Sermon - Pentecost - John 14:23-31

When you’re going on vacation or you’re travelling, and you’re away from our congregation over a Sunday, how do you choose a church to go to? Now I hope that at a bare minimum you go to church when you travel, and that you’re not just taking a vacation from church. If you have a hard time finding a congregation to attend on your travels, let me know what town you’ll be in and I can help find you a church to attend.

Or if you were to move from here to another town, which congregation would you join? What would you look for in that church? I suppose a good start would be to find local LCMS congregations and just choose one of those; but that’s not a good enough guarantee unfortunately. So maybe you would choose the largest one with the most programs and events going on. Perhaps the one with the prettiest sanctuary or the biggest social hall. Or maybe the one where the pastor is good looking and only wears the trendiest clothes and speaks the hippest lingo. 

While all of those things are nice, I suppose, they don’t really matter in terms of choosing a church. In fact, all of those things mentioned are merely peripheral to what the church actually is. Lutherans since the time of the reformation have given a succinct definition of what the church is, saying: “The Church is the congregation of saints in which the Gospel is purely taught and the Sacraments are correctly administered.” 

When you’re looking for a church to join, the two vital things to look for is whether they are preaching pure doctrine and whether the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s institution. Those are the things that matter most to the church. Why are those things the most important things? Because the church doesn’t belong to us, it doesn’t belong to people, and it’s not for our entertainment. The church belongs to God since it has been founded by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit establishes the church, within the Word of God, for our comfort.

That’s what the day of Pentecost is about, it’s a day on which we commemorate the founding of the church by the comforter, the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit did in fact establish the church, this is what we confess in the creed, saying “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints…” It is the work of the Holy Spirit to establish the church. Jesus Himself promises that this will take place when He tells His apostles “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

Then on the day of Pentecost, the 50th day of Easter, when the apostles were gathered together in one place, “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” There the Holy Spirit established the Christian church on earth. 

How is it that the Holy Spirit established the church? No, it’s not upon the apostle Peter that the church was built. The church is built upon the confession of St. Peter, the church is built upon the solid rock of the Word of God. It’s not the apostles who were special, it’s the unadulterated Word of God that they were given to proclaim which is special and significant. 

Before the Holy Spirit spoke the Word through them, all peoples across the earth were scattered at the tower of Babel. “And the Lord said:... “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.” The people of Babel desired to build a church on earth for themselves, a city in the heavens, founded upon their hard work. So the Lord put a stop to this abomination and prevented the people from forming their own church by scattering them with many words.

At Pentecost the Lord reversed this by forming the church upon Christ, the Word made flesh. This Word was placed upon the tongues of the Apostles and united all languages to one common tongue: the Gospel. Thus sanctifying all languages as holy and worthy in the sight of God. “And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?... we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” 

 This Word of God unites all different peoples and nationalities into one Holy catholic and apostolic church. Yes, that’s right, I said we are part of the church catholic. The word catholic doesn’t just mean the Christian denomination known as Roman Catholicism. It means the whole Christian church as it confesses the wholeness of Christian doctrine. So when we confess the Christian faith as written in the creeds, we’re declaring our solidarity and unity with the whole Christian church throughout all generations. We belong to the church catholic which has existed for millenia.

This church catholic exists not only on earth, but it spans across time and space, it exists both on earth as it is in heaven. The Word of God unites us together with the church in heaven so that we are one church. “But you have come to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”

When we gather together around the pure proclamation of the Gospel and the properly administered sacraments, it’s not just you and Jesus. It’s not even just you and the other people sitting in the pews. But it’s all the saints in heaven, the angels and archangels, and God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Here the Spirit gathers us all together in the Word of God.

This means that there’s no room here for hatred and malice towards one another. We are the church catholic and even with our exterior differences we are made one in the Word of God. Together, though we are different, we’re all one body in Christ Jesus. His blood atones for all of our sins equally and in His death and resurrection equalizes us all, no matter the barriers of language or time, age or ethnicity, race or sex. So let us treat one another as fellow Christians, redeemed by the death of Jesus, founded upon His Word of comfort. Put aside your enmity and strife, whether it’s based upon race, sex, age, or language, because in Christ it does not befit you as the holy people you are.

Furthermore, what unites us as Christians isn’t those exterior similarities, but it’s our commonality in the pure Gospel. That which unites the church isn’t just saying we have unity, but it means having unity in the sameness of our teachings. The only way that we can have unity in our teaching, in our doctrine, is by God’s Word being purely proclaimed.

When Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, He made the Apostles able to remember and teach all that He spoke to them. The Word which they proclaimed and has been recorded in the Holy Scriptures is the very Word of God. You can know and believe this with certainty that when you read the Bible you are reading the Word of God. The teachings in the Bible, which are Jesus’ teachings, are what unites us as the church. Because Jesus is the Word made flesh, when we proclaim the pure Gospel, we are proclaiming the pure Jesus. Pure doctrine matters because pure Jesus matters. If all we have is the teachings of man, then we have no Jesus and we have no church.

All of this is given to you for your comfort. Jesus gives this to us as He says “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” The peace and unity that the church has is found only in the pure doctrine of Jesus Christ who atoned for our sins by His death on the cross. This is not worldly peace, but it’s God’s peace. 

This pure doctrine can give you peace because in it you need not doubt your Savior. As you sit here today, you can be at peace knowing that Jesus has died for you and will bring you to heaven. You know this for certain because it’s revealed in the clear Word of God. You belong to the church catholic where you already dwell with all the saints and angels of Heaven. At this altar, we are gathered together with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven. 

This is the church catholic, formed not by sinful wretched man, but formed by the Holy Spirit with the power of the Word. Here is the place where Christ delivers to you, His church, His pure saving doctrine which gives you peace. Here His Word is proclaimed from the reading of the scriptures, from our tongues in the liturgy and hymns, and His word is made manifest in His body and blood at the sacrament of the altar. Here the Gospel is proclaimed to calm your troubled hearts that have been abandoned and hurt by the sins of man. 

So when you look for a church to call home for either one Sunday or many, don’t be attracted by the world’s peace and success. But look for the peace which only Christ can impart, find a church where the pure doctrine, the pure gospel of Jesus, is preached without error. Find a church where babies are baptized for their salvation just as Jesus commands. Find a church where the sacrament of the altar is given the highest priority each Sunday wherein your soul may be nourished with the lifeblood of Christ. When you find a church like that, you’ll have found the church catholic, and whether you’re near or far together we’ll worship as one in this heaven on earth.