Pentecost/confirmation service
Sunday 15, May 2005
Children's sermon: Service to God means learning and sharing and being sent out.
Sermon (Pastor Eberhart): There are no pentecost cards in the commercial world. The Home Depot sells Penta plants, and you can ask "how much does a penta cost," but no pentecost decorations.
Pentecost was orignally a Jewish custom. We now associate it with the giving of the Holy Spirit. The disciples were told to wait in the city, to get power from on high. They spoke in 15 different dialects and languages. "Are these Galileans?" they asked. "They're hicks," they said. "They're either incredibly intelligent, or incredibly drunk." Paul, a man who denied Jesus, becomes a proclaimer of `calling on the Lord.' The Galileans were not the greatest society. They spoke a language of creolized Greek and Latin, mixed with Aramaic. They were ordinary people. Someone once came into a church service at our savior and said `I don't belong here. I belong at the Spanish service.'
Lenten services are better than pentecost. A person with Jesus in their heart won't say ` You don't belong in this service.' The church is an instrument of God, not a country club. Not a rich man's playground.
A Toyota dealership boasts of having 60 different employees with different languages, they are hugely efficient, and they make $350 million in business a year. "This is America." They do it for money, but we should be like that for the love of God. God has brought the world to us. The Atlantic LCMS speaks 30 different languages. They have made more churches than other branches.
There is a fable about a disgruntled angel. He goes to God in heaven, and complains about the sad state of affairs on earth. God says that "I have given them fire and love." Fables are always pretend stories. God gave us His holy spirit to remind us of the truth. It's not a fable.
In 1968, the World Council of Churches was an inefficient organization. Nobody wanted to make waves. But someone wrote a letter saying "Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the Word is a dead letter, the church is just an organization, the mission is just propaganda, and the Christian morality is just slave morality. But with the Holy Spirit, the gospel is the power of life, God is near and Jesus is living." It takes a Spirit led Galilean to make that happen, to say that God will be with us and encouraging us.