Day of Pentecost
Texts: John 20:19-23;
Acts 2:1-21; 1 Cor 12:3b-13
YouTube: https://youtu.be/3xBqAyHRfcM
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
GOING FULL PENTECOST, PART 1
This weekend is a holiday weekend in our nation, of course. But I hope you don’t mind that we here in church are going full Pentecost. Pentecost is the third of the highest holy days in our Church Year, along with Christmas and Easter; it’s also the least known. This morning I want to do a short study about Pentecost itself and why it is so important. I’d like for us to appreciate that Pentecost is not only way more important than Memorial Day, but it’s also arguably more important than Christmas and Easter. Yes, we’re going full Pentecost this morning!
Pentecost has lost a lot of importance, I believe, because of the shift away from the actual story the Bible tells us. This Easter season we’ve been talking about N.T. Wright’s new book, titled God’s Homecoming.1 Bishop Wright (he’s served as a Bishop in the Anglican church) is considered one of the groundbreaking biblical scholars of our time. He’s had a great influence on my own faith journey. I don’t agree with him on everything — in fact, I have some important disagreements with him on some things. But I do agree with him on the theme of his latest book that modern-day Christians have come to get the main story of the Bible wrong.
The Bible as a whole is about God’s homecoming. About how sin has distanced us from our Creator God so that God’s presence in the world has become dimmed to us. But also how God has promised to come home to the earth which God has created, in order to set things right and eventually bring it to fulness, to bring it to completion. Yes, God is in heaven, but the biblical story is about God’s plans and promise to come home to the earth in such a way that the power and justice of heaven fill the earth. It’s exactly what we prayer for in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we are praying for God’s homecoming to advance further!
Yet, as Bishop Wright acknowledges, Christians over the past two thousand years have somehow turned this around. We’ve gotten it exactly backwards. Instead of the whole point of the Bible’s story being about God coming home to earth, we’ve made it center on human beings going to be home with God in heaven. We’ve made it about going to heaven after we did. We’ve taken a story about this earth, this creation, this world, and turned it into a story whose ending is about going to a heaven which is not really a part of this world. We’ve taken the Bible’s very this-worldly story and made it into an other-worldly story. A grave error, by the way, which has very real-world consequences. Like the move to the deadly authoritarianism we see in our world right now. If we get the story right, I think we stand in opposition to that authoritarianism.
But don’t worry! We’re going full Pentecost this morning so that we get our story straight! We’re going to retell the story like Bishop Wright does in his book, so that we see our proper place in it as Pentecost people, people of the spirit. The first thing to get right is that heaven is not an other-worldly place as we’ve come to think about it. In the Bible, right from the very beginning, the heavens are a part of God’s creation. God created “the heavens and the earth,” we read in Genesis 1. We also read in the Bible’s last book, at the very end, of God’s promise to create the heavens and the earth anew — to finally bring them to fullness, in other words. And the vision is not of us going up to heaven but of heaven, the New Jerusalem, coming down to earth (Rev 21:1-3).
God resides in the heavens, and because of sin, not in the same way does God reside on earth — for the time being. Heaven is kind of the White House, or the CEO’s office, from where the creator resides and oversees the Creation. So the Bible tells us of a time before sin when God walked the earth frequently — with the first man and woman (Gen 2). And the rest of the Hebrew scriptures, the “Old Testament,” tells the story of how God has promised to someday walk the earth again in a way in which God’s brand of power and justice will set things right and bring creation to fullness. God will come home to earth and fill the earth with God’s life-giving presence.
The first several chapters of Bishop Wright’s book make clear that this is what the Old Testament is about, namely, God’s homecoming. The Hebrew scriptures are clearly very this-worldly. Not even modern Christians, who get the Bible’s overall story backwards, challenge this much. Our mistake involves reading the New Testament as a break from the this-worldly orientation of the Old Testament. We’ve come to mistakenly interpret Jesus as making a break from the basic Old Testament story and turning it into the opposite, a story about us going home to heaven when we die. ‘Yes, the Old Testament is a this-worldly story,’ we modern Christians say, ‘but Jesus has come to help us get the story straight, to understand it as about going to heaven when we die.’
“No, no, no!” says Bishop Wright. Jesus and the apostles are all very Jewish and in good standing. They had the story right. Yes, they did come to offer some subtle changes to the Hebrew understanding of their story. But not to reverse its direction! From God’s homecoming to our homecoming. No, the New Testament story of Jesus is precisely that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who comes to launch God’s homecoming project. He comes to fulfill the story, not change it. Jesus comes to begin the story of fulfilling God’s promise to come home to earth with God’s brand of power and justice. The next several chapters in Wright’s book detail how to read the Christian portion of the Bible’s story as Jesus fulfilling the promise of God’s homecoming.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the detail of how Bishop Wright is guiding us to read the Bible’s story in the right direction. I will plan to return to this theme and mention the details along the way for our Sunday-to-Sunday journey through the Bible. This morning let me end by simply giving our three major church festivals a fresh reading in the context of the Bible’s overall story of God’s homecoming, especially from the perspective of John’s Gospel.2
Christmas. Matthew and Luke give us stories of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem which we treasure and celebrate each Christmas. John gives us something a little different, a more abstract version of Christmas as the Incarnation, the Word of God — the Word-God who created everything, who created all life — that Word made flesh, dwelling in our midst. In other words, the first phase of God’s coming home to earth is to actually take on human form in Jesus. God comes to dwell with us on earth. The Incarnation is why we’ve come to see Jesus not just as another human being but as the creating Word made flesh. God begins God’s homecoming by walking on this earth for a while as a person.
