This time of year barely a week goes by without some sort of celebration.  Next week is Memorial Weekend, we’ve just had Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day is not far off, neither is Graduation.  It’s a lucrative time for Hallmark.  Let me tell you how lucrative.  Americans purchase seven billion greeting cards each year, and the average household buys 30 cards.  The average person receives more than 20 per year, about one-third of which are birthday cards.  There are about 100,000 shops around the country selling greeting cards, and 50 percent of all first class mail consists of greeting cards. 

But I wonder if anyone has received, yet, a card celebrating Tuesday of next week.  Because Tuesday of next week is ‘Hug your cat day’.  Next Monday is 'Quit Facebook Day' (seems like a great festival to me).  Have you ever received a card marking ‘Appreciate a Dragon Day’ on 1/16?  Or 'Pig Day' on 3/1, or 'Reptile Awareness Day' on 10/20, or 'Hobbit Day' on 9/22, or 'National Mustard Day' on 8/4, or 'Don’t step on a bee Day' on 7/10, 'National chocolate-covered anything Day' on 12/16; or, my favourite festival, 'What if cats and dogs had opposable thumbs Day' which, I’m sure you all know is 3/3. 

Well, how about Pentecost?  Has anyone here ever received a Pentecost card?  No?  Well, why not?  Pentecost is, after all, the birthday of the Christian Church.  Shouldn’t we give a birthday card to the Church?  Well, like all births, the day on which the Christian Church started life was amazing.  Imagine it.  Let’s say you're a religious person living at that time.  You believe in the God of the Old Testament, you worship him regularly; you try to do the right thing by him, although you were not born Jewish.  And, as is your custom, you have come to the city of God (Jerusalem) for the harvest festival - you call it Pentecost.  And you’ve come to worship at the Temple, to thank God for the harvest and to offer him the produce of your land.  Just like you do every year.

But this year something extraordinary happens.  Something almost unbelievable - weird beyond your understanding.  There you are an Egyptian in Jerusalem, and you hear this strange sound like a storm brewing - it sounds like a great wind blowing through the city, and yet it’s not the weather, there isn’t actually a wind - just the sound of one.  So you rush out of the place where you’re staying to see what’s going on, and you hurry into a large open area in the middle of the city - and hundreds of other visitors to the harvest festival do the same.  But that’s just he beginning of weird phenomena.  In the square there are a handful of locals - eleven Palestinian Jews preaching loudly about what God has done.  Well, nothing very remarkable about that - except that among this gaggle of noise you hear one of these Palestinians calling out in your language - in Egyptian. 

And the other ten are proclaiming God’s love in other foreign languages - even though they are simple locals and not great linguists.  And your fellow pilgrims who have made the journey to Jerusalem from their homelands - they too hear these Israelites calling out in their own languages.  What’s going on?  How come these Galileans are speaking languages they couldn’t possibly have learned?  This is too weird.  Some of those watching this are bit more cynical.  They’re drunk, they say.  But that can’t be right.  It’s only 9am.

And then the leader of these eleven men stands up and explains what’s happening.  He says “look, this is the work of God.  This is the Holy Spirit.  The same Holy Spirit that God promised us hundreds of years ago through his prophets.  These people are full of God, and God is just being God - he is not a tame pet or a safe, cuddly teddy bear.  God is a supernatural being - he does things that human beings can’t understand, he moves in ways that baffle us, he causes things to happen that we can’t get our heads around.”  That, in effect, is what Peter says in this first Christian sermon ever to be preached.  It actually converts 3000 listeners, which is guaranteed to make any preacher today feel pretty small.

So that is one vision of the Holy Spirit - unpredictable, confusing, disconcerting.  But if that’s all there is to the Holy Spirit then this is all a bit scary.  Thankfully, though, that isn’t all there is.  And here’s where the gospel reading comes in.  John 14.  The scene is the Last Supper, and Jesus is having a conversation with those same eleven men who a few works later were speaking in foreign languages.  And among other things he tells them that he is going away - back into glory to be with his Father.  It’s not bad news, however.  Sure, the disciples will miss him, but God will not leave them all alone without help.  He will send them another helper, a comforter, an advocate - the Holy Spirit.  He will come and live with them, and live inside them to encourage, advise, and strengthen.  This Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force, but someone intimate - a companion and friend.  There for you, in you, in the good times and the bad.  Jesus was limited by a human body, the Holy Spirit is unlimited.  He can fill up our hearts, give us a future of peace and joy, and give us courage and strength to go through life living faithfully as a Christian.  That was the substance of Jesus’ conversation.

