Whenever I hear the Pentecost story, as we did last Sunday, the word of the Lord always leaves me wondering: What happens next?
After the flames disappear, after the smoke clears, after tongues return to their native languages, what happens then? Now that God’s Holy Spirit has swooped in to dwell fully with all God’s people, what difference does that make?!
The duty of explaining God’s outpouring of the Spirit falls upon the broad shoulders of the apostle Peter, who – with full throat – minces no words in explaining the Pentecost drama and unpacking the spiritual mystery of who’s who and what’s what. As it turns out, the Holy Spirit of God in Christ blessedly comes to focus all the attention of all our flesh upon Jesus.
The Spirit points us toward Jesus! As Peter describes him to the nattering skeptics of Pentecost, the One who – with the help of lawless Gentiles – you nailed to a cross. The One whom you killed. But also the One whom God released from the horrors of death. The One whom God raised back to life. The One on whom death could not keep its grip. (Acts 2:23-24)
“Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God,” Peter’s voice thunders. “Each of you must be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,” Peter’s words boom. “Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38) And thus it happens, and that is where we now turn in chapter two of the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles.
So those who welcomed Peter’s message were baptized, and that day about 3,000 thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts 2:41-47 NRSV)
Some pretty great things apparently do happen when God mixes with us, and here’s what happens next. With God’s Spirit now dwelling within our hearts, God’s Spirit points our hearts toward Jesus. And when the Spirit points your heart toward Jesus, what you see with your eyes will be awe-inspiring: “many wonders and signs,” much listening and learning, the lavish hospitality of bread and prayer.
Maybe that’s because, when the Spirit points your heart toward Jesus, your heart so also is turned toward the Cross of Jesus. And its simple shape – vertical beam intersecting with the horizonal – sketches the faithful model for living together in grace-filled relationship with God and with one another.
Imagine the vertical beam expressing God’s relationship with us and our relationship with God: one end anchored in dirt, the other reaching for the sky, seeming to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. In the vertical, God of heaven reaches out in desire for closeness with all of God’s earthly Creation, divine intimacy made possible throughout all our days by the Cross of Jesus.
Imagine, then, the horizontal beam – the old, rugged wood to which was pinned the outstretched arms of Jesus, in wide-open embrace of God’s desires. The horizontal beam – expression of the love, compassion, grace, and mercy that we receive from God and extend horizontally across communities; expressions of love, compassion, grace, and mercy spreading to blanket the very ends of the earth.
The four dimensions of the Cross: vertically, God to us, us to God; horizontally, the Spirit of God within us toward friend, neighbor, and stranger.
When the Spirit points us toward Jesus and his Cross, the Spirit invites our enjoyment of the Cross’s symmetry and balance, our discovery of stabilization in vertical and horizontal, our lives individually and in community making the sign of the Cross. Jesus tells his disciples,
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16:24-26 NRSV)
Indeed, what will we give up in return for our life? Or maybe a better question for these our confounding times of great profit and loss: What’s gone so horribly wrong?
Last week, I stumbled across morsels of answer in thoughts from the novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry. Writing in 1970 from his rural Kentucky home, Mr. Berry reflects on the sorry state of Christianity in the slave-owning South of centuries past. He writes:
“First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own?
“To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder.”
And so it goes: the master hardens his heart to the plight of the slave by fundamentally rejecting the idea that his vertical faith in God – his vertical relationship with God – carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice and love kindness, to care for the oppressed and vulnerable.
So long as the vertical relationship between you and God is secure, the horizontal relationship between God’s people plays second fiddle – to the extent that it even mattered at all. The control-knobs are way out of whack: Too much vertical hold, not enough horizontal hold.
Why matter about the life of a fleeting slave when eternity is at stake?
To be fair, so also does the picture of holy relationship scramble when the hold is too much horizontal and too little vertical – when our stewardship of time, talent, and treasure becomes all about me, us, and ourselves, at the expense of responding faithfully to the vertical beam of peace and grace that binds earth and heaven. Forgetfulness of that up-down, divine-human connection – ignorance of its expectations and obligations – is perhaps what transforms peaceful resistance into full-blown riot.
Thanks be to God, when the Spirit points your heart toward Jesus, your heart so also is turned toward the Cross of Jesus, toward that hallowed crisscrossing of vertical and horizontal, toward that sweet spot at the center of the Cross where once beat the very heart of Jesus – the same sacred heart that now paces your living, moving, and being, by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon and within.
The Spirit comes to point us toward Jesus and his Cross; lyrics from my childhood stir hope for reconciliation and renewal:
Great things happen when God mixes with us
Great and beautiful, wonderful things,
Great things happen when God mixes with us.
Some find life, some find peace; some people also find joy.
Some see things as they never could before
And some people find that they can now begin to trust.
Great things happen when God mixes with us.
Some find health, some find hope; some people even find joy.
Some see themselves as they never could before
And some people find that they can now begin to live.
Great things happen when God mixes with us.
Some find peace, some are disturbed; some people even find joy.
Some see their lives as they never could before
And some people find that they must now begin to change.
Great things happen when God mixes with us.
Great and beautiful, wonderful things,
Great things happen when God mixes with us.
Ancient words, ever true. Let us pray –
Surprise us, O God. Speak your word; startle us with your truth. Re-open our hearts and minds to your wondrous love. Silence within, any voice but your own. By the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ our Lord, keep our souls focused on you – and on the Cross, on the heart of Jesus.
Amen, and amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, June 15, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Wendell Berry, David French, and Dale Heinold inform the message.