May 24, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS
First Reading: Acts 2:1-21
1 When the day of Pentecost had come, [the apostles] were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 ’In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ”
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
3b No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
4 Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, 5 and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8 To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10 to another the working of powerful deeds, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Gospel: John 20:19-23
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
SERMON—Pastor Dan Peterson
“The Job of the Spirit”
Grace to you, and peace, this Pentecost Sunday, from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
Have you ever wondered what the Spirit does? I mean, as the historian of Christianity, David Christy Murray, points out, many Christians think of God the Father as a kind of being “up there;” the Son as the first-century wandering rabbi in white gown and Birkenstocks “back there;” and the Holy Spirit as a kind of nebulous—nebulous meaning lacking distinct form—a nebulous “It” that manifests itself in odd bursts of charismatic activity “here and there,” which have little or nothing to do with everyday life.
Well, it turns out, at least according to the Bible, that the Holy Spirit has a much broader job description than causing Pentecostal Christians to speak in tongues.
So what exactly does the Holy Spirit do, and why does it matter? Now, normally, to answer a question like this, I would consult books and articles and commentaries, and read blogs online to obtain an answer, but this morning I’m going to take a slightly different approach. I decided to consult Chat GPT.
And here’s the prompt I gave it. Ready?
“Write a job description for the Holy Spirit.
What does it do?
Indicate how it was operative in the Old and New Testaments.”
Now, the answer it gave me was fascinating, but before I get to that answer, I want to tell you why I included Old and New Testaments, especially with regard to the conclusion of today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus says the Spirit cannot yet come until He has come. So, this language of Old and New Testament in the Holy Spirit’s job description comes from a line in the Nicene Creed, which we’ll be saying later this morning. According to the Nicene Creed, and these words will be familiar to most of you, “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.” And I want you to notice there three things.
First, the Holy Spirit is the “giver of life.” This is consistent with the Old Testament, when God breathes life, or inspires Adam. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life. More broadly, this is a reminder that every single breath we take is a gift from God the Spirit. Every single breath we take is a gift from God the Spirit.
If you want proof for the Divine, instead of looking out there or up there, you might consider what’s happening right beneath your nose! The Holy Spirit is the gift of breath. It’s the gift of life. Not only the animating force that inspired Adam to be drawn out of clay, but also each breath you and I have. So, number one, the Holy Spirit is a giver of life.
Number two, it proceeds from the Father and the Son. You may have noticed, perhaps, some really colorful, or I would say poetic, actually, language from the hymn we sang a little earlier, that talks about the Holy Spirit as “an undying flame, tenacious.” In other words, the Holy Spirit is eternal. There was never a day when it was not.
So the writers of the Nicene Creed used very careful language to talk about, not how God made the Holy Spirit, not how the Holy Spirit was born from God the Father and the Son, but that the Holy Spirit proceeds. This is a way, in however inadequate language, to affirm the eternality of the Holy Spirit. There was never a time when it was not.
Thirdly, the Holy Spirit has “spoken through the prophets.” Now I know a few of you are fans of Gnostic Christianity, and I’m going to criticize that form of Christianity now, so you might say, hold the spirit—or hold your breath.
This line was added to the Creed because one of the main Gnostics—this is a breakaway heresy of the mainline Christian church that took place beginning in the second century AD—the main proponent of this heresy was a man named Marcion, who insisted that Christians should do away with everythingthat preceded Christ in the Old Testament; that that God was a lesser God, an inferior God; and that the true God is the God of Jesus Christ, according only to the Gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul. That would make for a much shorter Bible, and probably a lot of confirmation students more happy, but, the Church, in its wisdom, said, “No, no, no,” the Holy Spirit didn’t just show up after Christ. The Holy Spirit has been speaking through the prophets all this time, particularly insofar as they anticipate the day of redemption.
So we have three things in that Creed, or that article of the Creed, that paragraph, that I think are important when it comes to worth noting the Job Description of the Spirit. It’s not just a nebulous kind of charismatic activity; it’s the giver of life. It proceeds from the Father and the Son; and it’s been spoken through the prophets, made manifest, finally, in the gift that Jesus gives to the church at the end of the Gospel of John.
As we can see already, even before Chat GPT, if you can imagine, we know already that the Holy Spirit has a much broader job description than, as I said, “inspiring charismatic activity,” based on just a quick glance of the Nicene Creed.
The Spirit animates life, it gives each of us our breath, and among many other things, it inspires prophets to speak on behalf of God to the people.
