The Power to Change Lives

There is a story that is told of the city of London following World War II.  It is said that flowers that had bloomed in the city in the nineteenth century bloomed again in the city in the years following the war in the craters created by bombs that fell on that city during the war. Older survivors of that war, who remembered these blooms from decades past, marveled at the return of these harbingers of summer, convinced that God was sending a message to the war-weary people of London.  As it turned out, there was a simple scientific explanation for this phenomenon. It seems that when the bombs fell, they broke through layers of concrete and asphalt that covered the fertile soil on which the city of London was built. When those bombs exploded, they impregnated the soil with nitrates that are the residue of bomb blasts.  The exposure of the fertile soil to sunlight and rain, combined with the powerful fertilizers found in nitrates, woke the dormant seeds of flowers that had never bloomed, and the war-scarred landscape of London was transformed by the powerful message of creation that life triumphs over death. The seeds were there all along but, buried under the man-made materials of modern society, they never had the chance to bloom.  Freed from their prisons, ironically, by the weapons of destruction, the flowers that grew from those seeds brought hope to a discouraged and war-weary people.  I wonder what seeds lie dormant in each of us, waiting for the day when God can break through the man-made walls we have constructed around ourselves and create the right conditions for those seeds to grow and bloom.  

Pentecost is the anniversary of the day nearly two thousand years ago when the Holy Spirit came, like a mighty wind, upon the followers of Jesus who were gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. These ordinary people were so transformed by this experience that they rushed out into the streets and began preaching about Jesus to any who would listen. Some three thousand new believers were baptized on that day. Most Bible scholars mark that day as the beginning of the church… the birthday of the church… the day when the seeds that Jesus had planted in them during his life and ministry began to bloom.

One important feature of that first Christian Pentecost was personal experience. The coming of the Holy Spirit upon those followers of Jesus was a profoundly individual encounter for each one of them. Before Jesus' crucifixion and, again, after his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples that after he departed, the Holy Spirit would come upon them, but they had no idea what he meant. On Pentecost, they each had a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, and they were changed forever.  Yet the seeds of the person they became after that encounter with the Holy Spirit were present in their lives before that incredible day… and, looking back, we can see that.  Peter, always the brash, out-spoken leader of the group, found that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, he could preach fearlessly of the life, death and resurrection of his Lord. Though his own doubts had made him unable to heal those possessed by demons while Jesus lived, he had the power to make the lame walk after his personal encounter with the Holy Spirit.

We are each promised the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a gift of God that is promised to us in our baptism.  Yet many of us have never had an experience of the presence of God such as the one described in the book of Acts… a life-changing encounter with God’s Spirit.  In fact, a 1997 survey of regular church attendees conducted by the Barna Research Group, revealed that forty-eight percent said they had not had an experience of the presence of God in the past year and nearly two-thirds said that they had never experienced the presence of God in worship.  These are discouraging statistics for any pastor… and for our Worship Committee… and, while I know that there is nothing that we humans can do, whether in a worship service or elsewhere, to manufacture a genuine experience of the presence of God… for that is totally up to God… I still find it sad… assuming the survey is correct… that two-thirds of those who regularly attend worship in America leave feeling that they've had no spiritual experience… no personal encounter with the living Lord.  And rarer still is this incredible sound of a rushing wind… and the visible tongues of fire… as rare as Moses’ burning bush.

I wonder, however, if those numbers are skewed because of how we define the experience of the presence of God… this experience of “awe” in worship. On that first Pentecost, the experience of the disciples was dramatic…even ecstatic. They were overcome with excitement… with enthusiasm… with an experience of power beyond their own. They were set on fire by what happened to them.  Yet not all encounters with the Holy Spirit are as dramatic… or emotional.  We might not hear the rushing wind… or see the tongues of flame… and yet many who are here today carry in their hearts the conviction that God is real… and that their Savior lives.   In his landmark book The Varieties of the Religious Experience, published in 1902, William James, a great American psychologist and philosopher, described the human experience of God. He said, first, that we humans feel an uneasiness… or an inadequacy… about ourselves… a feeling that something is lacking. Then, we find the solution to that sense of inadequacy by discovering the proper relationship to higher powers… powers that transcend our lives… the power of God.  In this discovery of the power of God, we discover the power within ourselves.  It is a discovery that has the power to transform us… whether it is sudden and dramatic… or slower and more subtle.  While my own life was transformed in an instant by a powerful encounter with God, it was not transformed as completely as the life of my father, who never had a dramatic encounter with God in his life… and always longed for that day.  Yet, I believe, he was a far better reflection of Jesus in his final years than I ever hope to be… though I, too, long for that day.

But there is one conviction that I carry in my heart… and that is that each of us has received from God the seeds of the person we were meant to be. Those seeds are God’s gifts to us.  Those seeds… like the seeds of the flowers in London… lie dormant in our souls, waiting for the day that they will be released and bloom.  They can be released by a powerful and dramatic encounter with God’s Spirit, such as the one the disciples experienced on that first Pentecost… or they can be nurtured and nourished slowly over time by each effort we make to shape our hearts and minds into the mind of Christ… showing his love and grace to all.  As Karley read to us from the Gospel of John, we are one in Christ… and Christ has the power to transform us into his image.  What will it take… I wonder… for God’s love to break through the walls around our hearts to find the fertile ground where God’s word can take root and grow… where God’s gifts can bloom?   Will it happen in an instant?  It can.  But, for most of us, it will be a life-long process… one that begins with our baptism and continues until the day that God calls us home.  The comfort that we have… the peace that Dad knew… is that God will never let us go… even as we continue to grow into the people that he has called us to be.  Amen.

Acts 2:1-21