Sermon Notes — May 24, 2026
“Pentecost”
May 24, 2026
Acts 2:1-21
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Last week Terry mentioned that he had a hard time imagining what Jesus’s ascension into heaven might have looked like. He wondered if Jesus just took off like Superman, or was just sort of raised up into heaven, or whether he just vanished in an instant. Terry said that he had a much easier time picturing what Pentecost might have looked like. Terry, it might have looked just like this!
I appreciate all of you taking the time to indulge in the playfulness and imagination of this day with me, from wearing your red to making your Pentecost party hats. Pentecost is all about the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit, I think, is all about imagination. When we talk about the Holy Spirit, we’re talking about everything that could happen – everything that can happen – everything that might happen – when the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and took him to heaven – when that same power is poured out on us.
When the Holy Spirit’s power was poured out on Pentecost, it was noisy and bright and bizarre. It was confusing and chaotic and strange – no one had any frame of reference for this kind of experience.
The Holy Spirit was at work.
And when it was all over – when Peter was finished preaching and the last person had been baptized – when it was all over, something brand new. The church. You and me and everyone who has ever heard about the mighty works of God and the good news of Jesus Christ and said yes – I want to bind my life to that. The church was born that day.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Holy Spirit, blow away all that keeps us from you. Speak to us your words of power and hope. Open our hearts, that we may hear your call for us today. Amen.
One of the ways that I have learned to think about the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is the power of God to create something from nothing. The first appearance of the Holy Spirit is on the first day of creation.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The Spirit of God was there, moving upon the face of the waters, creating something from nothing. Creating everything from nothing.
And on the Day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit once again creates something – the church – from nothing. Now you could argue that there wasn’t nothing on the Day of Pentecost. Obviously there were people from whom the Holy Spirit created the church but just stay with me. Only the Holy Spirit could have taken the people in Jerusalem that day and created the church – the covenant of saints from all times and places who have lived and died for the last 2000 years until now, world without end, amen. Only the Holy Spirit.
I am the church; you are the church; we are the church together. And we are the church when we are inside this building, and we are the church when we are outside of this building. We are Bethlehem United Methodist Church, but we are each also part of the church universal – sometimes we call that The Big ‘C’ Church to distinguish it from a single congregation – The Little ‘c’ church.
If we are the church then the Pentecost story is our origin story.
Our origin story begins with the disciples who are waiting in Jerusalem just like Jesus told them. With no warning at all the room where they are waiting is filled with a sound – the kind of sound that feels like it’s swallowing you. The kind of sound that you can’t get away from. And then came the fire. Flames of fire in the shape of tongues hovered over the heads of each person in the room. And after that came the Spirit. The Spirit that filled each of them from the bottoms of their feet to the tops of their heads and spilled out…
In words.
Our origin story begins with words. Words that we are given so that we can share a message.
It makes perfect sense. The story of creation begins the same way. First the Spirit moves and then there are words. God says, Let there be light. And there is light. God says, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God makes the firmament and divides the waters.
The Spirit moves and then there are words, and those words create a world.
The first time it was a world where dogs and cats and oak trees and dandelions and bluebirds and you and me and everything else that has life could flourish.
On Pentecost the words create a world where all of creation is once again invited to flourish. A world where everyone can hear the good news of God’s love demonstrated in Jesus Christ in words that they can understand.
Sometimes the events of Pentecost get conflated with what the apostle Paul calls “speaking in tongues.” This is not that. When Paul talks about speaking in tongues he’s talking about a non-human language. But on the Day of Pentecost, everyone is able to understand what the disciples are saying. The disciples spoke in all the various languages of all the people who were in Jerusalem. And that was a lot of languages. Every people group that Michael read for us – from the Parthians in verse 9 all the way to the Arabs in verse 11 – every group spoke its own language.
And of all people in the known world, the Galileans were the least likely to be multilingual. Galilee was famously uncultured and uncultivated. And that makes the miracle even more – well – miraculous!