So, what’s the rest of the story? What does Chat GPT say when it comes to the “Job Description” of the Holy Spirit? Well, here’s what I learned.
Position title: Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity;
reports to the Father and the Son.
Status: Eternal, omnipresent, life giving.
Now for those of you who have recently finished high school or just graduated from college, I want to show you now why Chat GPT is inadequate. Because, already in the first part of the job description, we have a position title that is heretical.
Why? Because it implies that the Spirit is less than the Father and the Son. To whom does the Holy Spirit report? “The Father and the Son.” But then Chat GPT says, but it’s still eternal. So we have a problem here already, but we’re going to keep going to see if we can help Chat GPT make more sense of the Holy Spirit to all of us.
So, let’s continue with the position summary:
“The Holy Spirit is the dynamic and personal presence of God, active in creation, revelation, redemption, and transformation. The Spirit animates life [Nicene Creed], inspires prophecy [Nicene Creed], convicts conscience, empowers justice, sustains covenant relationship, and forms communities of faith. In Christian theology, the Spirit is not merely an impersonal force, but the living breath of God, active throughout history.”
Bravo, that was nicely done. Remember, too, that none of that is Chat GPT, it’s actually what other people wrote, and Chat GPT has just assembled.
“The Spirit’s work in the Old Testament is often episodic and vocational, which is exemplified when prophets talk about how the Spirit came upon them.
In the New Testament, it becomes more universally indwelling and transformative through Christ and the Church.”
So, that’s its position summary.
And right now, probably some of you are thinking, I’m not sure I want to hire this person. I’m curious, but I need to know more.
So, let’s consider what’s next on the résumé: the Holy Spirit’s Core Responsibilities. I’m just going to read to you a few, because, as it turns out, at least according to ChatGPT, the Holy Spirit is a very busy God. It has lots of responsibilities, for one example:
Creation and sustaining life.
Hover over primordial chaos and participate in creation [Genesis 1].
Animate living beings with divine breath, [Genesis 2].
Sustain creation and renew the earth. [Psalm 104; The psalm that we sang earlier].
Old Testament evidence: the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters. The [Hebrew} here is Tohu wa vohu, which means “the depths,” and out of the depths the Spirit draws form, out of chaos it draws order. The task of the Spirit is to unite with the dynamism of primordial chaos to produce order, and thus, out of it, life. That’s a big job.
Thereafter, God breathes life into Adam. That’s Genesis 2 and 3, as we talked about; and again, Psalm 104, as we sang today, describes the Spirit renewing creation.
New Testament development. I’ll be brief here: The Spirit becomes associated with new creation in Christ. (Which is problematic, because in Revelation, God the Father creates, and the Son, not the Spirit, create, recreates. There’s no talk of the Holy Spirit at all in the book of Revelation. It’s totally understated in the rest of the New Testament, so the job has to be made explicit, which Chat GPT does here.)
All right, let’s set that aside.
Holy Spirit: Responsible for life and creation, and in the case of Christ, new creation. Two: Revelation and inspiration; it inspires prophets, poets, judges, and visionaries? We’re all clear on that, right? Okay.
Three: Empowerment for leadership and mission. It equips individuals for tasks beyond ordinary human capacity, like preaching, for example. (I’m just kidding, that is a human capacity. If it wasn’t, I would be in big trouble.)
Granting courage and wisdom and authority in the face of persecution. In the New Testament, Jesus ministers in the power of the Spirit. The apostles receive boldness at Pentecost, which we learned about in our first reading, and spiritual gifts are distributed throughout the church, which makes the church run, and the body of Christ, real in the world, as our second reading indicates.
Number Four: conviction and moral transformation. [New Testament].
The Spirit convicts the world of sin and righteousness.
Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians as love, peace, joy, generosity, and self-control. The Spirit transforms believers into the likeness of Christ. It conforms them, as Paul repeatedly says in his letters.
Number six: it’s also supposed to be comforting and advocating. It consoles the suffering, it intercedes in weakness, it strengthens faith amid fear and persecution. New Testament development—in John’s Gospel, the Spirit is called the Paraclete, which means advocate, helper, comforter. Paul says the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words when we do not know how we should pray.
Okay. I wonder if the Holy Spirit ever gets to rest! These are the Job Responsibilities, at least according to ChatGPT: creation, sustaining life, revelation, and inspiration, empowerment for church mission, conviction, and moral transformation, and finally, comfort and advocacy.
But what, you’re probably wondering, are the Holy Spirit’s Qualifications? Did it go to seminary? Does it have a doctorate? What makes it qualified to be the Holy Spirit?
