Dawning Light from Resurrection to Pentecost

Acts 2:1-4; 32-33; Luke 24:1-10

Celebrating Pentecost
One day of the year that Paul especially honored was Pentecost, the 50th day after Passover, the Feast of Weeks. Something happened that changed the world. 
The result and power of all that had happened in Jesus began to be poured out for humans in everyday life: God fulfilled his promises from creation and throughout Israel’s long history and opened that history wide for all the rest of the world to participate. 
In the incarnation in Jesus, God united God and human. God’s self-giving love embodied in creation and covenant he gave in new form by taking to himself human suffering, brokenness, sin and death. He defeated death by the creation of new life in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. On Pentecost all of this was poured out for all people, beginning with the Jews. God and human were united in a new way by the gift of God’s own self, God’s life, God’s power in the Holy Spirit given to those who trusted in all that Jesus had done. God filled broken human life with love, joy, and hope by beginning the process that will finally defeat death and unite all reality in resurrection, new creation.

Jesus and the Spirit of Life

Romans 7:21 - 8:6

The Spirit of Life -- Where Jesus' Life Meets Ours
Today is Pentecost (fifty days after Passover/Easter) the feast of Weeks. Acts 2 stamps it forever as the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit, the new beginning, the "power from on high" that Jesus promised. Jesus' new resurrection life, so startling to his disciples, now began to invade their own lives as the Spirit of God became part of them. Jesus was not calling people to be generally 'more spiritual.' He poured out God's own Spirit, new life, new power, that brought Jesus' work to fulfillment and changed everything.
The New Testament is filled with this. Luke tells the story in Acts. John describes Jesus anticipating the coming of the Paraclete/Advocate. Paul focuses on the Spirit in Rom 8. The Spirit is the presence of the one God, given to us, continuing God's work in Jesus.