Acts 2: 1-21                   The Rev. Dr. Patricia Ramsden

I love birthdays!  And, as many of you know, I don’t just celebrate them for a day.  I celebrate all week long.  I think of them as a time when I can be reborn, when I can make anything I want out of the rest of my life.  They’re the time I look at my dreams and hopes and wonder which ones I will choose to turn into realities over the next twelve months.  Everything --- anything --- seems possible to me on my birthday. 

It’s a special time when the world pauses just to celebrate you.  People send you cards saying they love you.  They hold a birthday “dinner” in your honor. There are balloons and presents and even a special song sung just for you. They bake cakes that mark every year of your life with a glowing candle --- but best of all, is the moment when you get to blow out those candles of  the past, and all those past mistakes,  all the horrid memories, are gone in a whiff of smoke and only the pleasant ones remain.  

         What’s not to love about birthdays?  And so, we come here today to celebrate the birthday of the church and to be reminded of the best birthday gift of all --- the gift of God’s presence dwelling within us --- the gift of God’s love --- the gift of God’s Spirit. 

         For that is what this day, this Pentecost is all about. 

         On that Pentecost so long ago, God’s love blew like a gentle breeze and like a strong wind through that upper room   where the men and women who followed Jesus waited and prayed.

         It stirred up joy and energy and stories of their Savior that were just waiting to be shared.  It stirred them out of their lethargy and onto the streets.  It stirred and stirred until that small band of believers became a mighty movement, touching all the nations of the earth, calling those nations to see and know God’s love. 

         When those disciples received God’s Spirit, they received a new power in their lives and a new power in their faith. 

         They gained an emotional power they had never felt before -- the power to love people they had never known  and to care for people they had previously disdained. They found a new insight into people’s needs and they discovered that rather than fumbling around for the right words,  they possessed the  discernment to know what to say and the courage to say it with gentleness and love.

         They gained intellectual power too, for those men and women began to live with a wisdom far beyond their own and that wisdom allowed them to build the structure of a church that could welcome all people inside its doors and recognize all people as their true kin, brothers and sisters in the Lord.

         They also gained a spiritual power - the power of great faith that allowed them to perform miracles --- miracles of healing where the lame walked and the blind could see; and miracles of growth within their own lives --- miracles like the one that allowed a man as stubborn as Peter  to listen to God and to admit that he and the church,    were wrong to hold on to  traditional teachings when those teachings stood in the way of  God’s saving grace and God’s intent not to limit the faith.  Or the miracle that knocked Paul to his knees  and turned him into God’s most faithful apostles.  Miracles of faith, of growing in faith, started to happen when these men and women were filled with the Holy Spirit of God. 

         They received physical power too --- a strength and endurance to suffer for the faith.   The courage to hold on to Christ and all Christ said when common sense said to let Christ go and believe in the world instead. 

In the mighty wind of Pentecost, in the flame of God’s love, those men and women received great power: emotional power; intellectual power;     spiritual power;     physical power. 

         That’s the power we want today.  That’s the power we need in our lives.  That’s the power the world is seeking for --- and seeking for in all the wrong places.   For you see, that power is ours for the taking.  

         That same Spirit of God who lived within those early disciples lives within us today.  She is here to call us out of apathy and into action --- she is here to remind us once again of God’s great joy and of our need to share God’s joy and God’s love with others. 

         She is here telling us that we have the power --- we’ve received the gift, and it’s time we open it up, unwrap the paper, tear off the bow, call people up and invite them to God’s party called church.  

         We have the power to do that --- the very same power as those first men and women who sat in that upper room.  Those men and women who burst onto the streets of Jerusalem were not ready made saints, they were not religious crazies, they were men and women just like you and like me with our fears and our insecurities.

         But they were men and women who knew the love of God in a powerful way and who were determined to make their dream of a world saved by love not a dream any longer but their reality.  They were willing to risk it all to found a church and they were willing to do that because they knew they would not be doing it on their own, but with God.  For as the prophet Zechariah reminds us the building of God’s kingdom is not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of God alone.

         God has called you to rebuild this church.  And not by your power or your might but by God’s Spirit.  And God has given you the Spirit to do it. 

           So let’s unwrap the gift of the Holy Spirit and celebrate God’s love.  This party is for us.  This Pentecost is for us.  This birthday of the church is the mark of a new beginning when our dreams and God’s dreams will continue to come true.  Praise be to God.