5 June 2022
Text: John 14:23-31 (Gen 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21)
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
We are no longer in the Easter season, dear friends, and so we don’t traditionally continue to greet one another this way. But we are in a new and diabolical secular season, a month dedicated to the deadly sin of “Pride.” In the month of June, Christians are especially attacked. And so I will say it yet again. “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!” We say with our Lord: “The ruler of this world,” meaning the devil, “has no claim on Me.” Although turning the other cheek is appropriate when we are personally attacked, it is always appropriate strike back against the ruler of this world. And what could wound the devil more than our Lord’s triumphant resurrection – which the Holy Spirit inspired to be written into the Scriptures: the angel’s announcement to the women at the tomb?
Indeed, the Holy Spirit caused the Scriptures to be written, and on this day of the Feast of Pentecost, we hear of the Spirit’s glorious work! But there is a lot of misunderstanding about the Holy Spirit. I knew a Christian who wore a dove lapel pin because he felt sorry for the Holy Spirit, because He doesn’t get as much attention as Jesus. Dear friends, our Lord Jesus teaches us, “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
The Holy Spirit points us to the Son, and the Son makes us worthy to stand before the Father. The persons of the Trinity are one. There is no reason to pity the Holy Spirit. It is His will to bring you to Jesus.
Another misunderstanding involves “speaking in tongues.” You may know Christians who believe that this is to speak in gibberish. But what did the Holy Spirit cause to be recorded in our reading from Acts, dear friends? The apostles were all “filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” The international crowd gathered in Jerusalem “were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.” They said, “We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”
This is not gibberish, dear friends. It is the preaching of the Gospel. This is not a “secret prayer language,” rather it is the public proclamation of Jesus. This is not “the tongues of angels,” but rather the languages of the “Parthians and Medes and Elamites,” and the many dialects of Jews who had gathered and were hearing St. Peter proclaim: “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” and “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children,” and “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”
So Peter preached the Word and made disciples by baptism. The Holy Spirit works, then and now, by Word and Sacrament.
But beware of “this crooked generation,” dear friends. You can find videos online of people who claim that “speaking in tongues” is something different than simply preaching the Gospel. They jump up and down, roll around on the floor, and even make animal noises. But what does the Spirit teach us in the inspired Scripture is the final “fruit of the Spirit,” dear friends? “Self control.” And so this speaking of gibberish and ecstasy is not a spiritual gift, but rather a spiritual grift.
The real gift of tongues is not gibberish. For that is what the people heard in the days of the Tower of Babel, when the Holy Trinity muddled their tongues: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” The curse of this confusion was lifted on the Pentecost following our Lord’s ascension, when the Holy Spirit came, and the gift of tongues broke through the gibberish and confusion, replacing it with the clear proclamation of the Good News in languages that the whole world could understand.
It was a miracle, because the apostles had not studied these languages. But the Holy Spirit caused the Gospel to go forth on this day, overcoming the curse of Babel, so that Jesus might be proclaimed around the world.
The sad irony is that people lust after fake spiritual gifts when all the while, the Holy Spirit is using His means of Word and Sacrament to give you His true gifts. The confusion lies in a misunderstanding of the word “tongue.” It just means “language.” The English language is descended from both Latin and German, and so there are typically two words in English for the same thing. The Germanic word is “tongue” and the Latinate word is “language.” Speaking in tongues is simply speaking in languages. This miraculous gift of speaking in tongues that one has not studied has ceased. Today, preachers proclaim the Gospel in tongues after they study those languages. But on that day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit jump-started the church by expediting the preaching of the Gospel. And five thousand men, women, and children were baptized on that day.
We have drawn from the Scriptures what the work of the Holy Spirit is. You should remember this: “He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”
Dear brothers and sisters, the Spirit calls you. He called you at your baptism. He continues to call you “ever brooding o’er a world of gloom and night.” He calls you “out of darkness into His marvelous light.” And that is what it means to be the Church: the “ek klesia,” the assembly of the called-out ones. He calls you out of this dark, perverse, vulgar, and hateful world, where the ruler of this world lurks and attacks. He calls you in the name of Jesus. And He gathers you here – where the Spirit works through Word and Sacrament. He gathers you here around the altar, the font, and the pulpit. And sometimes we do “speak in tongues” in our worship when we join the saints of every time and place and tongue, using words like “Amen” and “Alleluia.” And indeed, the Spirit “bring[s] to our remembrance all that [Jesus] has said to [us].”
The Spirit enlightens and sanctifies us, dear friends. “Your Word,” says the Psalmist, “is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” The darkness of this world is overcome by the Word which the Spirit inspires and brings to us, enlightening us. And we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit, that is, made holy, which means we are separated from the world, again, “called out,” of the darkness and the world’s perversion and the false teachings, even among Christians, that the Spirit operates by means of gibberish and misunderstanding and a lack of self-control. For often, people who claim the “gift of tongues” are looking for the Spirit within themselves instead of where the Spirit locates Himself: in Word and Sacrament. And if you listen closely to such people, they rarely even mention Jesus and almost never quote the Scriptures.
Dear friends, if you want the true gifts of the Spirit, which the Holy Spirit Himself reveals to us through St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (and they are: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control,”), you will find them neither in the world’s pride and perversions, nor in the false doctrine of spiritual novelty and narcissism. Rather, the Spirit calls and gathers you here, to the preaching of Jesus and the Holy Sacraments, and He enlightens and sanctifies you to the Truth that the world hates, and to the holiness that separates us from them, being redeemed and ransomed from the world by the blood of Christ.
And so we rejoice in the Spirit, dear friends, and we join Christians of every time and place, “from every land and every tongue,” as we defiantly again confess:
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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