One Spirit
Acts 2:1-21
Today is Pentecost Sunday, the seventh and last Sunday of the season of Easter and the last in our series, “The Power of One” that we began Easter Sunday.
The language used to describe the coming of the Spirit is very circuitous. It is a common way in scripture to talk about that which is indescribable. You may remember the story of Elijah on the mountain searching for God, he experienced a violent storm and then he heard what scripture called “a sound of sheer silence.” That’s what happens when the Spirit comes.
Pentecost is a feast of the senses. There was an auditory experience (sound of wind), a visual experience (tongues of fire), a verbal experience (speaking in unknown languages) and a communal experience (sharing the good news with the crowd). The more we let God’s Spirit possess who we are, the more we experience the depth of Pentecost.
Pentecost is about passion. My childhood pastor used to describe faith as having a fire in one’s belly. There are values and ideals and dreams about which we have passion and create meaning.
Bellanotte – the experience of being one and being proud of the community that we have created.
Lots of times people will come to church for months or years and they are just here. We are OK with that. Things of the Spirit happen in their own good time. They listen to the sermons. They donate money to the work. They might help out with a ministry team or an event. But then something happens that is like flipping on a light switch and suddenly there is this great passion for what All God’s Children is about. I wish I could bottle whatever it is that causes that light switch to turn on. It is like people move from knowing about God to possessing an experience of God.
Back in 1915, a man in Pecos County, Texas named Ira Yates bought a farm. Along with his crops, he raised sheep and cattle. But during his first few years, life on that farm was very difficult. West Texas was a hard place to make a living. He had to contend with several severe droughts in those early years. So he barely managed to make ends meet.
Then in 1927, he convinced some geologists in the area to drill for oil on his land. They were skeptical at first. No one had ever found oil that far west. But at his insistence, they went ahead.
On October 29, 1927, which just happened to be Ira Yates’ 67th birthday – at a depth of 1,100 feet, they struck oil – a lot of oil! Eight thousand barrels of oil per hour, 200,000 barrels per day, flowed from that oil well. They didn’t even need a pump.
It became known as “Yates’ Find” and was by far the greatest oil find west of the Mississippi River. It yielded 12 million barrels of oil annually. And 80 years later, even up until today, they are still pumping oil from that well!
The point is that Ira Yates had owned all that oil from the moment he had bought the land. But he had never possessed it.
Right now, you and I own all the richness of God’s grace. Let it possess you. Let it seep down to the core of your being and burst out of your life splattering everyone around you with grace. Let it become that holy fire in your belly that won’t let you be still until you let God use you to make your world a better place.
Sources:
www.homileticsonline.com Is the Fire Going Out? May 2009.
Seamands, Stephen: “Welcoming the Holy Spirit,” Good News, September/October 2007, 14.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txpecos2/Cemetery-OldHickoxRanch.jpg
