For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
(Ephesians 3:14-21)
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We've got the power! It's true - WE'VE GOT THE POWER!!! In fact I want to hear all of you say it - WE'VE GOT THE POWER!!!!! LOUDER - WE'VE GOT THE POWER!!!!!!!!!! OK. The point is made. We've got the power. It's Pentecost. And like our opening hymn said, "Come, O Spirit, dwell among us, come with pentecostal power ..." So, assuming that the Holy Spirit has come and does dwell among us with "pentecostal power" we can say that we are an empowered people - which then begs the question: to what end? What, exactly is it that we're empowered for? To put it another way, I really like the words of Steve Mariboli: “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.” But to do that we have to figure out what it is that we have power over - otherwise, we're fighting a losing battle; spinning our wheels at best and possibly even slipping backward bit by bit - getting nowhere very fast.
If Pentecost is a celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus, then Paul's words in our passage from Ephesians are instructive. Paul believes that the Holy Spirit is present with believers - and, more precisely, within believers. Paul sees the Holy Spirit as the engine that pushes us ever forward into the world. He says that we are "strengthened in [our] inner being with power through [God's] Spirit." Do you ever hear people talk about their inner resource of strength, or people who go through some horrible crisis and say that they didn't realize they had the strength to make it. I believe that's the Holy Spirit. I believe that's God's Spirit within us making itself known; manifesting itself through a power to do or accomplish or persevere through something that we would have thought impossible - that we could not have done simply by our own strength. Our ability to achieve things that we would have thought impossible for us to achieve are signs of the power of God's Spirit working inside us, coursing through our veins. Paul went on to say that God's Spirit within us gives us the power to "comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love." And love is power. Love, in fact, is the greatest power. Love is what moves us to the good works we do as a witness to the faith we have. "Love never ends," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, and of faith, hope and love (all that will remain when everything else disappears) - "the greatest of these is love." And through that power of love filling us from within and overflowing from us to the world, Paul says that "God can accomplish more than we can ask or imagine." We limit ourselves. We become pessimists. We fall into despair. We think that things are bad and that they're going to get worse. We are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problems around us. But God is not overwhelmed. God sees possibilities even when we're tempted to throw in the towel. And God works within us to bring us out of despair and pessimism and to make us agents of change and transformation in the world around us - even if it's one person at a time, even if we'll never see the end result. How will the Kingdom of God come? Perhaps with a mighty roar and the sound of a trumpet and in the twinkling of an eye - but perhaps also bit by bit, person by person until we look around and all of a sudden realize that the Kingdom of God has arrived, and that love and peace reign. It seems impossible when we look at the world around us - but God does the impossible through us. By the Holy Spirit within us, "God can accomplish more than we can ask or imagine." Or, as Paul said in Philippians, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."
Pentecost is a celebration of that power. We know the story of Pentecost. I didn't have it read today, but we know it. Gathered together, the disciples experienced miraculous things as the Holy Spirit came upon them. Sights and sounds and visions that revealed the power and presence of God. But I want to go back to Steve Mariboli for a second. You have to decide to "to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't." Ever since that first Day of Pentecost, Christians have been trying to control the Holy Spirit; to tame the Holy Spirit; to bottle the Holy Spirit. Ever since that first Day of Pentecost Christians have been trying to recreate what happened as if that's what's supposed to happen forever and always, and I'm not convinced that we haven't missed the point. In fact, the whole business of "speaking in tongues" as it's evolved from that first Day of Pentecost has become not a source of strength for the church but the source of one of the major divisions in the church between those who speak in tongues and those who don't - with the group who do often thinking that only they have the Holy Spirit within them and other Christians don't. That's neither strength nor power. Its pride and ego and disunity sapping the church's strength and marginalizing the church's witness. And there it is - the church's witness.
What are we empowered to do by having the Holy Spirit within us? I want to go back one step farther. Before Pentecost there was the Ascension - Jesus being taken into heaven as his disciples watched. That's an interesting story. Ascension Sunday was last Sunday and had I been here last week instead of at the meeting of Bay of Quinte Conference, I'd have been preaching on the Ascension. But what intrigues me about the Ascension isn't Jesus being taken into heaven - it's what Jesus said to his disciples before he was taken into heaven. "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." It wasn't the power to speak in tongues or to perform miracles or to bring forth signs and wonders. That's not the power Jesus spoke of. It was the power to be witnesses. Witnesses of what? Witnesses of Jesus and his way. Witnesses who reveal the presence of God in the world; witnesses who show the love of God to the world. Witnesses who are willing to stand up to the rich and powerful and famous on behalf of the poor and lowly and outcast. Witnesses who are willing to take their place on the margins with the marginalized rather than stand in judgment over the marginalized. These are hard things to do. These are tough things to do. These are sometimes even risky things to do. They might be so hard and so tough and so risky that we often don't want to do them and we don't think we can do them - except that, as Paul wrote in Ephesians, "by the power at work within us God can accomplish more than we can ask or imagine." If the call of Christ seems hard or tough or risky, that doesn't mean we shouldn't accept it; it means we should find the power of God's Spirit within us - and get to it!
Steve Mariboli wrote that “incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.” We can't control the Holy Spirit. When we try it leads to disaster. But we can cede control of our lives to the Holy Spirit, and we can accept the power of the Holy Spirit and we can be witnesses to Jesus and to the way of Jesus: the way of faith, the way of peace, the way of hope, the way of love. And if we do that, then we won't only see incredible changes in our own lives - maybe we'll see incredible changes in others whose lives we touch, and eventually even incredible changes in the world.
We've got the power. Say it with me - "WE'VE GOT THE POWER." We do. We just have to use it!
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