The power given us by the Holy Spirit is purposeful: it helps us promote peace, extend forgiveness, and renew life.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21), because this coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost is an older holiday than Christianity. It was celebrated in Judaism for millennia before Jesus’ followers gathered in some place in Jerusalem to observe the day. We know that they began in some place together. Perhaps later in the day they planned to go worship in the temple. We don’t know. What we do know was that whatever their plans were, they were disrupted.
There was the sound of a rush of a mighty wind. There was something that played above their heads that others later described as looking like tongues of fire. They came outside and began to speak to people about God’s deeds of power in Jesus. And when they did so, they spoke in languages that were not native to them, languages that until that day they had not spoken.
Pentecost became, for Christians, the holiday which celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit. And indeed it’s paired in the lectionary with the twentieth chapter of John (John 20:19-23), in which on the day of his resurrection, Jesus said to his followers, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
There is a lot that can be said and has been said and will be said about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the followers of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is literally the foundation of the church. We exist because the Holy Spirit gathers us and we continue to serve from the power that the Holy Spirit gives to us. But let’s be careful about what that power is.
When Jesus spoke to his disciples, he said to them, “Peace be with you.” So first of all, the power of the Holy Spirit is the power of peace.
Jesus also said, and later Peter would say in that sermon on Pentecost, the the power was the forgiveness of sins: not the power of condemnation, the power of restoration and belonging.
And it is the power of life and of resurrected life. The power of the Holy Spirit is what lifts us up when we are cast down, what gives us strength to continue doing what is good and right and true when we think we have run out. The power of the Holy Spirit is the power to take our bodies when we have laid them down at the end of our lives, pick them back up again in a grand resurrection, and restore us to one another and to God in the realm that is to come.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
The Christians suffering persecution in Thessalonica wanted to know when it would end. Paul couldn’t tell them, just urge them to hold to their faith and compassion.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the second chapter of Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17).
In this chapter Paul commented on the return of Christ, the Second Coming, if you will (though he didn’t call it that). The reason, I suspect, is that the Christians in Thessalonica had been having a very bad time. Paul commented on it in his First Letter to the Thessalonians, that they had been enduring some pretty harsh persecution. He compared it to the persecution that he himself had suffered in Jerusalem.
By the time he wrote the Second Letter it appears that that had not ended. They were still going through some very harsh times.
In times like that, the basic question on anyone’s mind would be: “When will it end? And indeed, when will it end in some kind of reversal, in some kind of justice, in some kind of event so that those who persecuted us suffer and we ourselves triumph?
And Paul’s comments here: to me, well, they’re a little obscure, because he talks about some mysterious figure that will sit in the temple (or possibly already was sitting in the temple) and clearly Paul had discussed this with the folks in Thessalonica and so he left the details out. The point is —— and it was a point that he made in First Thessalonians — that we still have to endure, and we still have to live out the lives to which we were called by Jesus as we do so. We still need to do good works for one another. We still need to pray for one another. We still need to bring our compassion to one another even when it is hard.
These are also harsh times. We’ve just come through a global pandemic: harsh times. There are wars in the world in which people suffer terribly: harsh times. And we are looking at the withdrawal of supports from the poorest of the poor here in the United States and elsewhere around the world: harsh times.
We are asked to hold to our faith, to trust in the grace and compassion of God. And in the midst of it all, to exercise our capacity for love and care and tenderly bring to those who suffer the most the resources, the aid, and the compassion that we can, the compassion which has been given to us by Jesus Christ.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
One of the things that is hard to appreciate in a translation is the presence of puns.
Some of you are thinking that you don’t appreciate puns no matter what the language is.
But we are missing something here. John E. Anderson tells us at Working Preacher, “There is a delightful Hebrew wordplay: at Jabbok (yabok) a ‘man’ wrestled (yabeq) Jacob (y’qob).”
Yabok. Yabeq. Yaqov. Like Dr. Anderson, to whom I’m not related as far as I know, I call that delightful. You may disagree. What we can probably agree is that the author chose those words to call attention to this story, in which Jacob received a new name, Yisrael, “one who wrestles with God,” and that prompts Jacob to name his opponent as God, and further prompts him to give a new name to that place.
No longer Yaqov – Israel. No longer an unidentified Yabeq – Elohim, or God. No longer the ford of the Yabok, but now Peniel, the face of God.
Are you convinced yet that something important is going on here?
Jacob is one of the Bible’s more colorful characters. He’d purchased his brother’s birthright for a bowl of stew, which I suppose you could call shrewd bargaining but I think you could also call it taking advantage of your brother. He’d fooled his vision-impaired father to receive his all-important blessing, which I think we’d have to call fraud. He’d been fooled himself by his father-in-law over which daughter he was to marry, become a father by four women in a family dynamic which means that the phrase “Biblical family values” doesn’t necessary mean “healthy and happy,” and when gathering his family to return home, had once again defrauded his father-in-law so that he journeyed with big flocks of sheep and goats.
This is the underdog that we cheer for. This is also the hero whose actions we cringe at.