Sometimes the events of Pentecost are interpreted as a reversal of the events at Babel. Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? In Genesis 11 all the people of the world all spoke the same language, and they decided that they would build a city with a tower so tall that the top of it was in the sky. And God came down to see the city and said Yikes! If they accomplish this, there won’t be anything that they can’t accomplish. And so God mixed up all of their languages so that they couldn’t understand each other. But the events of Pentecost can’t be the reversal of the events at Babel. If the events of Pentecost were a reversal of the events at Babel then the result of Pentecost would be that everyone spoke the same language again. This is not that.
God gives power to the disciples at Pentecost so that they can share the stories of God’s mighty acts and the good news of Jesus Christ with everyone in their own language – in the way that they can understand. God’s purpose is not to make everyone the same, but to welcome everyone into God’s Kingdom in all of their variety and uniqueness – to say that there is a place for everyone in God’s Kingdom. You don’t have to be like me and I don’t have to be like you. There’s a place for everyone.
So what does our origin story tell us about the church? What does it tell us about us?
We are who we are – we are the church – only because of God’s holy initiative and out of God’s holy imagination. Under no other circumstances and by no other power would those first three thousand followers of Jesus create a community together. Only God could have imagined that. Only God could have done that. So if we ever get a notion that we as Bethlehem United Methodist Church can come up with a plan that is better than God’s plan or more creative than God’s plan, let this be a reminder that we absolutely can’t. And while it’s entirely possible that many of us would be friends and hang out socially if Bethlehem United Methodist Church never existed, I believe that our shared relationship with God makes these friendships deeper and more transformational than they ever could have been without our shared relationship with God.
We are who we are – we are in this place – only by God’s holy initiative and out of God’s holy imagination. Let’s remember that. This wasn’t our idea. And we couldn’t have made this happen. Only the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit could bring us together and only the Holy Spirit can continue to transform us
We are who we are because God reached out to us first. And that tells us a lot about how we’re supposed to reach out to others. At some point in our lives, God spoke to us in a language that we could understand – whether it was a Sunday School story told on a feltboard when we were children or a moment by a campfire when we first felt the peace of God, or a song that spoke particularly to us. God first reached out to us in a way that made sense to us.
Let me take you down a rabbit hole. Ron reminded us the other day that May 24, today, is what we in the United Methodist Church celebrate as Aldersgate Sunday. On this day in the year 1738 – almost 300 years ago – John Wesley, the Anglican priest who founded the Methodist movement even though he didn’t mean to – wrote this in his journal:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans.
Let me set the stage for you. John Wesley was terribly discouraged. At the ripe old age of 35, he had done everything he could think of to do – everything in his power – to be a holy person. More than anything in the world he wanted to know in his bones that God had saved him from sin.
And so, he went to a meeting – kind of like a Bible study – and the person who was leading the study was reading Martin Luther’s introduction to the book of Romans. I suppose that Romans is a good read – it’s not my favorite book of the Bible, but I can see how it might have been appealing to John Wesley. But have you ever read anything by Martin Luther, the German priest? Here’s what I believe. If God can use Martin Luther’s writings about Paul’s letter to the Romans to get through to someone, there is nothing that God cannot do. There is nothing that God won’t do to reach out to us and gather us in.
Wesley continues:
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Proof, friends, that God knows us better than we know ourselves, and will stop at nothing – not even Luther’s introduction to the Book of Romans – to draw us in and give us a family called the church.
And if God created the church – and continues to create the church – by finding people where they are and drawing them in, then that is our call as well. Our birthright, our heritage, is to be people who reach out and draw in. It’s in our spiritual DNA to find people – to meet them where they are – and offer the love and mercy of God through Jesus Christ. This means finding out what is important to them – their hopes, their fears, their anxieties, and what gives them joy – and welcoming all of who they are into this community where they can experience the welcome of God for themselves.
We are a people created from God’s imagination, and that imagination didn’t stop on the Day of Pentecost. God’s imagination continues to challenge us and shape us, and transform us. We are people with a message of love, hope, grace, and mercy, and we are equipped – we have the words – to share that message with everyone who needs it. And friends, there are so many people around us who need to hear it. Who need to hear that they are loved by God unconditionally. We have been entrusted with that message, friends. And by the Holy Spirit’s power we are driven into the world to share it. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit we offer ourselves. Amen.