-- and two prophets in particular – Joel and Ezekiel – began to predict that at the end of time the Spirit would be given to all the people in order to create a new community, a new kingdom of God, a new relationship among God and God’s people.
The earliest followers of Jesus witnessed his anointing by the Holy Spirit in the appearance of a dove and the voice from heaven at his baptism by John in the River Jordan. And then after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, Luke details that outpouring of the Holy Spirit predicted by Joel and Ezekiel upon all the people at Pentecost which we heard in our first reading this morning from Acts.
But if you accept my Trinitarian Chronology, you might wonder, as I often do, if we don’t give the Holy Spirit short shrift. I mean, God the Father gets lots of air time, what with the creation of the world, the Flood, the parting of the
But the story of the Spirit of God is harder to tell. And that’s because the story of the God’s Holy Spirit is in fact the story of each one of us, and of our ancestors in the faith all the way back to that first Pentecost when the apostles and Mary and all the others were anointed with the Holy Spirit by the rushing wind and with tongues of fire.
In each of our baptisms the Spirit of God given to the apostles at Pentecost has been shared with us, has been transferred to us, has been bestowed upon us –and the truth that we tell -- not only with our lips but in our lives -- is the gospel of the Holy Spirit. The life of the church, the life of the entire body of Christ, is the ongoing story of God’s Spirit. We write the gospel of the Holy Spirit with our love for each other, with our service to those in need, with our prayers for the welfare of the world, with our acts of mercy and our work for justice and peace.
It’s harder to recount the story of the Holy Spirit on Sundays because we are still writing it everyday of our lives.
Today, we’re adding a few more authors to our number. Four new Christians will be baptized into the body of Christ in just a few minutes. We will bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit upon Caitlin, Kiran, Christopher and Jaime today, as it was bestowed upon us. And then they take up their pens, and with their lives, continue the story.
As our candidates are baptized with water and the Spirit, we will have a chance to renew our baptismal covenant. We will pledge again to continue the story of God’s Spirit in our world and in our time.
But before we do, I invite you to spend a moment, like good writers, plotting the rest of your part of the story. What’s next in the story you will write with your life? Is it time to start a new paragraph or perhaps to turn a new page? Or will you continue the tale so well known by those who love you of God’s glory and grace, of God’s love and forgiveness, of God’s mercy and justice as it is manifested in you, in your life?
The chronology is yours to carry on. This gospel is yours to write. The story of God’s Holy Spirit at work in this world is your story. Make it a good one…
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