This is someone who’d been wrestling with everybody he met for his entire life. That might feel familiar sometimes.
As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “If we turn to the Bible for assurance that life will be easy and comfortable, and every prayer will be answered and God’s blessing will continually rain down upon us, the story of Jacob is not the place to look. What we can take from this story is that the struggle within us—those dark nights of the soul—is holy. We live in and with a God who is willing to be intimate in that struggle, to engage the mystery of ourselves, and to bless the struggle even as it wounds us.”
One of the blessings of Scripture is its reality. I’m not saying that every word is literally true – the parables of Jesus, for example, are fictions. Meaningful fictions, fictions which illustrate truth, but still intentional fictions. What I mean by reality is the way that Scripture doesn’t shy away from rock and sand, from heat and cold, from sweat and blood. When I read this story I can just about hear Jacob’s heart racing and his breath heaving. I can almost feel the tearing feeling of his wrenched hip. I can just about sense his desperation to get through the night. Just to get through the night.
As Callie Plunket-Brewton writes at Working Preacher, “Dark nights of the soul are part of the human experience, and few escape them. Whether we battle adversaries psychological or physical, the dawn does still come.”
We know what it is like to wrestle with the world.
We also have some idea what it is like to lose. As morning approached, Jacob’s hip was put out of joint. I’ve already mentioned that Jacob had been wrestling with everybody he ever met. Now he found himself out of joint with the world.
But there he was. Estranged from his birth family. Estranged from his family of marriage. Living with rivalry and dissension in his household. On the verge of a potentially violent collision with his outraged and defrauded brother. The reality of his hip matched the reality of his relationships.
Jacob was out of joint with the world.
So what do we do when we’re out of joint with the world?
I think we do what Jacob did. We hold on.
As Beth L. Tanner writes at Working Preacher, “Life is sometimes like that. Things happen that cannot be rationalized or easily understood. We survive by nothing more elegant than not giving up.”
We hold on.
Jacob had lost, but not lost all his strength. He wasn’t going to win, and he didn’t. He just held on.
We hold on.
There are a lot of ways in which I feel out of joint with the world these days. In lots of cultures in lots of periods of time, people grieved visibly. They might wear special clothing, or they might perform certain ritual actions. Others could see that their friends were in mourning. They could see that their neighbors were out of joint with the world.
As you know, last weekend I was at my stepmother’s funeral. I’ve been grieving. I’ve been out of joint. I know some of you probably are, too.
So what do we do?
We hold on. Next Sunday we will observe our All Saints Sunday. During that service, we read the names of those who have died since last October, and we light a candle for them. Further, there is a time when we come forward to light candles for those who’ve gone before, until the soft glow begins to rival the daylight. As we do so we hold on to memory, and we hold on to love. We hold on to the hope and faith that God will restore us to one another again in the fullness of time.
We hold on.
Yesterday I put on a clerical collar and stood along Kamehameha Avenue and waved and made the shaka and talked with people and said, “Thank you for coming” along with hundreds of folks who came out to declare their commitment to No Tyrants. We stretched about a half a mile along the street, and yes, there were people dressed as inflatable creatures. Thank you, Portland.
I was there to hold on.
I was there to hold on to an imperfect republic with all its messiness against a burgeoning and merciless autocracy. I was there to hold on to a tenuous commitment to justice for people of all races, nationalities, genders, and identities against growing prejudice and oppression. I was there to hold on to the hope for a society in which everyone would receive due process of law. I was there to hold on to the idea that peaceful demonstration is both moral and effective at improving the laws and mores of a nation.
Was I, were we, successful?
According to Corina Knoll of the New York Times, “When asked if the president had a comment on the demonstrations, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, gave a brief response in an email. ‘Who cares?’ she said.”
Not successful yet.
Hold on.
What if our conflict is with someone bigger than the president of the United States, though? What if it’s with God?
Again: Hold on.
George Peck, who was President of Andover Newton Theological School when I was a student there back in the late 80’s, came from Australia and taught me the meaning of the song “Waltzing Matilda.” He also taught me and all the rest of my colleagues about the down times of faith. While he served as a Baptist missionary and teacher in India, he told us, he lost his faith. He simply no longer believed in what he was doing. What did he do?
He held on. Not to the faith, which wasn’t there. He held on to the things that he did out of the faith he’d had. He kept teaching. He kept preaching. He kept praying. He didn’t know if his faith would come back. But he knew that if he did the things of faith, he’d recognize faith when (or if) it returned.
He held on. And his faith did return.
Jacob held on until the morning, and he was blessed. Dr. Peck held on until his faith grew again, and he was blessed. We’ll hold on until this attempt at autocracy is defeated, and we will be blessed. We’ll hold on to love and memory next Sunday and every day, and we will be blessed.
Hold on, friends. Hold on.
Be blessed.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric tends to improvise while preaching, sometimes intentionally. The recording will not exactly match the prepared text.
The image is Jacob and the Angel by Annette Gandy Fortt, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56023 [retrieved October 19, 2025]. Original source: annettefortt.com.
