Acts 2:14-21 "In Those Days" Scott Hoezee

It will come as no surprise to you all, I suspect, that I have been thinking a lot about the Holy Spirit lately. Truth is, the Spirit and its work in our lives is something that ought to occur to us every day. If you go off to work and spend the day plying your talents, that should be a reminder that it was the Spirit of God who gifted you with those talents in the first place. If you spend anytime at all in prayer during the average day, you should be aware that it is the Holy Spirit in your heart prompting you to pray and winging that very prayer to God through Jesus.

For Christians, the Holy Spirit is a little like oxygen--it is the very air we breathe. The Spirit is the atmosphere in which we exist. But like the literal air you are respirating in and out right this very moment, the pervasiveness of the Spirit's working and leading tends to be something we don't actively ponder or celebrate. True, we'd all get very panicky very quickly if we sensed we were running out of air. And it's also the obvious case that we would die were we deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes. Oxygen is pretty important, and yet we can't function in life if we do nothing but think about the air we're breathing. In fact, a surefire way to start breathing funny is to pay attention to your breathing! The moment you start observing your own respiration, you soon find you've begun to breathe too fast.

The Spirit is like that--the Spirit is ever with us and as believers in God we'd die, we'd wither spiritually, without that sacred presence in our hearts and minds. But we don't actively think about that Spirit every moment of the day. And maybe the Holy Spirit is fine with that. As we've said in the past, the Spirit is, as it were, the "shy" member of the Holy Trinity. The Spirit's role is not to call attention to itself but ever and only to Jesus. Long ago when Father, Son, and Spirit divided up the work of salvation, the Son volunteered to be the one who would be born a human and die on a cross even as the Spirit accepted the job of forever after calling attention to that cosmos-changing sacrifice of the one we now call Jesus.

But there are seasons in our lives when we do pay extra attention to the Spirit. There are moments when we sense the Spirit's work and when we pine, more than usual anyway, for the Spirit's guidance. If you've ever been trapped in an elevator or had some virus that made breathing difficult, you know how in certain circumstances the oxygen to which you pay no attention 99% of the time suddenly becomes the #1 concern on your mind. So also we all encounter liminal moments, decisions, transitions, or times of crisis when we become vastly more conscious of the Spirit than we are at other times.

But on this Pentecost Sunday 2005, here is the good news of the gospel as it comes in Acts 2: God has poured out his Spirit and so when we need that Spirit, we can be well-assured that he will not need to come to us in some special way. He's already here. When we come upon moments when we long for the Spirit's touch and leadership, we don't need to make a long-distance call or some 911 emergency call to get the Spirit to draw near to us: the Spirit is already closer to us than flesh is to fingernails.

"I will pour out my Spirit in those days," the prophet Joel once declared. Peter on Pentecost said that "those days" were "these days" and those days have never ceased ever since. Across nearly two millennia of church history and within the hearts of untold millions if not billions of believers, that Spirit, so dramatically poured forth on that first day of Pentecost, has been present and active even when there was no obvious drama going on. We live, and we are so very, very blessed to live, "in those days," in the very days that so many people had for so long yearned to see and experience.

If anything, the moments when we sense the Spirit ministering to us or guiding us in a peculiar, special way are little more than concentrated doses of the same ministry and guidance we receive every day. When you wind up in the hospital for some reason, the nurses will often hook you up to some oxygen delivered to you through a nasal canula, that little rubber tube that fits into your nostrils. But you're not receiving anything through that tube that you haven't received in all your normal breathing every day of your life. It's just that sometimes you need a concentrated dose of what you have all the time in order to get you over the hump of a medical difficulty. So also the Spirit at special moments: the work the Spirit does in key moments isn't really so different from what happens daily as it is. But a concentrated jolt of divine energy may be just what we need now and again.

What a gift we've been given. Pentecost surely deserves more celebration than we sometimes give to it. The Spirit of the living God is within us, and that is as life-changing a truth as it is mind-boggling. The amazing thing about the Holy Spirit--or, better said, one of the amazing things about the Spirit--is how remarkably nimble, deft, and comprehensive the Spirit can be and often is.

When I first felt called to the ministry in my freshman year at Calvin, in my deepest heart of hearts I knew from the start that it was God's Spirit bearing witness to my spirit that this was the direction to go. But I held out against that voice within my mind for weeks. I refused to pray about it (because, after all, when you pray about such a thing, you run the risk of getting an answer!). I did not mention this to a single soul.

But the Spirit can be as relentless as the proverbial dog with a bone and so finally I caved in, prayed about it, and did indeed receive the answer I thought I would fear. Except that I didn't fear it in particular. And then, once I began to mention it to others, I found to my utter surprise that during all those weeks when I was being a stubborn young buck in not praying about it, the Spirit had not been idly biding its time, waiting for me to give in. The Spirit had been moving in the minds of lots of other people I knew, who, upon hearing my sense of call to the ministry, responded "You know, for weeks I've been thinking that is exactly what Scott ought to do!" For a brief moment, I was nearly sure I could see in my mind's eye the Spirit of Pentecost winking at me and saying, "Gotcha!"

That was for me a concentrated dose of the Spirit's leading, and you all have your own such stories to tell. The Spirit every day pulls off the grand miracle of working in the lives of millions of believers, treating each person as though he or she were the only soul receiving such care. In a few moments, we'll hear from two of our young people who also know something about how the Spirit lives in the hearts of all who are baptized into the Triune name of God. We've all got our stories to tell and the reason is because we are living "in those days" of which Joel and then Peter spoke.

Yes, I've been thinking about the Spirit a lot lately. I am passing through one of those concentrated, high-dose moments of spiritual guidance. Last Sunday I came here not knowing what you good people would say to me in the wake of my announcement about the Seminary's offer. I was a little scared, to be honest. But by the end of the day, the Spirit was winking at me again. Despite the pain that my leave-taking from this pulpit brings to me and to many of you, so very many of you startled me by saying that even so, as you had pondered this and prayed over it and talked about it with loved ones, you saw it as the leading of the Lord. Even those of you who assured me you weren't happy about it could not deny you saw the sense of it. It was a confirmation I had not expected. Yet that is the kind of thing that can happen when you live "in those days" which are still these days--the days of Pentecost.

All of us at Calvin Church are going to need some concentrated doses of the Spirit in the year ahead. Who could deny that Pastor Bob's impending retirement and my leaving portend change, significant change even. So what we must say to one another over and again is that the good news of the gospel as it comes this morning from Acts 2 is that in these days God has poured out his Spirit. That Spirit has never failed us yet. We can dream dreams and catch visions and know in and through it all that this is of the Lord. This is of the Lord and we know that because his Holy Spirit told us so. What a gift! What a comfort! What a treasure it is to live in these days. Amen.