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By one Spirit

I Cor 12: 7 – 13

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 15 May, 2005

WE WILL never change the world until we discover how to be a community in Christ. We will never even change Marrickville, or our church, or even ourselves — without that discovery.

 Throughout history, it has been Christians who have a sense of community who have brought about changes.

For every St Francis, there were the Franciscans.

For every John Wesley there were the Methodists.

For every William Wilberforce, there has been a Clapham Sect.

Community breeds an attitude of transformation; community in Christ gives that attitude focus and direction.

 One of my favourite comic strips is Bristow in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s about the daily life of a man named Bristow who is 17th in line for the position of Chief Buying Clerk in the giant Chester–Perry organisation. You never get to see what Chester–Perry does. But you do see Bristow, doing as little as he can.

 Now and then, someone in the office mentions the “Great Tea Trolley Disaster of ’97”. No one ever explains the event, because everyone in the office knows what happened. It is shared. It is part of the office culture. It is part of what binds the staff together.

 When I worked for Fairfield Council, two events were part of the folklore.

  One was about a young fellow who had a habit of stealing other people’s cigarettes. They decided to teach him a lesson, so they doctored two cigarettes by inserting a hair from the tail of a horse down the centre of each one. His father was an alderman, and the young fellow was one of those spoilt brats who ran to daddy when things went wrong, and there was a lot of ranting and raving, but no one ever found out who was responsible.

 The other was about a chap who had a big old white car, and never washed it. But he was getting married, and they figured that he would wash it at least this once.

  So someone dabbed a little oil on the car, just a finger tip, here and there, and sprinkled fluoriscine dye on each dab. That is an interesting dye. When it’s dry, it is an orange–brown powder. But, when it’s wet...

  Fluoriscine is great in air–sea rescue. 1cc of the dye — enough to cover a 5c piece — will dye 1km² of ocean bright, luminous, green.

 So you can imagine what happened when the chap began washing his car the morning he was going to get married. Yes, the water ran green. It just ran and ran. Everything turned bright green: driveway, car, grass. Fortunately, fluoriscine doesn’t stain. But it runs.

  I wasn’t there for either event. I knew the horsehair cigarette chap, but I never met Fluoriscine Man. But both stories were part of the folklore of our office, and everyone knew these tales.

  Every successful group has its shared stories, and a group lacking shared stories is a group which will not last long.

  What are our shared stories? What events have we experienced, which define who we are?

 We, at Silver Street Mission, don’t have a lot of shared culture. If we break apart, despite our loyalties and our efforts, that will be a major factor. We need a shared culture.

  Do we ever say to each other, “Do you remember when...?” or “Do you remember the time...?” If we do, it’s a strength; if we don’t, that lack is a destructive force within us.

  Early in the year 1901, a group of Bible College students in Kansas got together and began praying. They didn’t pray the way we pray. They prayed fervently and they prayed pointedly. They didn’t give God a big shopping list, or read him the hospital ward records. They came with one thing in mind. They wanted the power of Pentecost in their lives and in the life of their College.

  Around midnight, that power came on them.

  One of the girls spoke in tongues. Several others followed.

  For 100 years, that event has been cherished as the launching day of Pentecostalism.

  Historians tell you that modern Pentecostalism has its roots in Edward Irving’s ministry in the 1840s, and in the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, as much as in the Topeka Bible School.

  The main thing for the life of the Pentecostal churches is that they have a story. Their members point back to that event in Kansas, and say, “We began at this place. The first of us to break through into this experience was Agnes Ozman. This is who we are as a group.”

 I’m not here today to tell us all about Pentecostalism, but I am here to tell us about having that shared story.

 And, for the early church, the shared story was the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

  Get this clear. Their message was the death and resurrection of Jesus; their shared story was the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

 We need to be clear on that distinction.

  Our message is the same: Christ died for our sins and rose again for our justification. And our shared story must be the same as theirs, that we are participants in the coming of the Holy Spirit.

 In I Corinthians, Paul talks to the divided, failing Corinthian church, and tells them about the basis for unity. He says,

1CO 12:12 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

  He compares the Christian community with Christ’s body. No longer is Christ localised in the physical body of Jesus who died and rose again. By his Spirit, indwelling every believer, Christ is revealed again to the world until he comes again.

 The world needs to look at you and me, look at us together, and see Jesus.

  When we show care, it must see Jesus’ care. When we minister healing, it must see Jesus, the Healer. When we speak wisdom, it must hear Christ’s wisdom. Every action of this community must become a reflection of the action of Jesus.

 And the mechanism by which this happens is the action of the Holy Spirit.

  In Paul’s image, the Holy Spirit is outside, and he is also inside. He baptises us, washing over us with the love of Christ; he fills our inner being with his power and satisfaction, so that the being of Christ flows back out of us.

 As Jesus said,

If anyone believes in me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

  Another metaphor that Jesus used was the vine and the branches. He said,

I am the vine, you are the branches.

  This image is of a grape vine in a vineyard. Farmers get the root and the stem of a hardy variety of grape-vine and graft the branches of a fruit–bearing vine to it. So pests don’t attack the plant because of its hardy lower sections, but the upper sections bear big crops of tasty grapes.

