Our Story - Guest Speaker

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Peter interpreted the events of that Pentecost in the light of his tradition and his experience of following Jesus, but not everyone welcomed the message, and it's not hard to see why. It meant that these devout people would have to significantly revise their ideas about what constituted faithfulness to their God. We're not told what was spoken and heard in all those different languages. Only that it had something to do with God's deeds of power, that God was a powerful God They could accept. But the egalitarian and universal nature of this revelation was a lot to take on board. And what did that Galilean troublemaker Jesus have to do with anything? How do we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and become a part of God's work in the world in our own day? Many of us, myself included, picked up our ideas about what it means to be Christian and about the Bible in our early years, explicitly from Sunday school or church school, or perhaps implicitly from the behavior and attitudes of our parents and grandparents. Yet, the day that we realized that we were never going to graduate from the School of Christian Learning was a blessed day indeed. In this lifelong endeavor of discipleship our Christian faith calls us to be ready to open our hearts and minds to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. And from the vantage point of seven decades of life, I can tell you that this can be an uncomfortable experience. We know that society is changing very rapidly, and it can be tiring, even painful to be asked frequently to reexamine our assumptions. It may even feel like a betrayal of our heritage.