I was amused, if a bit sadly amused, at the cartoon that I saw in an issue of The Lutheran magazine. It shows a man leaping up from his pew in the middle of a worshiping congregation. He is waving his arms in the air. His mouth is open with a shout of joy and glee. And beside him, his wife is frantically trying to pull him back into his seat, and she is saying: "Okay, so you feel the Spirit, but not here in this Worship Service."
That’s about the way it is with us, isn’t it, the main line denominations outside of what we sometimes disparagingly label the "Pentecostal Sects"? We are perfectly willing to talk about God the Father, our Creator and Preserver. We certainly have a great deal to say about Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior; but when it comes to the work and the power of the Holy Spirit, we become strangely silent. A lot of people will testify that they have finally "met the Lord," that "they have found Jesus," that "they have turned their lives over to Christ," but the Bible tells us that "no person can say that Jesus is Lord and Savior except through the power of the Holy Spirit."
A Methodist bishop once said that if the Pentecost, that tremendous coming of the Holy Spirit and birthday of Christ’s Church, would recur at a National Convention of the United Methodist Church, they would probably appoint a special committee to investigate this phenomenon and report two years hence.
One of our mothers tells me that she was getting her little son costumed for Halloween Beggars’ Night, and the easiest thing for her to do was to take an old sheet and cut it up and dress him as a ghost. As the process of costuming was going on, I guess the lad remembered what he had heard in the Creed during church Services, and so he asked: "Mom, will the Holy Ghost be out tonight, too?"
I ask my Confirmation Class how they know that something they are doing is either right or wrong, and they reply with the normal answer: "Well, my conscience tells me so." And I ask the obvious next question: "And what is your conscience?" And they reply, usually: "Well, my conscience is a kind of little voice inside of me that tells me what’s right and wrong." And I ask the clinching question: "Whose voice?" And then they are silent. They realize that the answers that they have given previously are really childish, nonexplanatory, if not stupid. But let me assure you that many adults are equally reluctant to answer that question, even though we say in the great Creed of the church, the Nicene Creed, which was written by the Council of Nicea, the first Council of the Church, in the year 325: "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets."
Or in Luther’s explanation of the Third Article of the Creed concerning the Holy Spirit, we dutifully recite: "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him. But the Holy Ghost has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me by his gifts and sanctified and preserved me in the true faith."
In other words, we are testifying that we have absolutely no relationship with God the Father or with Christ our Savior except through the Holy Spirit working through the Word and the Sacraments, as he does. The means - the only means - through which we can have relationship with the Father and the son is through the power of the Holy Spirit.
People will say that somehow God seems to have deserted them, that they cannot feel his presence. They never hear his voice talking to them. They are talking the same kind of hogwash as the man who said he was going to sell his waterbed because he felt that he and his wife were drifting apart. God is not drifting away from you. I assure you of that. God is there, and he is speaking through his Spirit. It is just that you aren’t listening!
In George Bernard Shaw’s play, Saint Joan, Joan hears voices from God. The king is very annoyed about this, and as Joan stands before the king, he says: "Oh, your voices! Your voices! I am the king. Why don’t the voices come to me instead of you?" And Joan replies: "They do come, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field at evening, listening for them. Oh, yes, when the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it, but if you prayed from your heart and you listened to the trilling of the bells in the air long after the bells have stopped ringing, then you would hear the voices as well as I do." Joan is a vivid example of Christian truth that ordinary men and women gain the strength of giants and the power of miracle workers when they wait on God for the empowering of his Holy Spirit. But there are a lot of you who don’t believe that, do you? You really don’t!
We are like the basketball coach who was questioning one of the new candidates for his team, and he was asking the boy why he wore such long hair, clear down to his shoulders. The lad replied: "I wear long hair because Jesus wore long hair." At which the coach grabbed him by the arm, led him over to the swimming pool, and said: "Okay, let’s see you walk on the water." But the coach had forgotten that there was one man who did walk on the water at the bidding of Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit! Peter walked upon the water!
Today we celebrate the Holy Spirit as it came in the Baptism of Jesus Christ. In this day of power shortages, most of us are stupidly neglecting the greatest source of unlimited and eternally lasting power that the world has ever known. In the Baptism of Jesus, we hear the voice of the Father, by the power of his Spirit, symbolized physically in the form of a dove descending from heaven, and the Spirit is saying: "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased."
Today we baptized seven infants, tiny children. But we did not baptize those children. They were baptized by the power of the Holy Spirit, as our Lord assured us. We merely acted in faith. The parents and sponsors who brought them acted in faith and in obedience to our Lord’s command. Every one of them was here. By what? Through what? The power of the Holy Spirit working in the parents and sponsors who brought them! They were acting in faith, inspired by the Spirit, and through that Sacrament, that child, born into a sinful society with all of its bent toward a sinful life, completely out of contact with the God who had created it, was placed back into a Father-son relationship with God once more. That little child became a part of the fellowship of the Church of Jesus Christ and became part of our responsibility as a family of that church.
You ask: "But why baptize babies when they have no understanding of what is going on?" And I merely ask in return: "Why not?" Do you for one moment think that our understanding and knowledge is what gives the Holy Spirit power in our lives? Did these parents understand - or any of us - how those children were conceived that they brought? Did any one of us, including the parents, have any understanding about what occurred to create these new lives to live upon God’s earth? Do you understand the power that brought us together as a congregation to worship this morning, along with hundreds of millions of other people throughout the world who are doing exactly the same thing? Do we understand how this faith in Christ, beginning with twelve penniless Galilean peasants, has come to countless millions from generation to generation for nearly 2,000 years? Can we understand the power that drew us here to engage in an exercise this morning that is to the Jew a stumbling block? He can’t get over it. He can’t get around it. He can’t get through it. It’s there! A tremendous stumbling block! And to the intellectuals of this world, utter idiocy.