It’s now the time in this sermon when I make an embarrassing confession to you, confirming the fact, as if you didn’t know it already, that I am pretty hopeless when it comes to anything practical, like DIY, or, in this case, car mechanics.  A couple of months ago I tried to start my car.  You know how I try not to drive unless I absolutely have to.  Well, it had been around 4-5 days since I’d driven, and I turned the key only to get that noise that sounds like a cat bringing up a hairball.  I tried again, this time it made no noise at all.  Now, I’m not SO hopeless at car mechanics that I can’t diagnose a dead battery.  So, ‘dead battery’, I thought.  Next I asked myself, ‘who has jumper cables?’  ‘Dave’, came the answer.  So I called Dave, and within half an hour my battery was working nicely, and I drove to the Amish discount store, because it’s five miles and that would surely be far enough to get the battery fully charged.  So I got to the store, and without giving it any thought at all I turned off the engine and went in.  Well, I bought a few items and came back out, got into the car, put the key in the ignition, turned it … and got the cat throwing up sound again.  So I thought.  ‘Oh dear.’  I wondered what to do.  I reckoned I couldn’t call Dave again, because I just feel too bad wasting all his time and gas to be my personal pit crew for the day. 

So, I did what I was trying not to do in the first place, and that was call AAA.  The person who answered the phone reminded me why I was trying not to call them.  After I’d given her all the details of the car, and telling her I was parked outside a grocery store she very unhelpfully said, ‘at least you can go shopping’!   So one hour later the repair truck came and started the engine.  And I thought, ‘this can’t just be the battery, because five miles is quite far enough to charge it’.  And the AAA repair guy agreed with me.  So I took it straight to the auto shop in town, went in, leaving the engine on (!) and explained to the mechanic what was going on.  He replied that I should go for a nice long drive because it probably was the battery.  So, I drove around town, came to church did a few things in the office – leaving the engine on all the time, and then after about 20 minutes drove back to the mechanic’s shop and sat outside in the car, engine still running, deciding whether I was brave enough to turn it off.  I’m here to tell you that this improved my prayer life amazingly.  I prayed in the name of the Holy Trinity for about five minutes, beseeching the whole company of heaven to join me in deep and heartfelt intercession.  I never invoke the saints when I pray, but this time I thought I should.  I reckoned there must be a patron saint of car batteries who could lend a hand just this once.  So I turned it off.  Prayed some more.  And turned the key again.  Brrrrrm.  Now the sick cat roared with health.  And I drove off rejoicing in the goodness of God.

It was all about the battery.  Nice car, powerful engine, beautiful design, a tank full of gas, experienced driver, spotless driving record, fully paid up insurance; but without a fully charged battery I wasn’t driving anywhere.  The Eleven Apostles.  Sound doctrine, strong faith in God, good prayer life, fine fellowship, but no life.  Everything was in its place, except the power they needed to live the life of God.  That changed on the Day of Pentecost.  And the same is true of us.  You see, we cannot live the life God calls us to in our own strength.  We can try very hard to life right by God, carry out the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, grit our teeth and pray really hard for long periods of time.  But without the Holy Spirit filling us up and giving us the supernatural power to follow Christ, we are just not going to go anywhere in our spiritual lives.

Paul several times in his letters says “be filled with the Holy Spirit” - open yourselves to God, and like an empty balloon allow him to breathe into you and fill you up with himself.  And when we do we experience the same Spirit we’ve been reading about.  When a Christian is full of the Holy Spirit she experiences God in new ways - God becomes not just a theory, but a friend, the intimate companion that Jesus mentioned - the guide, counsellor, adviser, comforter.

So what do we open ourselves up to when we open ourselves to God the Holy Spirit?  Well, the two things we’ve been talking about.

First, his power, his holiness, his supernaturalness.  We won’t be blasé about God or treat him like a hobby or errand boy.  We will know him to be almighty.  We will feel the pinprick of guilt when we go wrong - that’s the work of the Holy Spirit leading us back to God.  We will not think we have God all sewn up and sorted.  We will feel inadequacy at times, we will be made aware of our limited minds, we’ll submit to his ways even though we don’t understand them sometimes.

But second, we will experience his warmth, his intimacy, his companionship.  Do you know what it’s like to know that God is inside you - with you wherever you go, to guide, comfort, encourage, give strength.  Because it’s possible.  A life free from problems, pain and hassles is NOT possible.  But a life of peace in the middle of it is - because we can be filled up with our intimate and loving God.

Let me finish with an extraordinary true story I read the other day.  Dr Oliver Sacks works with patients with Tourette's Syndrome.  This is a bizarre mental disorder which causes sufferers to have physical and verbal tics.  Some patients have constant facial twitches; others find themselves uncontrollably saying or shouting things, often with embarrassing consequences.  One patient whom Dr. Sacks was treating was given to compulsive bowing towards the ground, inappropriate shouting, and also an obsessive fiddling with his glasses.  Yet this man was a skilled surgeon!  Somehow and for some unknown reason, when he puts on his scrubs and enters the operating room, all of his tics disappear for the duration of the surgery.  He loses himself in his role and the symptoms of his condition stop.  Then when the surgery is finished, he returns to his odd behaviour.  In a similar way when we are filled with the Holy Spirit we in a way lose ourselves.  We become absorbed in God, or rather God becomes absorbed in us and changes us.  He takes way the quirky things and turns us more into his perfect Son.  May he fill us afresh this Pentecost Day and empower us to live more fully of him.