  Those branches will wither and die if they are not firmly grafted into the root stock.

 There is a life flowing from the root into the branches, and that life is the Holy Spirit.

  The life expressed in the fruit is the life of Christ. The fruit we bear is the representation of Christ’s life in our world.

 Think about the “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22.23. You know what that fruit is: as Paul says,

...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

  Those nine qualities are all aspects of the character of Jesus, created in us by the Holy Spirit.

  Here’s another way of considering the work of the Spirit in us:

  It’s amazing how we take on something of the character of people who have been important to us.

 Some years ago, when I was still in College, I did a course called Lay Pastoral Care. A couple of times situations arose which were very difficult for me to face — a couple of conflicts, a few points of self–revelation that I was uncomfortable with.

 Pam, the Maintenance Leader of the group, would come to me afterwards and check how I was feeling. She was very caring, and also very appropriate — not gushing or rescuing, just concerned and supportive.

 A couple of years later, a woman who was attending the church came down to see me at the office, and told me all about a difficult situation she was facing. As I tried to help her with it, I was slightly amused to realise that I was saying, almost word–for–word, the kinds of thing that Pam had said to me.

  What we experience of Jesus in the ups and downs of life will come out in our lives, and it is the Holy Spirit who directs and impels that expression of Christ.

 But we have to go back to those Biblical images and understand that they are not “Jesus and me” images. The body, though one, is made up of many parts. The vine, though it has a single stem, has many branches, all designed to bear fruit.

  God’s primary purpose is to build Spirit–filled communities, so that, together, we can reflect Christ’s life to the world.

  As I said, our proclamation is the dying, rising Christ, but our dynamic — our common life — is the life of the Spirit, first poured out at Pentecost.

  We need to begin thinking of ourselves as Pentecost People.

  In the history of the Church, it is a sad fact that there has been a conspiracy against the people.

 The Catholic Church was so keen to preserve the special place of its saints, that it began divorcing the Church from its first century roots. The historical events were viewed as important, but the experiences were viewed as belonging to a different kind of people, the special ones, the Saints. It wasn’t so much a doctrine as an attitude.

 Then the Reformation reacted against the Catholic idea of saints, and scoffed at talk of miracles. But they didn‘t liberate the church to experience Pentecost days again. They denied power to the church.

 Eventually, Protestant scholars turned this from an attitude into a doctrine. It wasn’t just unlikely that these events would be experienced by modern Christians, it was impossible.

  Since the 1960s, we have been increasingly set free from these wrong attitudes. It takes time. Some have rushed ahead and ended up in “empty imaginings”. Some have lagged behind, and kept grumbling, “You can’t do that here now.” But we are getting there, bit by bit.

 The secret is knowing where we have come from and knowing what we share.

  We can’t repeat Pentecost, but we can all share in Pentecost. We can know what it is, and we can find its power again.

 The beginning is to start talking about Pentecost again. If we talk about it, it becomes part of who we are.

  Paul wrote,

If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.

  I am not of the “Name it and claim it” school. Some Christians act and talk as though if you want wealth, you just say that that is what you want, and claim it as your own, and you will get it, or that, if you want healing, you state your desire and believe you will have it, and you will be healed.

 That’s not Biblical.

  But I do believe that what we talk about becomes part of our understanding and our expectation.

  I don’t have a lot of early experiences which encourage me to understand community. A lot of my experiences encouraged me to be isolated and to think that community is close to rabble.

  But I understood how the Bible focuses on community, and I began thinking about it, and talking about it, and pondering what the Bible says about it, until I began to understand and desire community.

  John Wesley didn’t understand faith, and he asked a friend what to do about that. Should he give up preaching?

 His friend sad, “Preach faith until you have faith: then you will preach faith because you have faith.”

 I will say to you, “Talk about being a Pentecost person until you are a Pentecost person; then you will talk about being a Pentecost person because you are a Pentecost person.”

  You have every right to talk about being a Pentecost person because, legally, that is what you are.

For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body--whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free--and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

  What we need to do is to go from legal standing to experiential transformation.

  What did I say at the beginning? We need our story, and our story is that we belong to Pentecost. We can’t command that Pentecost should come down on us. Nor can we ensure that our experience will be exactly the same as the first apostolic band experienced. But we can know the presence and the power and the life-giving flow of the Holy Spirit.

 Make Pentecost part of our story!

  Today, I want us all to begin talking about our heritage. I want us to begin declaring it with our mouths, until we fully believe it in our hearts and begin experiencing it in our lives.

  I have a statement for us to say, so we can hear ourselves saying it:

• I am saved by the blood of Jesus

• I am alive by his risen power

• I am baptised in the Holy Spirit

• I’m a Pentecost Person —

Praised be his name!

 Let’s pray:

Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of life, come on us all today, we pray. Glorify Jesus in our sight and, through us, in the sight of the world.

Grant us courage to live in community for him and faith to live boldly by the life he gives us.

For his name‘s sake, and his everlasting glory,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)