SPEAKER_00: Well today we celebrate Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: This began as a holiday, a feast in ancient Israel to recollect the giving of the law at Sinai.
SPEAKER_00: And for us, it becomes superseded by the giving of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: It's understood in many ways as the birthday of the church.
SPEAKER_00: But it what it is is that God pours out God's very own life, God's very own power, presence.
SPEAKER_00: That the church is, what is the church?
SPEAKER_00: The church is the place where God's life has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: That's what church is.
SPEAKER_00: This is the place where God's presence has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: Even we can say God's own agency has been poured out into us.
SPEAKER_00: This is the understanding of the prophetic tradition where the prophets, right, function as a mouthpiece for the God of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah standing up and says, Thus says the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And then dot dot.
SPEAKER_00: Where the agency of Isaiah is taken up in the agency of God and vice versa.
SPEAKER_00: There's a mingling of Isaiah and spirit, as we say in the creed, right?
SPEAKER_00: The spirit is the one who is utter, uttered, spoken through the prophets.
SPEAKER_00: And Joel prophesies that one day that God's own life, God's power and presence will be poured out and God's agency indiscriminately upon God's people, not just for a special prophetic class or tradition, but young and old, men and women, people of all kinds of languages, race, culture, that it's poured out indiscriminately on Jew and Gentile alike.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what John the Baptist prophesied.
SPEAKER_00: This is going to usher in the kingdom of God, right?
SPEAKER_00: John the Baptist says the mountains will be made low and the valleys will be raised up.
SPEAKER_00: Or the Blessed Virgin Mary, right, where she says, you bring down the mighty from their throngs, and you've exalted the humble and the meek.
SPEAKER_00: What the Spirit does when it's poured out is it creates this level playing field for all of humanity by virtue of our being human, by virtue of our being created in the image of the God who will pour out God's own life.
SPEAKER_00: This is what we see in the prophet Joel.
SPEAKER_00: This is what we see taking place in the book of Acts, and what Peter is eventually going to reference.
SPEAKER_00: That is that the spirit is poured out.
SPEAKER_00: You think of somebody like an Isaiah, like the authority that comes with Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like this power, presence, and authority, Joel is saying, like, yeah, in your daughter.
SPEAKER_00: In your sons, and children.
SPEAKER_00: Elderly.
SPEAKER_00: See, visions, dream dreams.
SPEAKER_00: And even Joel says, like slaves.
SPEAKER_00: This is a radical claim.
SPEAKER_00: This leveling of the playing field is at once an opening up of this unsurpassable worth and dignity that humanity has before this God, this Jesus, who has promised and prayed to the Father that this Spirit will be sent upon us.
SPEAKER_00: This is what we recognize today.
SPEAKER_00: This is what the church is.
SPEAKER_00: The church is the place where God's power, presence, and agency has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what you will see unfolding in the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_00: Just as Christ was anointed with the Spirit, right?
SPEAKER_00: The dove comes and rests on him, empowered for his ministry, so too the church.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit will come down, and then the church will be set ablaze for ministry throughout the Mediterranean, doing much of what Jesus is doing: preaching about the kingdom, healing, exercising, feeding the poor.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus was doing throughout Judea.
SPEAKER_00: But this vision of the church, that the Spirit and power and presence of God has poured out on people, it is a radical revolution.
SPEAKER_00: In many ways, we can understand Christianity not as a political revolution, meaning that people were revolting against the structures of power as they were understood.
SPEAKER_00: We don't really see Jesus as a political revolutionary or the church is functioning in that way.
SPEAKER_00: But what you do see is by means of this spirit, this power, this presence, there is a radical revolution of friendship.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what people in the first century, like non-believers who are looking upon the church, right?
SPEAKER_00: We have textual evidence of this, of just how peculiar these Christians were.
SPEAKER_00: That they gathered together people from different classes, different economic status, different races, and they had a common life.
SPEAKER_00: Like it was so peculiar.
SPEAKER_00: The people who would be the last people who you think would be together.
SPEAKER_00: It's not simply that the people who are speaking this language or from this land or had this skin tone.
SPEAKER_00: It's not simply that, hey, they're in the same room, but acts will eventually say, and they had all things in common.
SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a needy person among them.
SPEAKER_00: This radical common life that's born out of God's power, presence, and agency poured out onto his people.
SPEAKER_00: What does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: This means, as we see throughout the rest of the New Testament, that we bear witness to this spirit, that we draw near to Christ by drawing near to one another.
SPEAKER_00: That as we draw near to one another, this is in many ways the undoing of the Tower of Babylon.
SPEAKER_00: It's not uniformity, it's not imperialism, it's not the colonization of anything.
SPEAKER_00: But rather, it's the shared life in God, the shared life by the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: As we celebrate today and eat, if you didn't know we're eating, we're eating.
SPEAKER_00: As we celebrate and eat, I want to invite us to this vision, this vision of God's power and presence poured out in our life.
SPEAKER_00: That this is simply who we are.
SPEAKER_00: Who is the church?
SPEAKER_00: What is the church?
SPEAKER_00: It's where God's power and presence has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: It's where God's life has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: You'll notice this in the Nicene Creed, right, which we recite every Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: So the creed functions as claims about the Father, and then the Son, and then the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's a you know it's a triune creed.
SPEAKER_00: And then where is the the church?
SPEAKER_00: We believe everything we say about the church is under, right, the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in the Holy Catholic Church, right?
SPEAKER_00: We believe in the communion of saints, we believe in the forgiveness of sins, we believe in new life.
SPEAKER_00: Why do we believe because God's Spirit, God's life has been poured out.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.