Does these infants’ lack of understanding limit the power of the Holy Spirit to come to these children through this crude vehicle of the water, and begin to exercise his power in the lives of these infants? As Paul asks: "Does Almighty God need our advice on how to conduct the business of his universe? Does he need us to tell him what he can or can’t do by the power of his Holy Spirit. Do you think you’re properly equipped for that task?" That is what Paul asks us.
If you want me to explain how the Holy Spirit can work in these infants, I will be very happy to oblige you, but first I would have you engage in a little exercise. First, explain why I’m standing in this pulpit this morning, without ever in my life having wanted to. Why do I have absolute confidence that I am reaching your hearts and minds, many of you? Why am I preaching of the unlimited power of the Holy Spirit, about which I used to have a rejecting, cynical skepticism? Explain why I’m preaching this gospel without the slightest desire to do so, and that a power infinitely greater than I am is forcing me to do it. As St. Paul says: "Woe unto me, if I preach not the gospel." I’m not doing it because I want to, but because I have to. Explain all that, and then I’ll be happy to explain how the Holy Spirit can work in the life of an infant.
Remember the day of Pentecost. The birthday of the church? A little group of frightened disciples was gathered together for fear of their thousands of enemies crowded into the capital city on that Festival Day, locked in that Upper Room, frightened, isolated. And then a strange power began to move through them. They sensed that they were no longer just a disorganized bunch of individuals, but that they were a fellowship, bound together by a common experience and by a passion to share that experience with everyone else in the world. As this new power laid its hold upon them, they realized that it was not their own contriving, but of God himself.
Remember how a cowardly, braggart, blowmouth, denying weakling named Peter burst out of that room and, with everything to lose - including his own life - and nothing to gain, went out and stood in the marketplace of Jerusalem and preached the gospel of Jesus Christ. Explain that, my wise friend! Explain why his Jewish enemies, as they heard him, were cut to the heart. They knew, somehow, that God’s truth was being spoken, and when he finished, they asked Peter plaintively: "What can we do?" And he replied without hesitancy: "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." And in response, 3,000 of those who could have killed him received the Holy Spirit and were baptized, and the church was born. Explain that, my historically astute friend!
Explain this congregation of thousands that has been here for well over a century. Who did this? Leamer? Wirt? Weertz? Opperman? Valbracht? Ridiculous! There isn’t a one of us who could organize a respectable ladies’ sewing circle without some help. It was the Holy Spirit and his power that built this church. This congregation lived and grew in spite of us, not because of us, and it will be the Holy Spirit that, through the coming decades and centuries, if God wills, will continue to build St. John’s.
Let me give you just a little vignette of the power of the Holy Spirit. Why is it, in the midst of a recession, with the specter of inflation, unemployment, a truly shaky economy facing us at every turn, that stewardship-wise, this has been the best year in our history? At the beginning of December, we needed $80,000 to meet our benevolent goals and our other expenses. It seemed a mountain of impossibility. And yet, we received more than $80,000. Explain this bunch of fools that laid that $80,000 on the altar of the Lord!
I was acknowledging some of the special gifts that had come in two days ago, and our Assistant Director of Music came in to me and said: "Pastor, you know, if we’re going to continue to proclaim the gospel through our musicals, pageants, cantatas, and other presentations, we need a very expensive piece of equipment to add to our public address system. Our Engineer, has found one, almost new, that he can get for about half of its real cost, but I need $1,500 in order to get that. Pastor, do you know where I could dig up $1,500?" I told him frankly that I didn’t know where he could dig up $1,500, but, with some misgivings, I promised to do what I could.
In almost the next letter that I had to answer, I found a check for $2,000. As some of you know, the Kings are working for a year and a half or two years in far off Saudi Arabia. The instructions on the check were that $500 should be used for their regular parish commitment, but that $1,500 should be used for "some special thing that the church needed." Knowing how Steve and Betty feel, being members of our Cathedral Choir, and knowing how they love the whole music program of our church, I picked up the phone and called Larry on the intercom and I said: "Larry, the Lord doth provide. I’ve got your $1,500 right on the button, so tell Carl to go out and get that mixer." Okay Explain that to me!
You say that you’ve never experienced the power of the Holy Spirit, that God never speaks to you in this way? Well, beloved, I assure you that it isn’t God’s neglect. His Spirit is literally pounding at your heart and mind unceasingly, incessantly, and powerfully. All you have to do, as our Lord told us, is open the door.
I don’t know what the mountain is that you face in your life today or how big it is. I only know that the power of the Holy Spirit - the unlimited power of the Holy Spirit - can move that mountain. And that isn’t just some kind of pious hope. I say that with absolute, unequivocal, unshakable conviction.
The first year of my ministry, only a few months after ordination, I was called in an emergency to the hospital. One of the ladies in our congregation had delivered a baby, and he was not expected to live. I was asked to come and baptize the baby. I rushed to the hospital, and I look down into that incubator, after the obstetrician and pediatrician both told me there was absolutely no chance for the child’s survival. I looked down at that little, twisted, blue form, and I reached my hand through a hole in the incubator and baptized the baby. I say, not I, but the Holy Spirit. And we prayed for that child’s life. Despite all medical knowledge, an hour later, that baby was as healthy as any child in the nursery of that hospital. Explain that to me!
Explain how it was something other than the power of God’s holy Spirit. If any one of you has another explanation, you’re welcome to come up right now and tell us all about it!