Pentecost, 2005

Pentecost
The Rev. Carol Luther
May 15, 2005

Readings:

Acts 2:1-11
Ezekiel 11:17-20
1 Corinthians 12:4-13
Acts 2:1-11
John 20:19-23
John 14:8-17
Psalm 104:25-37 or 104:25-32 or 33:12-15, 18-22

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. 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. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1)

Pentecostal Flame Pentecost is one of the strangest stories in the Bible. Tongues of fire descend from heaven and fill a group of disciples so that suddenly they are able to speak in tongues. It's given rise to all kind of excesses. Consider that type of Christian worship that we call "Pentecostal," full of people fainting and crying out with a flamboyance that verges upon hysteria.

The Feast of Pentecost, celebrated seven weeks after Passover, was and is a traditional Jewish festival. For ancient Jews, Pentecost was one of three pilgrimage feasts, the other two being Passover and Succot (the festival of booths in the fall) when the devout were expected to come to Jerusalem. At Pentecost, pilgrims offered the first fruits of the summer's early harvest. They also remembered, because all these feasts have both a material and a spiritual aspect, the giving of God's law to Moses on Sinai, fifty days after the Exodus from Egypt. Just as wheat is necessary for the life of the body, so does Torah, the Word of God feed the soul, for man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

In the weeks following the death and resurrection of Jesus, those who had been Jesus' followers lived a shadowy existence. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, not even the blessed and absolute assurance of Eternal Life does much to assuage the process of grief. A lot of the resurrection stories we read during the 50 days of Easter are really about the kind of aimless, and not so aimless, wandering that people do when they're grieving, when they're searching for something to fill the space of their loss: going fishing, looking for lost sheep, walking to Emmaus, mistaking one person for another. They're also about the isolation of grief. The disciples spent a lot of time locked up in their room. They prayed a lot. So confused is this whole process that the four Gospels do very different things with Easter: Matthew sends everyone to Galilee. Mark sends them into total confusion, Luke goes only as far as Bethany while John ends at the Sea of Tiberias, also in Galilee.

We, too, need to do some wandering before we can understand the strange and surprising events of Pentecost. Ten days before, Jesus finished his resurrection appearances and ascended once and for all into heaven. At our children's service I showed a movie version of this which showed Jesus, a boyish smile across his face, rising up as if taking an elevator into the sky. It looked fun, but I'm not sure it really happened that way. After this, two people in white robes appeared and said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

Ascent/ descent. Or as we say in our Eucharistic prayer:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

And so we arrive at Pentecost. Pentecost is Ascension's flip side. Just as Jesus was taken up at Ascension, so, a mere ten days later on Pentecost, the fire from heaven comes down. It's a second coming, different from the first, but no less crucial to the story. In John's Gospel, the resurrected Jesus breathes on his disciples and says to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit." In Acts it comes in clouds of light just as Jesus had gone. The Holy Spirit is that cosmic string that connects all life to the Divine Life.

Unity and diversity. Not either/or but both/and. As we look at Paul's letter to the Christians at Corinth, we can hear him working on this: many gifts, one spirit, the same God active in everyone. By extension, since we are joined by this Spirit, all life on earth is really but different aspects of this one life as our Psalm says,

O LORD, how manifold are your works!
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

All life on earth depends upon all other life for its very existence. This manyness and oneness may be the most basic and the most profound of all spiritual truths. Each of us encounters that spiritual truth in our own unique way, but all those unique ways are intended to come together. Hence God, who is everything, gives us a story about both uniqueness and unity to take us from the High Days of Easter into the more thoughtful season of Ordinary Time. God became unique in the person of Jesus. After Jesus' ascension, this same unique God fills the hearts of the many. The second coming has come and that coming is the spirit active in us. As Jesus says, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth."

Hence the speaking of many languages. Conversation and conversion come from the same Latin root converso, "to turn around." This says something very deep about learning. Learning is not a straight line from grade school into college, a place where we parade our achievements and reach a place where we can look out and say, "I've made it. Now what can I do?" Learning is like the unfolding of a spiral or a rose: as one petal reveals itself in all its wholeness, it becomes aware of another, and another. Everything we think we know gives rise to so much more that we do not. Each problem solved leads to yet another mystery. Truth is a dance in which all the petals are players. Truth is a labyrinth walking the sacred spiral toward God's heart.

Pentecost is how God invites us to dance.

Pentecost is also known as the Birthday of the Church for filled with the Holy Spirit and able to reach out to others with a clarity and a depth they did not think possible, the disciples found the courage to continue the ministry of the one they loved so well.

Pentecost liberates us from the prison of our single selves. When the Holy Spirit comes to earth, I am no longer trapped in the upper room that is my own head; I am freed to speak in wonderful new ways. Full of a new language of reconciliation, Pentecost allows me to embrace my Muslim sisters and my Republican brothers. Pentecost brings sheep ranchers and wolf conservationists around the same campfire like the wolf and the lamb of Isaiah. People of color teach me what it means to be white. To embrace our differences is to discover a unity beyond the melting pot, beyond the standardized test. The miracle of Pentecost is the living and breathing story that we will never find oneness in God until we can embrace the amazing and mind boggling diversity of humanity, but also our unity, that I, the tree, the fish and the rock are made from the same creation.

Our church and our world sit poised at the brink of what will either be dissolution into warring camps or a new Pentecost when we speak each other's languages. Those of you who are following the terrible controversies in the Anglican Communion might sense that the Anglican Communion is reaching a point where it is afraid to live with local variation and craves the certainty of a Magisterium and an Archbishop of Canterbury whose word is law. In the Roman Catholic Church, a theologian is stripped of his authority to teach theology because he suggests that there may be ways to salvation that are not through the one Jesus Christ defined by the Church. In the United States, the rhetoric of "get big government off our backs" leads to ever increasing centralization of what were once local services, while too quickly we forget how our former rival the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of trying to centralize hundreds of different cultures under a single Russian authority. Unity/diversity/many/one/both/and.

Pentecost defies both those who would splinter the world into local enclaves and those who would centralize the world in their own image. The power in this story resides at neither of these poles. At that moment the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and could speak in tongues, they were completely deprived of themselves; they had no idea what they were saying-- only that the Holy Spirit was alive and at work in them, exactly as Jesus had promised. Jesus was back. Jesus was in their heart; they had become pure gift, stripped of all self-interest. The miracle of Pentecost was not just for them. It was God's love, showering over a fearful and fragmented world. Take hope, my friends. With God's help, we can do it.

AMEN.