“Gift of God”

(The Gospel lesson for this sermon is found in the book of John Chapter 20: verses 19-23)

Pastor Stan Larson

Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas

Sunday, May 11, 2008

This indeed is the birthday of the Church.  Now, if we had all the kids in here, this would be an obvious answer to this next question, “What do you expect at a birthday—presents, you expect to receive gifts.  That’s if you’re the birthday person and if it’s the birthday of the Church. You expect to receive gifts.  That’s a given.  No matter how old you get, no matter how much you have of everything, you still like to receive cards and gifts, reminders that people remember you.

 It’s important to remember that this is the birthday of the Church. It is a time down through the generations where God has given great and wonderful gifts to God’s people.  When this was celebrated or when the first Pentecost happened for the Christian Church, we have to remember that the disciples were already in Jerusalem celebrating the festival of Pentecost.  It was already a major festival in the Jewish church, in their tradition.  It had started out long, long, long ago as the Spring Harvest Festival.

 Now when you have a spring harvest festival, what do you expect?  Food…you expect food.  Churches always had food.  The church, the Hebrew people, had realized that this was a wonderful festival, but that we’re going to add something to it.  We never do that do we…add other things to special days.  They said, “You know, this is about the time when our ancestors coming out of bondage in Egypt, would have come to Mt. Sinai and received the Law”, and so by the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Pentecost was also the day when the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law.  They had received the gift of the Law.  Now for us, that might sound kind of ominous.  You know, when you get the law, you are brought before the judge, you’re on trial and all that kind of thing; but for them, and for us, the Law was, when you look back on the Ten Commandments, given to the people to say, “We’re beginning to be a community.  We’re coming together as a people.  We need some basic rules.  We need to figure out what are the guidelines”.  You know, what’s our curfew at night; what are the chores that people are supposed to do; how are we supposed to treat one another in this family, especially a blended family, which that definitely was.  And so, we have the Ten Commandments.

 The Jews down through the years said, “Okay, the first part of the Ten Commandments talks about loving God. The last part talks about loving our neighbor”. Now, we’ve heard that somewhere before haven’t we?  You know, to get along in God’s family, we are to love God to love our neighbor as ourselves.  So the Jews said, “This is a wondrous gift. It’s the gift of community; it’s the gift of getting along together in Community”, which is not always easy, because sometimes the people we are closest to, are the people we are having the hardest time getting along with.  So, we need those basic little guidelines.

And onto that, now, we add the gift of the Spirit.  That first Pentecost, Jesus as he had been resurrected, and talked with the disciples, and as he ascended Heaven, He said, “The gift of the Spirit is going to come upon you; wait for it.”  And it is on this day that the Spirit manifested itself in the lives and hearts and ministry of the disciples of the early church.

 And all of a sudden they found themselves doing things they had never imagined themselves doing.  They were moving from being huddled in that upper room, to being out on the street, talking to people, telling people about the mighty acts of God, the wondrous things that happened in and through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.  And they found themselves talking to all kinds of people; and people understood them. 

As Ken Coker said, you have all of these people from all over the world.  Now, we’re not going to go all over the world. We don’t have any place other than the United Nations where you could gather that many people.  But if you walk into anybody’s home, into anyplace in this community, you will need to speak different languages in order to reach the people there. If you have raised children, they speak a different language than you do.  If they’re elementary, if they’re tweeners, if they’re teenagers, if they’re in their twenties, if they’re Gen-x, whatever.  You speak a different language than your parents.  We need to be able to get the message of Christ to all of those people who speak different languages.  And now we have to speak “text”.  You know we have all of these acronyms and initials.  We always thought, in the church, that LOL stood for Little Old Ladies; but in texting, it means Laugh Out Loud.  You would go very wrong if you said one thing but meant the other.  We have all kinds of languages. 