Well, again, referring to that hymn we sang earlier, number one, it must be eternal. It has to be eternal.
Number two, it must be fluent in prophecy, wisdom, fire, wind, breath, dove imagery, and silence.
And number three, it must demonstrate a capacity for bringing order out of chaos.
Okay. All right. So, what kind of Work Environment does the Holy Spirit enjoy?
Well, it is active in creation, according to its job description, in the wilderness, in the temple, during the exile, in the upper room, in the prisons, in deserts, in churches, and in human hearts, and it’s frequently encountered, ChatGPT says, in moments of crisis, worship, justice seeking, and unexpected renewal.
So what, finally, are the Performance Outcomes of the Holy Spirit? Listen carefully: “Successful operation results in: renewed creation, liberated communities, courageous witness, deeper compassion, reconciliation with neighbor, transformed consciousness, and hope stronger than despair.”
What a job description! What, indeed, a job description. That’s what Chat tells us when it comes to the nature and work of the Holy Spirit.
It reflects, however, a problem, and it’s a point I made at the beginning. Even if we associate the Holy Spirit with everything from creation to inspiration, what difference does it make in our everyday lives? Whether we are retiring or retired; whether we’re off to start a new chapter in life; whether it’s college or after college; whether we find ourselves somehow stuck in the purgatory of high school; what difference does the Holy Spirit make in our lives?
Well, there’s one answer that Chat GPT doesn’t include that I think is good news, indeed great news. When it comes to everyday life—and this is the point I want you to remember for today—the Holy Spirit is the power that empowers. It is the power that empowers to go on instead of giving up. The power that empowers. Now we’ve already heard how, when it comes to leadership and mission, the Spirit equips individuals for tasks beyond ordinary human capacity. And we’ve heard how the Spirit grants courage, wisdom, and authority. We’ve heard how in the story of Pentecost, the gifts of the Spirit are distributed throughout the church, which Paul names, and we’ve heard how the Spirit of God comforts us and intercedes in our weakness. How it’s frequently encountered in moments of crisis, worship, justice seeking, and renewal.
And yet, for all of that, for all of that, when it comes to our everyday lives, the job of the Spirit is simple: It’s the power that empowers us to go on and not give up. It’s the power that empowers us to live when we’ve lost someone we love, or in the face of uncertain, even harmful circumstances. It’s the power that empowers us to change one person’s life, when we know we won’t change the world; to find meanings not in the big sense of purpose, but in the small things of ordinary existence.
It’s the power that empowers. Whether we know it or not, name it or not, that is the work of the Spirit in our lives. It is the simple, sometimes fierce determination to be, to say “yes” to life, when life, in its myriad of ways, says “no” to us. I want to share with you a brief story about my friend Beatrice Lawrence. Some of you may recall she is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Seattle University, and has spoken at our forums many times. She’s Jewish, and when her father died several years ago, I asked her, “How do you go on, knowing that your tradition is agnostic when it comes to life after death— that it doesn’t have the kind of robust theology we have of Christ’s resurrection and how He overcame death, and that for us He opens the gateway to new life, to eternal life. It says, in the words of Ecclesiastes, perhaps we just don’t know whether the Spirit of God returns to heaven and the body returns to the to the earth. So, how do you go on?”
And she said, “I just do.”
And I want to say, that’s the work of the Spirit! We don’t have to name it, although there’s benefit bringing it to conscious expression. We don’t have to affirm it explicitly, although I think it makes a difference in our lives when we do. It’s simply that Spirit to go on, to say yes to life, when life, in terms of loss, in terms of difficulty, in terms of hardship, says no to us.
I want to invite each of you this morning, this Pentecost Sunday, to think about the work of the Spirit in your life, not by way of speaking in tongues, or even by considering the breath that is constantly flowing in and out of you, but just in terms of a difficult moment or period of life, where somehow you went on instead of giving up, and I want to say, perhaps inspired by that same Spirit: that’s the work of the Spirit in your life.
Let’s pray.
Holy Spirit, wow, you have a complicated job. You animate life, you inspire poets, prophets, and visionaries. You convict us of sin, yet you sustain us, transform us, renew us, and give us the faith that comes only from you. You comfort us in our weakness and strengthen us. Yet, for all of these, when it comes to our everyday lives, we know you, whether we name you or not, as the power that empowers.
Make us aware of your presence in our lives, the power that empowers, the source of each breath, knowing that in our trials you are always with us, inspiring us to go on instead of giving up—that, you might say, is your job.
Amen.