Do you see why it’s so important to interpret Christmas in terms of the larger story of God coming home to earth? Because it begins with God actually walking the earth as a human being, showing us the proper and most complete way of being human. Jesus is what God’s power and justice look like when lived here on earth. God’s homecoming had to begin with this.
Good Friday to Easter. Why did God need to show us God’s power and justice lived out in a human life? Because that’s the part which we human beings are most inclined to get wrong. We tend to think of God’s power and justice looking like the best version of our kings, our human leaders. Our kings and emperors themselves sure tell it that way. And we have tended to believe them. Even though the Jewish prophets tried to warn us, over and over again that that might not be a good idea. God is a Good Shepherd who shepherds very differently than the ones we currently have.
Well, Jesus living God’s power and justice on earth is a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy in the sense of showing us how wrong we typically are about God’s power and justice. It looks more like the opposite of power and justice in the human world. So much so that, instead of being the one who crucifies the so-called evil people, Jesus lets himself be crucified as an evil person. He’s not, of course, as God confirms on Easter. That’s how wrong we typically are about what God’s power and justice look like. We see our human kings and emperors, and they tell us that God’s power and justice looks like them executing and killing all the bad people. Looks like their power to divide and conquer. John’s Gospel brings this out most clearly in Jesus confrontation before Pontius Pilat on Good Friday. In the cross and resurrection we see God’s true power, the power of love, and God’s true justice, the healing of our divisions. We see God’s power and justice submitting to our power and justice so that we might learn God’s way of loving service and healing forgiveness.
Now, Easter also comes with the wonderful promise that death has been defeated in the cross and resurrection of Messiah Jesus. Death will someday be defeated for all of us. So we can count on us being held in God’s power of life when we die, God and Jesus who currently reside mostly in heaven. But that being held in God’s power of life when we die is by no means the end, or the point, of the story. Which finally brings us to . . .
Pentecost. Pentecost is arguably the most important Christian feast day because it celebrates the phase of God’s homecoming story in which we currently dwell. God Incarnate walked this earth for a while to show us what God’s power and justice truly look like in the human world — and that they are so different from human authoritarian power and justice that they look like the cross and resurrection. But God’s power and Justice are also so different than ours such that God doesn’t hang around here on earth like an emperor to rule over us like human emperors. Instead, Jesus ascends to God’s throne, or CEO office, and God sends the spirit to for the next phase of God’s homecoming. It’s the phase where Jesus, the head of the body resides in heaven, and we are the Body of Messiah Jesus here on earth. Since God is not like our authoritarian leaders, God’s rule includes us, calls on us, in order to help carry it forward. God pours out the spirit of love and healing forgiveness on us.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus prepares his disciples for this next phase, the sending of the spirit, in his lengthy Farewell Address to them at the Last Supper. He knows that they will be in a place of terrible sadness and fear, as we see them at the beginning of today’s Gospel Reading. He knows that we are often in those places of sadness and fear. And so Jesus prepares them on Holy Thursday for that place they will be in on Easter evening. It is good that he goes away, he tells them, so that the spirit can come and be poured on us, to make us alive us again, and to take us out of those dark and fearful places so that we might do even greater works than he. Because he is going to the Father. Jesus ascends to heaven precisely so that God might send the spirit to fill us with God’s presence so that we become part of God’s homecoming story. An integral part. I might even say a necessary part.
Because here’s the thing: we fail to do our part if we have the story wrong. We must get the story right so that we can go full Pentecost and live what God’s power of love and healing justice look like in the world. We must fulfill our role as witnesses. Or the wrong story takes over, like Christian Nationalism right now threatens to take over. It is imperative that we get the story right, or we fail our baptismal calling.
How do we get back on track with the right story? This morning is the beginning of giving that answer, with the importance of going full Pentecost. But the complementary conclusion to the Pentecost phase of God’s homecoming story is the story of how God becomes known as the Trinity. Next Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Next Sunday we’re “Going Full Pentecost, Part 2.” Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, May 24, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/3xBqAyHRfcM
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
Notes
1. N.T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025).
2. Instead of the usual format of “Sermon Take-Home Notes,” I offer today only the Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright, from God’s Homecoming pages 129-43, with the section on “The Work of the Spirit in John” covering much of what follows.
