Thinking about international travel helps us put ourselves in the scene of our Bible reading. Imagine: you’ve travelled from your country to the city which is the centre of your faith, for a religious festival. It’s a long way and you can’t come to all the festivals but this time you’ve made it. It’s a good thing you have a language in common with the others in the city, because in the country where you live you speak a different language from the rest of your people. In fact there are people at the festival who live in all manner of different countries and speak all manner of different languages.
This festival has been going the way it usually does when you hear something different. You hear someone speaking English with a Kiwi accent. You also hear other people babbling away in a variety of foreign languages, but you go to hear the kiwi speaker and are surprised to find that the speaker is not a New Zealander at all. In fact you recongniise him as one who lives in a particular part of the country you’re visiting, a part that is not known for its educated people. How can this guy know your language and speak it how you do? Better check it out.
This speaker and the whole situation has got your attention. As you watch and listen another man gets up and speaks to everyone in the common language. He seeks to explain what is going on. He tells of God’s working in this city through certain people over that last while. As he speaks you realise that God is doing this, that God is speaking to you and you need to respond. It has everything to do with Jesus and it is him to whom you respond.
What we make of this
It seems to me that God often works this way. He stimulates people’s thinking, then does something that gets their attention. In checking this out they engage with God’s people who clarify God’s intention and call out a response of faith.
Jesus worked this way many times. He would do something that got people’s attention and then point to himself and his Father. You think: how many healings were like this? Feeding thousands from very little. Turning water into wine for a wedding. Dying and coming back to life.
And what have we seen? What has caught your attention that has turned to a spiritual conversation that has drawn you closer to Jesus? At the point of my conversion what caught my attention was a speaker. I wanted to debate his assertion but I met a man who showed me why the speaker was right and what I needed to do to get right too. At another time ill health saw me seeking God and his way forward. The health situation was the catalist for spiritual growth.
Evangelism
We know we are supposed to tell people about Jesus but this can be a burden because we shy away from talking about it especially with those who have not asked us any questions. How about ‘show and tell’ where God does the showing and we do the telling in answer to the questions that come to us from people we already know? I think I can handle that.
But what do we tell? And what are we not to tell? Jesus tells us that the Spirit will prove to people that they are wrong about sin, about what is right and about judgement. The word translated here as ‘prove’, means convict, convince, refute. The Spirit can do this, we can’t. That’s a burden removed for me. I have only to present the truth, I don’t have to do the convincing. Although I’m often tempted to try.
There are some other aspects of the Pentecost story that stir me. When I think about this event, about God’s action, I wonder.
God doesn’t repeat the same thing. We’d get stuck on the experience.
The Spirit blows where it will. Quite unpredictable really. Infinitely creative, still coming up with things we haven’t thought of.
God may be at work in you. Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost appeared drunk but weren’t. But nor were they entirely sober! We talk about that sort of thing.
When is the last time you discovered something that you were just bursting to share with others? That’s the excitement, joy, and energy that filled Christ’s friends and followers on Pentecost so long ago. What is it that will send you out into the streets, enthused and joyful and amazed, “blown out the door”, unable to contain the power of God’s Spirit at work within you?