Preparing for Worship - June 5, 2022

This Sunday is the Day of Pentecost. Pentecost means “fiftieth” - the fiftieth day after the Jewish Passover. It was also known as the “Feast of Weeks” and the end of the grain harvest that followed Passover. Jewish pilgrims from all over the world returned to Jerusalem for this time of thanksgiving to God for His goodness in His creation. For Christians, it was about 50 days after Easter - a perfect time for the Holy Spirit to come with power to work through the early Christians to share the Good News of Jesus, the Risen Savior, with the many Jews gathered there.

It was a reversal of what had happened in the Old Testament Lesson, Genesis 11:1-9. Sin was clearly still in the generations of people after the Great Flood. God told them to scatter and fill the earth (Genesis 9:1), but they wanted to stick together and make a name for themselves and build a great tower to reach up to God, as if they were gods themselves, doing what they wanted to do. Instead, God confused them and their one language into many and caused them to scatter all over the earth, divided from one another.

Psalm 143 is the psalm for this Sunday and is one of the penitential psalms. David knows that he, too, is a sinner, like everyone else, and confesses to God, “No one living is righteous before You.” He prays that God will not judge him, as he deserves, but give him steadfast love. He thirsts for God’s mercy and for God’s good Spirit to lead and guide him. He feels that his own spirit is failing, yet he still says to God, “In You I trust” and knows that God can forgive him and bring him out of his troubles.

In the Gospel lesson, John 14:23-31, we hear Jesus speaking of the importance of hearing and trusting the Word of God. He will be leaving and returning to His Father (at His ascension into heaven), but He and the Father will send the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
who will “bring to remembrance all that He had taught them” and teach them even more. It is through the Holy Spirit that they were able to preach and teach so powerfully at Pentecost and afterwards and could write exactly what God wanted in the Holy Scriptures, so that even today we can believe the truth of God’s Word and have peace in Christ, even with all the troubles of this world.

The Epistle Lesson, from Acts 2:1-21, describes the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, with wind and fire, and enabling the believers suddenly to “speak in tongues,” in languages that they had never known before, in order to communicate the message of the Risen Lord and Savior Jesus to many people that day. This was in fulfillment of a prophecy from Joel, in the Old Testament, so that many “could call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.” The joy was not in the diversity of the people from many nations, but in the unity they found in faith in Jesus and in baptism through the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God (see verses 36-41, after our text).