The Age of the Spirit
the Age of the Spirit
May 24, 2026
Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf
A Pentecost sermon related to Acts 2:1-8, 11b -17a
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That the emerging longing of faith is for an experience of God, the Holy Spirit.
When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.
5-11 There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound, they came on the run. Then when they heard, one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were blown away. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans? How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues?
“They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!”
12 Their heads were spinning; they couldn’t make head or tail of any of it. They talked back and forth, confused: “What’s going on here?”
13 Others joked, “They’re drunk on cheap wine.”
14-21 That’s when Peter stood up and, backed by the other eleven, spoke out with bold urgency: “Fellow Jews, all of you who are visiting Jerusalem, listen carefully and get this story straight. These people aren’t drunk as some of you suspect. They haven’t had time to get drunk—it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. This is what the prophet Joel announced would happen:
“In the Last Days,” God says,
“I will pour out my Spirit
on every kind of people.”
These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.
Close your eyes and recall if you will a peak moment in your life of inspiration and uplift. Perhaps it was a beautiful natural scene or a moment of birth or a reunion or even a realization or transformation. Remember it with your senses; colors, textures, smells. Call it back, feel it in the body, and enjoy it for a moment.
Bringing that kind of bodily, sensory, enlivening energy back into our consciousness is one way to begin to sense what Pentecost is about. Chapter 2 in the Book of Acts talks about a Holy wind, an energy like a wildfire that rushed through those gathered and allowed them to speak in languages that they would not have known, allowed them to speak about the power of God so that others could understand. There was a quickening, an aliveness, an immediacy of that energy. People felt it. People sensed it. They could experience its effects for themselves.
That sacred energy had an effect of drawing people together and communicating the Divine in a compelling and experiential way. I can still recall the smell of incense in the air visiting the cave in southern France where Mary Magdalene supposedly lived out her life. She certainly was known as a powerful presence, an enlivened soul who channeled the Divine power for the good, teaching many, healing many.
Thank you to those of you who wore red today. Not only is it a color associated with Magdalene, but with Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. By wearing red, you are helping acknowledge our most neglected Christian holiday, Pentecost, the one with no cards or gifts or big dinners or school vacations. Yet, Pentecost may have the most to say about our future as a church and spiritual tradition.
Some years ago, I was an interim minister at University Congregational in Seattle. It had been a while since they had called a new ordained minister and it seemed an opportune moment for them to evaluate where they were—where they were in relation to their city and the world. This inquiry was to inform them about what kind of future and future leader they might seek. In my work there with a team looking at the future context of faith, we discovered some significant trends of change emerging.
Most importantly for our purposes this Pentecost Sunday, I want to tell you that many of those tracking this time of change say with American theologian Harvey Cox that this emerging time is The Age of the Spirit. (Church historians might call The Age of the Spirit a Fourth Great Awakening.) In his book The Future of Faith, Cox named, albeit oversimplified, three ages of Christianity. The first three centuries were the Age of Faith, when followers simply embraced the teachings of Jesus. Then came the long Age of Belief, in which church leaders increasingly took control and set acceptable limits on doctrine and orthodoxy. The last 50 – 60 years has seen the emergence of the Age of the Spirit, in which many Christians have begun to ignore dogma and embrace spirituality while finding common threads with other religions.
Experiential faith is most important in this Age of the Spirit. The positive experience of community and the felt experience of God/the Divine/Love will be the authority rather than past lines of institutional declaration and doctrine.
While dogmatic evangelicalism has greatly tarnished Christianity and the term religion and created a strong negative association among many, Romantic evangelicalism, known in many circles today as spirituality, is still sought widely. People want to feel and experience the Divine, the Deep Unifying Mystery of Life.
