The Mystery of Our Gifts
NL Year 1 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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I have always been fascinated with the third person of the Trinity, also known as the Holy Spirit. One of the main reasons why I am so fascinated with the Holy Spirit is that I am in awe of and in love with Martin Luther’s explanation of the third article of the Apostles Creed. That’s a mouthful, but the third part of the Apostle’s Creed is the part that is the focus on the Holy Spirit...kind of. It says, “I believe the Holy Spirit,” and then it goes on to talking about the catholic church and communion of saints, etc.
Luther says this about that third part of the Creed, “I believe that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and preserves it in union with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. In this Christian church he daily and abundantly forgives all my sins, and the sins of all believers, and on the last day he will raise me and all the dead and will grant eternal life to me and to all who believe in Christ. This is most certainly true.”
That, for me, has caused me to be completely fascinated with the Holy Spirit since I had to memorize all the explanations to all parts of Luther’s Small Catechism which is where this comes from. It is such a powerful statement of faith and trust in God saying that God is the one who is in charge and guides our faith. Do I completely understand how the Spirit works? No. I have no idea how exactly the Spirit works but I do know that the Spirit does work in and through each of us all the time.Our Faith in God and in the workings of the Spirit aren’t necessitated by completely understanding it, in fact Luther says that we can’t do it by our own reason or understanding, but that the Spirit calls us and asks us to trust.
Part of my other fascination with the Spirit is the fact that we don’t talk about the Spirit as much as I think we should. In fact, if you take a look at the Apostles Creed you can see that the Holy Spirit gets one line that directly addresses it and yet all it says is that we believe in it. Now I know you might say that God the Father only gets that same one liner, but God is credited with creating heaven and earth and if I were to ask you to give me examples from the Bible where we see God at work as the Father then we would be here for a very long time.So why is the Spirit so mysterious? Why doesn’t the Spirit get as much face time as the other two parts of the Trinity? I don’t know but I do know that also drives my fascination with the Holy Spirit. I thought I might take us through some of the important texts that talk about the Holy Spirit and maybe as we walk through them together we might shed some more light on the Spirit and maybe pay more attention to its workings in our lives and in the life of the world. Let’s start by taking a look at the texts today.
The first reading we have today is the Pentecost text, and on that first Pentecost we see that the Holy Spirit comes and bursts into the house and the lives of the disciples, and fills them with power and gives them the ability to speak in tongues so that they can share with everyone in the city about Jesus rising from the dead. The Spirit empowered the disciples to step out of the house and talk to everyone who was in the city. I don’t know about the rest of you but this is awesome PR for Holy Spirit. It appears out of nowhere and helps the disciples talk to and convert thousands of people in just one day. The Spirit here is both described as a violent wind and tongues of fire resting on the disciples. We see that the Holy Spirit gives all the disciples the same gift of speaking in tongues.
In our Romans text today we see that the Spirit also acts as one who helps us when we suffer and when we wait. We see how the Spirit helps us to connect with God which is the point Luther is trying to make in his explanation we talked about. We then hear about how we know all these things are possible because the Spirit intercedes for us. Because of all that there is nothing that will separate us from the love of God as found in Christ Jesus.
If we take a look further in Romans in chapter 12 we see Paul then talks of the Spirit again in terms of gifts. There he talks about the gift of prophecy, ministry, the teacher and exhorter, the giver, the leader, and the compassionate. This isn’t an exhaustive list because we see in other letters from Paul that there are other gifts that the Spirit gives to each of us. The most popular list is probably from 1 Corinthians the 12th chapter. In Corinthians we hear the specific mention that these gifts are given by the Spirit and we have new gifts such as the healer and he says that knowledge and wisdom are two different gifts, which we won’t dig into the difference today...that will have to another time.] So we see very clearly that the Holy Spirit resides in each and every one of us and gifts us with abilities in which we can serve God and one another.
If we look at the gospel of Mark, he talks about John the Baptist and how he baptizes with water, but when Jesus comes he will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John wants people to know that Jesus is different. We also see at Jesus’ own baptism that the Spirit descends upon him like a dove and that is the beginning of Jesus ministry in the world. I have always found it interesting that the gift of the Spirit to Jesus was the marking of the beginning of his ministry. I also love the imagery because even though many of us were baptized as children we can remember that we too were baptized with the same baptism as Jesus and we are all marked for ministry in this world.
One of the other texts I love about the Holy Spirit comes from the first chapter of Genesis. We see all the way back in the very first book of the Bible in the second verse of the Bible that a wind from God moved over the waters of the earth which is also translated as the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit has been around and was very active in the very creation of the world itself. I love it!
The Great Commission in Matthew’s Gospel, which is our gospel text today, tells us to make disciples of all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. When Mary visits Elizabeth it says that Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and blesses Mary and her child. The Spirit fills Ezekiel and helps him to be the prophet that God has called him to be and helps him say what needs to be said to God’s people. There are so many times throughout the Bible in which the Holy Spirit moves the world or fills someone so that they may do the things that need to be done. I bet that if you stop and think about it there are times in your life when you have seen someone filled with the Holy Spirit. I am also certain that there have been times in your life when you have been filled with the Holy Spirit.
Have you ever had a time when you had this profound sense of need or urgency to help someone or do something? Have you ever had a time when you said something to someone and you have no idea where that came from? Have you ever volunteered without thinking or stepped in to help when you had no reason to help other than that urge? Maybe you can’t think of a time when that happened, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened. I may have told you this before but I had someone tell me once that you never walk into a situation saying I’m going to shine a light in this place or for this person right now and it’s going to be awesome. He said those moments are never planned. The moments when you help someone, the moments when you share a word of love, and kindness to a stranger. Those are moments when you, just like so many other people in the Bible have been filled with the Holy Spirit to make a change in this world, no matter how small that change might be. I also want you to take this moment to look around and see everything people have brought in to lift up their gifts they have been given. Even if you weren’t able to bring something in I have no doubt God has blessed you through the Spirit with a gift in this life. And if you don’t know wha that it is, it isn’t too late to find out.
That light that man spoke of, is the filling of the Spirit inside each of us. Again, you might be sitting here thinking, I don’t think that’s happened, or I can’t remember a time right now. It doesn’t matter. The Spirit has worked through you, and the reason I know is because I have seen it. I have seen the Spirit work through each and every one of you since the moment I got here and that’s what's so mysterious about the Holy Spirit, it works through us in ways that we don’t even know it. That is again why I love Luther’s explanation of the Holy Spirit so much, “the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and preserves it in union with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”mMay the mysterious Holy Spirit fill you this day and always with the abundance of gifts to do God’s work in this world. And may you always know what a precious gift it is to be loved so much that you don’t have to do a thing to earn that love that is so lavishly laid upon us. Amen.