Happy Birthday

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21.

When you're a kid, your birthday is, after Christmas, the most anticipated day of the year. The closer it gets the more giddy you are. All you can think of are gifts and cake and a party with all your friends. After a certain age, your birthday is much less of a celebration and more of a nod to the passage of time. Maybe even a shrug. Your birthday only becomes a big deal again if you live to be very, very old. At the nursing home where I used to work, we had at one time 3 people who were 100 or more years old. You can bet they got big parties!

The Pentecost recounted in our passage from Acts took place somewhere between 27 and 33 AD. So Christianity is just a bit shy of 2000 years old. Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church because that's when it took its first breath, so to speak, apart from Jesus' physical presence. And before the invention of the stethoscope, breath was considered the vital sign that separated life from death. On Pentecost, the church came alive.

In both Greek and Hebrew, one word was used for breath, wind and spirit. The movement of air is a powerful but invisible force. Wind can be felt and its effects can be seen but wind itself cannot be seen. Neither can breath, except on very cold days and even then you don't see it for more than a second or two. It's easy to understand how breath came to be used as an analogy for spirit, the unseen but powerful force that gives us life.

Even today, when a baby is born, doctors and nurses are intent on clearing a newborn's airway and hearing that first cry. We rate the baby on a scale in which 3 of the 5 signs—the color of its extremities, its response to stimuli and the quality of its crying—are related to the adequacy of its respirations. A baby who doesn't get enough oxygen during the birth process is at risk for cerebral palsy. You may count your baby's fingers and toes when he or she is born; we nurses are looking to see if they are blue or not.

So it is natural to associate the coming of the Holy Spirit, appearing as a wind that shakes the building the apostles met in, with birth. Birth is a starting point and Pentecost is a good place to say the church first began to function as the body of Christ.

But before the descent of the Spirit on the church Pentecost was a major Jewish holiday. Called Shavuot, it was the 50^th day since Passover. It was the day when the first fruits of the spring crops were offered to God along with prayers for the rest of the harvest. It was also the time when Jews commemorated God giving the 10 commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai. (Exodus 20:1-17) That's why so many Jews from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem.

The parallels are easy to make. At Pentecost the first fruits of the church are brought in and offered to God. In that day followers of Jesus went from about 120 to 3000. (Acts 1:14; 2:41) A very promising start on the harvest to come.

God gave his people the law on a Pentecost 1200 to 1400 years before Christ. This Pentecost he sends his Holy Spirit, making a different way of living a godly life possible. So the church being born on this auspicious day is akin to a person being born on his grandfather's birthday.

But there is another Biblical event that relates to this Pentecost. In Genesis chapter 11, we read the story of the tower of Babel. Humanity speaks one language, something we also find in ancient Sumerian writings. But they are using this common language to coordinate efforts to build a tower to the heavens. For this arrogance, God confuses the language. And divided by a variety of languages, people scatter to the ends of the earth.

On Pentecost, Jews from all over the known world come together to go to the temple in Jerusalem. They speak a variety of languages. And then God pours out his Spirit on the apostles and they speak in different tongues. Out of the cacophony, people manage to pick out the language they know. They are drawn together by this spectacle. And then Peter preaches the gospel to them.

He probably spoke in Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman empire ever since Alexander the Great. Luke is obviously giving us a summary of a much longer speech. What is interesting is that Peter goes from Joel's prophecy to Jesus as the center of the phenomena the people are witnessing on that Pentecost. And Peter emphasizes Jesus' resurrection. He mentions his death and says it's part of God's plan but he doesn't explain why. Instead he focuses on Jesus rising again. Why? Partly because it is so fresh. Jesus' resurrection was only a month and a half ago. But mostly because it validated who Jesus is: the Messiah, God's anointed King.

What made this Pentecost so effective wasn't the sound of the wind or the tongues of flame or the speaking in tongues. God wasn't interested in giving everyone a magical experience. He was and is interested in redeeming people. He is interested in bringing them into the body of Christ, of uniting them to his son, who is the divine love incarnate, and making them like him. So the focus of the church has to be Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us and is doing in us and how we should respond. The farther we get from that, the more likely we are to go astray.

When the Jews of the diaspora heard the gospel proclaimed on that Pentecost, thousands claimed Jesus as Savior and Lord. They repented and were baptized. And Luke tells us, “They were devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” (Acts 2:42) That's what we do today. We devote ourselves to the teachings of the apostles, found in scripture and summarized in the creeds. We devote ourselves to prayers, new, old and ancient. The first part of our worship service is very much like the synagogue service the apostles were familiar with. We pray, we read the scriptures and someone comments on the passages read.

They also broke bread together. That is probably a reference to the earliest form of what became Communion or the Eucharist. The second part of our worship service is all about our sharing the bread and wine which become for us the body and blood of Jesus, incorporating us into one body, his.

And that brings us to fellowship. The word in Greek, koinonia, means something more than friendship. It's more like partnership. We are partners in Christ, working together to become the kingdom of God.

It all began on Pentecost. And that's why we're celebrating it as a birthday. That's why some churches put up decorations. There's even a kind of correlation between the trappings of modern birthdays and Pentecost.

Birthday parties have candles. The candles in churches symbolize the tongues of flame that came to rest on each of the apostles, the purifying and illuminating energy of the Spirit. Plus God descended to Sinai in fire and spoke to Moses out of fire. The liturgical color of Pentecost is red because of the fire.

The breath used to blow up balloons at parties can represent the Spirit filling us.

At birthday parties we sing traditional songs for the birthday boy or girl. Here too we sing about Christ and his church.

Somebody usually gets up and makes a little speech about the significance of the birthday. That's what I am doing now.

And there is food and drink. Soon we will celebrate the Eucharist, a foretaste of the wedding banquet of the Lamb.

But where are the gifts? The initial gift is the Spirit of God himself. Through him, God not only comes to us, he enters into us. God is no longer someone out there but lives in our hearts and minds and lives.

And the Spirit in turn gives us gifts: wisdom, healing, grace, faith, hope, love and various abilities. Unlike some of the gifts we receive for birthdays, these aren't the kind that you get tired of or which are cool to look at but useless. As it says in 1^st Peter, “Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve another as good stewards of the varied grace of God.” (1 Peter 4:10)

Finally, there is one thing about birthdays that we are especially desirous of when we are young: we want to be older. No child really wants to stay a little kid forever like Peter Pan. We want to grow up and become like our father or mother. We want to be an adult like our older brother. We want to become a man or a woman. Each year is another milestone on the journey of our life. Somewhere along the line we can lose that desire. There's nothing sadder than an adult who refuses to grow up and continues to act like a child. Or an older person trying to hold onto or recapture his or her youth.

We confuse the youth we desire with immaturity and with outward appearances. But what keeps you young inside is not self-indulgence or recklessness or sex or looks but the ability to trust and a sense of wonder. When you lose those, you truly age in the negative sense of that word.

God gives us eternal life. On that scale, we are all still quite young. And so we should still desire to grow, to mature, to see what the next year brings. The church is still young, still making mistakes, still wanting to be popular rather than righteous, wanting to be cool rather than wise. Let our birthday wish, our prayer, be that the church appreciates what it already has and that it wants to grow up to be like its heavenly Father.

First preached on May 23, 2010. It has been updated and revised.