In this Age of the Spirit, helping people to experience Divine Love through spiritual practices (love of God) and acts of service (love of neighbor) becomes paramount. In this age of deep personalization and mass customization, more places of entry and levels and types of participation in church should be expected and allowed. Let Spirit flow where it will. We at Plymouth have some of this already; groups for knitting, meditation, contemplation, book study, Scripture study, groups for singing for all ages, justice seeking groups, soul circles, different kinds of worship, volunteering opportunities to serve food or build houses. And what great timing for Plymouth then to have an emerging Contemplation in Action initiative focused on experiential spiritual practices that you will hear more about this summer as it readies to launch in the fall.
Anybody here know what Pentecostalism is?
We might think of it as that place where people are speaking in tongues and very expressive in worship. Some of you might think of it as strange and even not very worthwhile. But of the 2 billion Christians worldwide, over one quarter are now Pentecostal, up from just 6 percent in 1980. It’s predicted that by 2050, a billion people will be inside that tent. It is the fastest growing religion on the planet.
There’s clearly something vital and alive in that movement. And I can say that I wonder what would be possible if we at this church and at similar places could combine our deeply thoughtful and reasoned approach to faith with the depth of feeling and expression of that way.
Being in the Age of the Spirit does not mean that you have to be an extroverted, constantly high volume, in perpetual motion, dramatically expressive doer of deeds and devotion. It does mean that we must engage the felt experience of the Holy Spirit in our times of prayer and volunteering and being together so that meaning and connection and inspiration are present.
So I wonder what a progressive Pentecost-flavored faith might do in this world. If not lived out in the exact same modes of expression of those called Pentecostal now, I wonder what our life together, what our individual journeys, and what our service in the world would look like if we really allowed the Holy Spirit to come through us as fire and wind as well as the silence of the still waters.
The ancient story of Pentecost from Acts 2 may be strange to those who haven’t attended a Pentecostal worship service. However, let us not neglect it for it may be the most underappreciated story in our part of the world of Christian faith. It represents a kind of initiation of the church after the initial experiences of the Risen Christ. Jesus was no longer present in the body, but in Spirit. The people could feel it, and it changed their lives. They formed a new countercultural community that was dedicated to sharing and healing and inclusivity.
What I am saying is that the story of Pentecost is not just a story about another time and other people. It’s about you and me, about our experience of God’s deeds of power, about our hearing, knowing, feeling, and experiencing the Good News of hope and affirmation that inspires and touches us, that brings us into compassionate solidarity with our deepest parts, with all humanity, and with all Creation.
And maybe we have already begun. For the past several weeks, since Easter, I have felt particularly touched and moved in our worship services by the songs of children and adults, the messages from our youth, the prayers of music, and the energy in the gathered congregation. And isn’t that movement of Spirit needed now in the face of a resurgent force of empires around the world and at home? In the face of so much fear of the other and toxic seeking of dominance? In a time of so much loneliness and lack of community in our nation?
So let us remember the enlivened spirit of neighboring that came like a powerful wind earlier this year to the people of The Cities and to open hearted communities of faith. Let us remember the vital unifying Spirit that burned like a strong flame through actions of compassion and protection and justice.
On this Pentecost Sunday, let us remember that the Holy Spirit is not calling us to a life of faith which is a dry moral play of obligation and pointing out faults of others or our own, but is calling us into an experience, moving us into a living poem we inhabit that captures us and convicts us, into a living song that touches and inspires and lifts us, that gives us new understandings and takes us beyond our perceived limitations.
I’m now thinking of the author Annie Dillard, who some of you may know. Annie Dillard once wondered why we didn’t issue seat belts and crash helmets when people came in to worship. She had this sense that if God really appeared, you better hold on because it’s not always stillness. Sometimes it’s fire and wind. It will shake us up as God tries to wake us up to our fullness, to the possibility of peace and justice, to the reality of healing and the joy, the deep of living in this Creation in this life.
So my friends, I say it quietly, but I’m still thinking about fire and wind: Let us be open to the new Pentecost and continue to join with The Age of the Spirit.
AMEN