Luke 24:45-49 and Acts 1:8 & 2:1-4
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
June 8, 2025 – Pentecost
God loves to give us assignments we can’t carry out by ourselves. He sets us to tasks we can’t accomplish on our own.
We have an essential contribution to make, but nothing comes of our efforts unless we avail of help from beyond us, unless we allow God to supplement our small contribution with His bigger one.
Everyone who’s flown a long distance is aware of the impact of the jet stream, that mighty air current five miles above the earth. It can make an airplane traveling eastward go a hundred miles per hour faster than one going westward and travel far farther without refueling.
In biblical Hebrew there is a word, ruach, which can mean either wind or spirit. Thus, the “Spirit” of God is also the “Wind” of God. Certainly, the Holy Spirit operates like the high-altitude wind of the jet stream. Just as that wind can carry a plane further and faster than it could go on its own, so the Spirit can carry a human being farther and faster than they could go on their own. And, just as the jet stream can have the greatest effect on a plane that carefully follows the direction in which that wind is flowing, so the Spirit can have the greatest effect on a human being who carefully follows the direction in which the Spirit is flowing. Finally, just as an airplane will fall and crash if it turns off its engines and leaves all the work to the jet stream, no matter how strong it blows, so a follower of Jesus will fall and crash if they put in no effort and leave all the work to the Spirit, no matter how strong He blows.
The faithful and fruitful followers of Jesus both do their small part and depend on the Spirit’s doing His larger part, as they give themselves over to His dominion and direction. They believe that the Spirit will inject into their faithful efforts God’s supernatural power that they might accomplish what they never could on their own. They trust that the Spirit will fortify and multiply their modest contribution with God’s miracle-working one.
The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles were originally two volumes of a single book written by Luke, the “beloved physician” and traveling companion of Paul. The first volume is a history of the earthly life of Jesus; the second, a history of the early life of Jesus’ church. The two volumes were separated that Luke’s Gospel might be collected together with the other two synoptic gospels and John’s Gospel, the one composed last of all.
Now, here is an understatement: Jesus’ original disciples were slow learners! And the two teachings of Jesus they most struggled to get their minds and hearts around were, first, that suffering was necessary to the fulfillment of Jesus’ mission and to theirs and, second, that the mission involved included reaching out to, and including, all people, even those repellant to them.
In Luke’s Gospel, we read how Jesus, in His final message to His disciples before He returned to heaven, reminded them how He had often before brought up with them those two teachings, both in “my words which I spoke to you” and in His citing “the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms”. Jesus’ saying, as He does here, that His teaching about their universal mission and suffering for it, “is written” means it’s been God’s plan from the start. Their costly mission “to all nations” is what God had in mind all along. But it will take persistent revelations and much prodding by the Spirit for the idea purpose to sink into the disciples’ thick heads and to grab their hard hearts. Yet God intends, whether or not they like it, to accept anyone and everyone as family who embraces His Son and follows Him.
We should not be surprised then that the disciples must wait to begin their mission of witness “to the ends of the earth” until they “have been clothed with power on high” as Luke’s Gospel puts it, until “the Holy Spirit has come upon [them]”, as Acts puts it. For the power from beyond them must first work on them in order that it might work through them for all people.
At Pentecost the Holy Spirit, who arrived with “a sound like the rush of a violent wind”, did come upon them and did clothe them with power from on high to convey the good news to all sorts of people who spoke all sorts of different languages. The conversion of 3,000 that day exceeded the disciples’ humble capabilities. It happened by God’s supernatural action.
But it would not have happened had the disciples not made their next-to-nothing contribution, had they not stayed put, waited and prayed as Jesus commanded hem. Those modest acts of obedience gave the Spirit the opportunity to work behind their backs to ready them for the launching of their world-wide mission. Their just letting go and letting God turned everything around, including them. For the Spirit at Pentecost did not so much improve those parochial, xenophobic disciples as infuse them with an entirely different kind of life that flowed through them in a direction opposite to that of their past and carried them further and farther afield than they ever before thought of doing. They thereby ended up creating a new, growing, increasingly diverse community. Their turnaround is like what happened to the Chicago River a century ago.
Chicago is a great city, and the third largest in America; but it probably would not exist today had it not been for an engineering feat that replaced the old waters of the Chicago River and reversed the river’s flow.
In the late 19th century, the Chicago River was a shallow, sluggish sewer. The stock yards dumped their animal waste into it, and many neighborhoods dumped their human waste into it. Its putrid waters, carrying waterborne diseases, flowed into Lake Michigan, from which Chicago took its drinking water. For decades, historians estimate, at least ten thousand people died each year from illnesses carried by the Chicago River, and one year 100,000 did. Finally, city engineers started moving earth and rock, digging canals, and installing gates and locks. On January 2, 1900, they opened a sluice gate at Lake Michigan and good Great Lakes water poured into the Chicago River, filling it with clean, healthy H2O and causing the river to flow in a direction opposite to how it had always before moved. Then what once brought death to a city brought life to it and enabled it to flourish.
The Holy Spirit replaces the putrid water of our sinfulness with the pure, living water of God’s grace and reverses the flow of our life outward to others. The Spirit fortifies us to care for all and to share our witness to Jesus forthrightly, vulnerably and lovingly. May we then let go and let God. May we give ourselves over to the dominion of the Spirit and depend on Him to make everything different – and better.
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