Calvin Synod Herald, 2016 (117. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2016-05-01 / 5-6. szám

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CALVIN SYNOD HERALD

comfort, lead and empower his disciples following his return to the Father - to Luke’s description of how our Lord’s promise came to be fulfilled in the lives of his disciples.

Too often, as we read these lessons from Scripture, we read them as history, as something that took place thousands of years ago. And in fact, Christ’s life, death and resurrection was a life lived in history, which can be historically dated, an event upon which we look back in time and remember as unique.

But the gift of the Holy Spirit is not an event that can be relegated to the annuls of history. According to one of the commentaries that I read on the significance of this day, it stated, "Pentecost is a festival of the Gospel, but the giving of the Holy Spirit is not confined to one time, one place, or one group of people. God continues to pour out his Spirit upon believers in and through the word and the sacraments, and sometimes in ways that are stranger than the story that Luke relates in the second chapter of the Book of Acts."

How true this is! The fact that the church has been empowered to proclaim the message of God’s redemption and saving grace in Christ’s death and resurrection ever since Peter’s first sermon, is witness to the ongoing presence of God’s Spirit still at work among us.

In fact, every Sunday morning our pastors stand in the pulpit and give their testimony to the power of God’s Spirit. I personally after forty-five years of ordained ministry, I am still amazed that I am standing in a pulpit still nervous, still preparing making sure that it is not my wisdom but the Word of God through His Spirit will out of my mouth.

Even when I think back upon the last forty-five years, 1 can only credit the power of God’s Spirit for seeing me through some difficult times, and for helping me to grow, not only as a pastor, but also through the grace of God, to accept his forgiveness and to grow in faith. As I have continued to experience God’s Spirit at work in my life, I cannot say that the day I was ordained provided me with some magical confirmation of divine gifts, as it was the beginning of a journey in which God’s Spirit would lead me and mold me to become a pastor. And that process, I pray, is still ongoing. And over these past years, I have also witnessed how the power of God’s Spirit has touched the lives of many persons through the sacraments. How many times persons have expressed to me how they had come to experience a sense of peace and a realization of our Lord’s presence in their life, after receiving communion - especially when they were facing surgery or some difficult situation in life.

1 don’t believe that it is something magical about a piece of bread and a sip of wine that conveys this calming peace of God, but the power of God’s Spirit that brings to reality the promise of our crucified and risen Lord to be present to us through this meal. It is the Spirit that opens our hearts to embrace God’s grace in the sacraments.

And finally, I honestly believe that God’s Spirit has been poured out to all of the children I had the privilege of baptizing, at which time God embraced them as His own, redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Again, I don’t believe that there is anything magical about the water that wi 11 be poured over her head that accomplishes this gift of God’s Spirit, but with the water, accompanied by the word and promise of our risen Lord, God’s Spirit embraces all of us as He unites us in the family of Christ’s church.

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JESUS'S ASCENSION

The Ascension of the Lord happened on a Thursday, the 40th days after His resurrection.

If you will read the entire gospel of Matthew, you will discover that there is no direct reference to the ascension of our Lord. The same is true for John’s gospel. The book of Mark condenses this event into only one verse, and if you consult the commentaries, they will tell you that this verses may have been added at a later time.

Luke’s gospel, in very general terms, relates this final event in the life of our Lord in one verse. Some may conclude that for some reason the ascension was not considered essential to the purposes which compelled the gospel writers to record their accounts of the life and ministry of the Master. One must ask the obvious question, “Why?” “Why do none of the gospel accounts make much of the ascension of Jesus Christ?”

Let us try to identify some of the reasons for this lack of emphasis on the ascension in the gospels. While these reasons are largely inferential, they do help us to see this matter through the eyes of the gospel writers.

First and foremost, the purpose of the gospels is revealed in their title, ‘the gospel.’ That is, the authors of the gospels set out to present the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. Technically speaking, the salvation was procured by the death of Christ and proved by the resurrection. The ascension did not directly contribute to the work of the cross in such a way as to be instrumental in achieving the salvation of men. In the light of the writers’ purpose to portray the good news of salvation, any part of Christ’s life and ministry which does not directly relate to their purpose would pale in the shadow of the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord. It is not that the ascension of Christ is unimportant, then, but that it is largely irrelevant to the purpose of the gospel accounts.

Second, the ascension of Christ was not a favorite topic for those who were so intimately involved with Him. As John put it, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our-