I guess it must be ten or eleven years ago that I attended a day-long diocesan conference on a program called “Alpha”, featuring the founder of the “Alpha Movement” himself as the principal speaker.  And at some point, in the middle of the day, the speaker told us that we could experience the power and Presence of the Holy Spirit if we were all still and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come to us.  . . . I guess Mr. Founder was anticipating something like Saint Luke describes for us today in his Book of the Acts of the Apostles; that people would begin speaking in Tongues to the amazement of everyone present.  . . . It didn’t happen.  . . . We got quiet, and after a long while a few half-hearted high pitched lu lu lu’s were heard that put me in mind of Arab women just before they set out to cut off the genitalia of their wounded enemies, . . . but nothing like rushing wind or sacred fire filled the hall in which we were assembled.

    That sort of showy manifestation of God’s power, sometimes called a “Pentecostal experience”, seems to be the thing most often associated with the Holy Spirit.  Mr. Founder certainly thought so.  But if you read the Book of the Acts of the Apostles very carefully, what happens in Chapter Two is that on the Day of Pentecost (and thereafter) the Holy Spirit provides the Church with gifts necessary to the moment.  So, the Day of Pentecost in the Church Calendar is not an occasion for remembering how the Primitive Church spoke in Tongues so much as it is, instead, the day we remember that the Church was enabled to speak in other tongues, so that, “devout men from every nation under heaven . . . heard [the disciples] speaking in his own language” (Acts 2:5-6).  Jesus promised His disciples on the Day of His Ascension that they would “receive power . . . [to] be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).  And, sure enough, ten days later, on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit shows up to equip the Church with the very thing She needed to fulfill the Word of Jesus to “[tell in every tongue] the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:11).  . . . Later, in the Book of Acts, Luke shows us how the Holy Spirit made of the Church, to meet the needs of the moment, a united and healing community.

    This festival of Pentecost, then, is not so much a celebration of the Church’s empowerment from Heaven . . . as it is a celebration of God’s equipping the Church with His Presence.  It is a festival which celebrates what we are taught to cherish in the Creeds; . . . it is a festival which celebrates the bestowal of the Third Person of The Trinity upon the Church so that She might become catholic; so that She might become a sacred family . . . Who is in communion, through the Son, with the Father and with one another, the living and the dead; . . . so that the Church might have authority over sin; . . . and so that in the fullness of God’s time we might rise from the grave as Christ rose and enter, with Him, into everlasting felicity.

    And so, the Gospel appointed for today brings us back in time; . . . it brings us back fifty days to Eastereven when Ten of the Eleven disciples were gathered in one place trying to sort things out; . . . trying to deal with the cruel death of Jesus on a Cross outside Jerusalem . . . and trying to deal with the bizarre news of Mary Magdalene that she had seen Jesus alive, and report from Peter and John that they had not found the body of Jesus in the tomb where it had been hastily placed on Friday.  . . . Ten of the Eleven disciples are trying to sort things out . . . when suddenly Jesus is there!  . . . And the disciples are frozen with disbelief.  . . . They are unable to believe that they are seeing a spectre, . . . and they are unable to believe that they are seeing Jesus alive.  . . . Jesus settles the matter by showing the disciples that He is flesh . . . and that His flesh bears the marks of the instruments of His death.  . . . And then Jesus gets right to the heart of the matter.  He says,

“Shalom.  As the Father has sent me, even so I send you,” [and He breathes on them, saying] “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

    . . . I have noticed that, with increasing frequency, it is the habit of a great many Contemporary Protestant Christian Persons, when faced with theological issues that result in the generation of more heat than light; . . . it is the habit of a great many Contemporary Protestant Christian Persons to distill the Faith down to a single, overarching principle; . . . it is the habit of a great many Contemporary Protestant Christian Persons to declare that the meaning of the Faith is to be defined by a single word:  Love.  And armed with that idea, it is the habit of a great many Contemporary Protestant Christian Persons to conclude that the Faith permits anyone to do anything they like so long as it is an articulation of love . . . or evokes love in another person, . . . which is perhaps the most wicked and irresponsible thing that the Church can ever say, because exactly the opposite is true:  The Faith forbids anyone to do anything they like out of deference to God’s love.  Jesus makes that perfectly clear at His Resurrection appearance to His disciples:

As the Father has sent me, even so I send you, . . . Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

We are sent from the Baptismal Font; . . . we are sent from the Communion Rail as sons and daughters of God, even as Jesus is the Son sent by the Father; . . . we are sent from the Baptismal Font; . . . we are sent from the Communion Rail with the abiding Presence of the Holy Spirit Who has authority over us and over our lives.  And so, at our Baptism and at the Confirming of our Baptism we renounce the authority of the world to dictate what to love and how; . . . we renounce the authority of our own flesh to govern our affections; . . . instead, we make Jesus our Master from Whom we learn, by careful and reverent attention, the priorities of God, . . . and to Whom we entrust ourselves and our love.  . . . And it is the Holy Spirit Who is the catalyst that aids and empowers our resolve to renounce and reform.  It is the Holy Spirit Who is Present in our lives to open our eyes to see the silliness, the pathos, and the wickedness of the world’s and the flesh’s affections so that we retain our resolve to resist sin; . . . it is the Holy Spirit Who is Present in our lives to help us to love what God has commanded and to help us let go of sin in order to embrace the yearning we have for the things that are beloved of God; . . . to embrace them in the way that is loved by God.

    So, you see, the meaning of the Faith is not Love.  The Faith is a flowering of God’s love, but its meaning is belief in Jesus!  Saint John tells us this at the beginning of his Gospel, and we remember it as one of the Comfortable Words that follow the absolution of our sins:  “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  . . . And so, at His Resurrection, the Son breathed on His Church and commanded us to,

Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

. . . Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit on us to be Present to us and have authority over our lives; . . . so that we might not become so terrorized by evil that we forget to forgive the sins of those who believe in Jesus, . . . and so that we might not become so deceived by evil that we forget what sin is and to name it to children of the world and of the flesh; . . . so that we might not be so deceived by evil that we forget to live and to teach that sin’s remedy is belief in Jesus.  . . . And so, I invite you, believing in Jesus, to renew your Baptismal Vows and your obedience to the authority of the Holy Spirit to help you keep them, using the form found on page 292 in The Book of Common Prayer.