Quick Summary:

On Confirmation Sunday the sermon begins with a story about canoeing on the Confirmation retreat, and the role of the wind in making the trip either challenging or easy.

Today’s texts are all about the Spirit. And the Bible’s word for SPIRIT also means WIND and BREATH. In today’s story from ACTS, that Wind and Breath and Spirit of God comes so swiftly, so suddenly, and so powerfully on God’s people, that they’re driven out from the familiar into unknown territory. Peter, astounded by what he sees and hears, seizes the moment to say, what they were experiencing is exactly what God had in mind all along:
“In the last days God’s spirit will be poured out on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”

You get the distinct impression in ACTS that resisting the Spirit of God is as useless as trying to paddle a canoe solo, against the wind. And sure enough, many times throughout ACTS, God’s people find themselves having to let go of their agendas and prejudices and assumptions about what God supposedly wanted from them, in order to truly see where the Spirit wanted them to go.