THE DAY OF PENTECOST

June 4, 2006

Acts 2:1-21

Romans 8:22-27

John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Year B

It is said that when the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City was consecrated, the Rector was invited by a friend to choose from his collection of relics. The Rector was quite moved by the offer and when he returned the church staff eagerly awaited his choice. He came back carrying a box covered with a purple cloth. “It came down to choosing between a piece of the table from the Last Supper or a piece of St. Peter’s chains” he said. “So I chose a piece of the table from the Last Supper”. There was awed silence. Then someone asked, “Why did you choose this and not the other?” “Well,” he said, “the other seemed so far-fetched”.

I think that’s how many people look upon the Feast of Pentecost; part of the liturgical year, but wondering where the truth is and what exactly it has to do with reality. A lot of people in the world feel the same way about the church. A French Roman Catholic remarked once that Jesus foretold the coming of the Kingdom but it was the church that came instead. Percy Shelley said, “I could believe in Christ if he did not drag along behind him that leprous bride of his, the church”. Or, as Annie Dillard wrote, “What a pity that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians”.

Today is the birthday of the church, so it is well to remember that what happened on Pentecost was not an organizational meeting, nor a seminar, but an encounter with the living God.

We are confronted today with the gift of the Holy Spirit, but the concept of the Holy Spirit can be difficult to grasp. An Asian man, upon hearing reference to “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” said, “Ah, now I see. You are governed by a divine committee.” When he was told the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism like a dove, he said, “Father I understand. Son I understand. Bird I do not understand at all.”

As observant Jews Jesus’ disciples were gathered, as had numerous others, for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, celebrating the first fruits of the harvest and the giving of the Law. Coming as it did fifty days after Passover, it was called “Pentecost”, a Greek work meaning “Fiftieth”. In spite of the resurrection these disciples were still trying to come to terms with Jesus’ absence. They were not doing any teaching. They were not doing any healing. What they were doing was tiptoeing around the Roman authorities. But in that room at Pentecost something happened to them. The same dispirited disciples who entered that room left it empowered apostles; those who would change the course of history. They healed the sick and cast out demons. They went to prison gladly and sang hymns until the walls fell down. Whatever happened in that room spread to Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome and to Alexandria. We are not talking about people working themselves up into a frenzy. Pentecost was not a concept. It was an explosion.

We must resist the temptation to explain the Holy Spirit. Although I do not understand electricity, trust me, I believe in it. I’ve never read a book on it but an experience I had with an extension cord in my bedroom as a child convinced me of its reality long ago. In the same way we are confronted, not with an explanation of the Holy Spirit today, but with the effects of the Holy Spirit’s power; the power of God to communicate and to enable us to respond to that communication.

One sure sign that two people are in love is the fact that they long to be with one another. Just to be in the other’s presence is vitally important because it is a communion of sorts. No wonder when we speak of love we speak of fire. No wonder when we speak of barriers we speak of coldness.

There are so many barriers that divide the peoples of the earth; national, geographical, cultural and emotional. Each kind of barrier or division could be explored by simply listening to people’s stories and observing their behavior. One preacher writes, “Like an arctic ice-bank, individual pieces break off and drift away in the cold, becoming alone and distant”. As an observant preacher once asked, “How large is the iceberg with which you are ignoring me?” This is the situation in the world, behind closed doors, and sadly, sometimes the situation in the church.

Pentecost is essentially the upending of what happened in the story of Babel. The story of Babel is a story of distance and isolation. It is the story of peoples becoming isolated by oceans of misunderstanding and distrust. But if the testimony of scripture is true, God is relentless when it comes to communicating with us, through all kinds of situations and circumstances. Sometimes, when you say to people, “Have you considered the possibility that God is at the center of this?” they will say, “Oh, it was just a coincidence” or it was “just fate”. As Deon Irish, organist and choirmaster of St. Michael and All Angels Church, Cape Town, South Africa, is quoted as saying, “At least a significant part of what is wrong in the world today is precisely that people have stopped regarding the very concept of God as ‘scary’”.

There is something about this God that longs for relationship with us and that relationship is a relationship of fiery love, and that’s scary because if you allow that relationship into your life nothing stays the same. God will confront us with the truth, and the truth, as Jesus declares in today’s gospel, is not always easy to face or to see.

One elderly woman, speaking of her own truth, told about her difficult and emotionally distant father. She said she could never quite get over never being able to please him, never being able to gain his approval; never being able to gain his love. She said, “It doesn’t matter how old we get. The wounded parts inside us are always very young.” The good news is that God wills for us to be healed and whole. That is the truth we proclaim, the truth we say we own.

God is, and always will be, a mystery beyond our grasp. And because of that, whether it be the Spirit of God blowing through the church or your own individual life, remember that a mystery is different than a problem. A problem can be solved. A mystery can only be entered and experienced. That does not make it less amazing or miraculous. That is what is involved in true worship.

The Greek word for worship is ‘proskuneo’; a word that means to “kiss toward” When was the last time you allowed yourself to “kiss toward” God? When was the last time you allowed God’s presence to affect you in that kind of loving, intimate, but risky way? A relationship with the living God calls us to do just that. The question Pentecost places before us is the question of whether we believe the power of God can still blow through us and set our hearts and lives on fire? It makes all the difference in the world. How open is your door, your life, to such a possibility? How open is the church to such a possibility?

To quote Annie Dillard again:

On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

That is the reality of Pentecost. That is the truth - and the reality – of the God we promise to share with the child we baptize into Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church this day.

No, God is not always gentle. God is wind and fire. God will give us strength, but God will also show us the truth of our weaknesses. We can pray with our fingers crossed and then hide under the pews and hope for calm, in our lives and in the church. Or we can pray with wild abandon and ask that God would ignite us; that the fiery windy power of God’s Spirit might blow right through us and ignite a future that we cannot even imagine, but only step into – but stepping into it, let us be prepared to hold on tight with all our might.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois