Acts 2: 1-21
A woman I slightly know who lives in Alderley Edge said to me last week that our church was a church that was a full of life. It is an extraordinary compliment to pay a church. What does it mean to say that a church is full of life? It means nothing less than to say that the church is filled with the Holy Spirit.
In Genesis we read that God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And in the same way in John’s Gospel we read that Jesus breathed on the disciples and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.
We heard again this morning the familiar reading from Acts describing the moment the church was born. It was born the moment that the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples and gave them life.
It is a wonderful thing to be part of a church that feels alive, a church where you can sense the presence of the Holy Spirit, a church where you can sense that there is a power that has descended from on high.
The people who witnessed the first Pentecost speculated that the disciples might be drunk. How do we know that the sense we have of the Holy Spirit moving among us is a feeling that comes from God and not from our own delusions?
We have to repeatedly test the feeling. We test it by returning to scripture, including the passages that trouble us as well as the passages that comfort us and confirm us in our beliefs. We test it through prayer, by allowing ourselves to be formed by the prayers we say, the prayers themselves emerging from the words of the Scripture and internalised in our hearts. And we test it in community. By being in communion with other Christians, preferably including Christians whose lives are very different from ours.
As we approach the altar this morning, we retell the familiar story of the cross, we say the prayers that shape our lives and mould our lives to his who died for us, and we enter into communion with Jesus Christ and with Christians across the world and through the ages, and in communion with them, we will indeed know, that the Spirit we feel moving among us is indeed the Holy Spirit, the power that comes from on high. Amen