We don’t have to go far and wide to find out that we need to find ways to communicate the wondrous good news of Jesus Christ to the people sitting right next to us, living down the street from us, working with us in our schools and all over the place.  We need that same gift, which God gives to us.  The gifts of God come to us and they continue to challenge us, to empower us and to move us, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do, to move us out of our seats and into the streets, to say, that’s where they need to hear the Good News.  Yes, we need to hear it here, but they need to hear it out there.  They need to hear that it is a way of life, that it is a way that we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.  It is not just about words, but it is about lives and our actions and how our lives are transformed when God’s presence and God’s Spirit comes into us and takes over our lives.  It is lives transformed that we need to be telling people about.  Jesus came and transformed the disciples.  Here, on Pentecost, the disciples began to transform the lives that they touched, as well. 

That has been the task of the Church down through the ages, to transform people’s lives so that they move from following just the ideals and the schemes of the world, to following Jesus Christ, to living by the Law, the Ten Commandments, loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  And that special coming together, as the church always does, is around food.  You know, all of those wondrous gifts that God packaged and put into this single day here—and it is a birthday, a birthday of the Church, a birthday when we can get others together to share memories, to share food, and realize the gifts of the Spirit. 

The Spirit does not manifest itself the same way in everyone.  Paul goes to great lengths to tell us that some have this gift, some have that, some have another; and they are all wondrous gifts.  We’re not all supposed to be alike.  We all need to be able to speak in different ways to different people, to speak the wondrous news of Jesus Christ to those that we can communicate with.  I had a gentleman, when I was in Kansas; he was a local schoolteacher; he was also one of our organists and our choir director, and he had grown up in house that was totally German.  He was a year ahead of me in college; but he had not learned to speak English until he was in Elementary School. 

His family spoke German at home.  He was the Debate, English and German teacher in high school.  When he got together with his dad and they would be talking English; and when they started working on cars and implements, they spoke in German, because that was the language they had when talking about working on cars.  We know people who work on cars; we know people who are master gardeners; we know people who have dogs and people who have pets.  They speak in a different language.  We have to be able to reach all those people. 

We think, well, I have nothing to share; but we all have people that we can talk to, that we can particularly reach from our experience, from what we have going on in our lives.  And God tells us we don’t have to speak like everybody else; we simply have to say it in the way that it is important and relevant to us, about what God has done in your life and in the life of God’s people.  We all have our different languages.  It’s a good thing that we’re not all alike because God sends us to a lot of different people out there, not just different races and languages but all kinds of different people.  We are to reach out to all them with the Good News, saying, “God sent us these wondrous gifts and we would like these gifts for you as well”, because God’s gifts keep giving.  They are not just once and forever, and you just put them aside and say, “Okay, I’ll take them out some other time.”  They stay with us.  They empower us and cause us to do things that we never ever imagined we could do.  That’s God’s gifts, the gifts that God gives to us. 

Today, we celebrate a baptism.  The family has had a wondrous gift, the gift of life and a daughter, a gift that will continue to give throughout the years—getting them up at all hours of the day or night, giving them wondrous gifts that they have to clean up after; but also joy and wonder, and they will watch her grow through the years.  They will be gifted every day of her life, just as we are gifted by God every day of our life, in and through the gifts that God has given to us. Through a baptism, through the gift of the Spirit, God continues to give His gifts to us every day.

 It is the birthday of the Church; it is our birthday.  Every Sunday, every day should be that day for us. Today we gather together and are joyous; and we want to share that good news, so that those gifts will compel us to go outside to show off those wondrous gifts.  Remember that first bicycle you got.  You couldn’t wait to go out and drive it around the neighborhood.  And then, when you got a car, you couldn’t wait to show it off to your friends.  This is a wondrous gift that God gives us.  He says, “Go and show it to others’ share it with others, help them to know the gift that God has for them as well.”

We come together to celebrate the gifts from God, because God says, “Here are my gifts, a time to gather around food, in my name, a time to gather and celebrate community and the ways we can live together”.  We can come and celebrate the gift of God’s Spirit, and how it empowers us to move out in ways we could never imagine.  And all of those gifts are ours to celebrate, to use, to empower us for ministry in God’s name, for they are gifts of God for us, for the Church.  We are the ones to receive, and then God calls us to share.  Because we have already been gifted, we are called to give to others what we ourselves have already received, the gift of God’s presence, Gods Spirit and of God’s care and concern for us this day and always.  Amen.