Year C
Season of Easter
Pentecost Sunday
Acts 2:1-21
Read the Bible passage: Acts 2:1-21, The Message; or Acts 2:1-21, The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
Faith-provoking, historical insights into the lesson by David Ewart, Acts 2:1-21, Holy Textures.
Click here: George Hermanson's sermon, for an easy to print or email Adobe PDF version of this sermon.
The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
In our Acts passage we get the marching orders for the church. We may puzzle over the meaning of the coming of the Spirit. They did then. The watchers ask if the disciples were drunk.
It is called ecstatic speech. We have all some experience of this when we are so excited we cannot get out our words or they tumble over one another. Then there are times the moment of awe is so great we say nothing. There is nothing magical about this experience, and the writer of Acts uses colourful and metaphorical language to tell of a moment when the world changed.
We all have a moment or event in which our world changed. We heard or saw things in new ways, heard or saw things that we had never had before. Our world was changed, we were changed.