Pentecost Sunday - 24th May 2026

“How the Spirit of God breaks through into our lives.”

Pentecost - presented to Warners Bay Uniting Church and Boolaroo Uniting Church 24th May 2026

Focus text: Acts 2:1-21

I was in Sydney over Thursday and Friday of this week on a retreat workshop on spiritual transformation in Sydney. Over the 2 days we heard a series of stories that spoke about how the Spirit of God breaks through into our lives in unexpected yet undeniable ways. On this day of Pentecost, our attention shifts to these moments through a story that encapsulates one of the greatest moments in the Church’s history, where the Spirit of God moved through the people gathered with fresh perspective and a new way of hearing and understanding God and each other that leads to moments of transformation and beauty that otherwise would not exist.

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Pentecost is an invitation to become a part of this great transformative process for the sake of our world. That peace, wonder, awe, and beauty may take centre stage, reconciling us to God and to one another.

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One of the stories shared this week was of a young jazz pianist. It was January 24, 1975, just before midnight at the Opera House in Köln, Germany. The air outside was freezing, and inside, the atmosphere wasn’t much warmer. Sitting at the centre of the stage was an old run down Bösendorfer piano. But it wasn’t the majestic Bösendorfer that had been promised. By a terrible mistake, the stage hands had rolled out the wrong one and left for the day. There was no time to try and swap them out, and so was badly out of tune, the upper register sounded like tin, the bass notes were completely hollow, and the sustain pedal didn’t work.

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A young, 29-year-old American pianist named Keith Jarrett walked out onto that stage. He was completely exhausted, wearing a back brace from chronic pain, and hadn't slept in days. His condition was significantly aggravated by the journey to the venue itself. Instead of flying from his previous gig in Zürich to Köln, he had opted to drive with his producer in a tiny, cramped car. The long, multi-hour drive left him utterly exhausted, completely sleep-deprived, and in excruciating physical pain.

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He looked at this broken instrument, a symbol now of his own brokenness, knowing that a sold-out crowd of over a thousand people was sitting in the dark, waiting. His first instinct—the human instinct—was to walk away. In fact, he had already tried to cancel the show. The instrument before him was objectively inadequate. It was a disaster. But instead of walking away, Jarrett sat down. He adjusted his brace, closed his eyes, and struck the very first note. What followed over the next hour became the best-selling piano album in human history.

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That night, Jarrett took a situation defined by limitation, deficit, and frustration, and through sheer presence and will power, he transformed it into a masterpiece.

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Writing about that legendary night in Germany, one music critic noted:

“What we hear in Cologne is not a conclusion but a threshold, the moment when one door swings open and the wind of possibility pours through. There is something timeless about this music precisely because it is... composed in air.

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This morning in the book of Acts we hear how the wind of possibility poured through the people gathered, and of how this wind stirred awe and wonder in the crowd – rushing wind, tongues of flame. We’re told they began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Those gathered appeared to have received a power that fell on all sorts of different people from all sorts of different backgrounds. Despite all the differences of language, and culture, and customs, a bond was formed. Regardless of the inability to really speak to one another, the church members and the family members were able to communicate a shared compassion for one another and a common love of God. It was truly an experience of the Holy Spirit moving in and through them all.

 

The Holy Spirit here would show no partiality and it marked the beginning of the kind of church God was raising up – a church that knew no division, no us and them, no prejudice or bias – it was purely the birth of a church who were able to honour the God presence in one another, filled with the Spirit’s power.

 

I love these words from Mary Ogus, an Episcopal priest in the United States:

 

“There is Pentecost.
 Whenever, in the depths of the most destructive forces of our own hearts,
We discover a more creative force compelling us toward
Reconciliation, toward kindness, toward forgiveness.
There the spirit is rushing in,
Giving us new eyes to see, new ears to hear,
New voices to speak God’s love.
There is Pentecost.”

 

The presence of the Holy Spirit is given to us as a constant reminder that our God is with us. The Holy Spirit comes to bring contentment, to remind us that despite all the world’s distractions, we belong to God and that reality will help us keep our equilibrium when the inevitable waves of doubt and despair come crashing down around us.

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Years later, when asked about how he survived that impossible performance, Keith Jarrett recalled the physical and mental strain, saying:

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“My glasses were falling off, my pants were twisted up, I was sweating, crouching, standing up, sitting down, and I was thinking: 'nothing can stop me now.' [It was a feeling] of total trust.”

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When the Holy Spirit descends today, it doesn’t look like a polite, orderly church service. It looks more like holy chaos. There’s the sound of a roaring wind, tongues of fire, and a gathering of ordinary people suddenly speaking in languages they did not know. The crowd goes on to look upon them and mocks them, saying, "They’re just drunk."

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But Peter reminds the crowd, this is not drunkenness, but rather this is evidence of the Holy Spirit who comes to remind us all that with the Spirit’s power, despite our very human limitations, like Jarrett discovered, nothing can stop us now.

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I’d like to close with a few of those opening bars that Jarret played on that bitterly cold winter’s night back in 1975. I invite you to close your eyes and allow yourself to be transported back to that concert hall where a spotlight falls on this old, broken down piano which represents every limitation, inadequacy and disappointment you’ve ever known that has made you want to just give up and walk away.

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Now imagine Jarrett sitting down at that broken instrument, taking a deep breath, and stretching out his hands to play.

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(Play the opening melody of the Köln Concert)

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My friends, this is the mystery of Pentecost. This is the promise of the Holy Spirit – that God takes our brokenness, our flaws and uses them to make and do something new that was never thought possible before.

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No matter how inadequate you find yourself or the situation in life you are currently facing, know that God meets you in that place of hopelessness, offering a way forward, albeit not in the way you might have hoped for or imagined. Our God is a God who is well acquainted with our brokenness and continually calls us forth regardless. It’s almost as if He can already hear the masterpiece that is within us, longing to come to life, albeit through a willing, yet weary instrument.

This Pentecost as the Spirit of God descends upon us in the midst of the chaos and clamour of our world and our daily lives, may we be present to the moment in such a way that we meet it with the same grit and determination showed on that stage some 50 years ago by Jarrett. May that same Spirit open up for each of us new and lifegiving ways to create moments of magnificence beyond the mundane, moments of hope beyond the despair, and moments of transformation beyond the fear.

Amen.