For Christ Church, Old Durham Parish, Nanjemoy, Maryland
I’ve often said that as long as it’s possible to walk into a CVS or a Target and not find a section of Pentecost cards, the Church might have a chance at having at least one holiday that is not totally co-opted by popular culture. To my knowledge Pentecost has not become a growth industry, and I think I know why. First, it has no symbol that is easily packaged to appeal to popular imagination. There is no baby, no barnyard, no cemetery, no open grave. We look in vain for three crosses on a landscape made rosy in the dawn. There is no handsome or beautiful saint, like a Patrick or a Mary, nor any ethnic group that associates itself with Pentecost.
Pentecost is out of this world. Not because it really has to do with some
world beyond our own, but precisely because it blasts our preconceptions about
this very world we live in. Most of the
time we imagine that this world is knowable, subject to scientific
investigation or logical dissection, and that is, of course true. Except when it’s not. There are dimensions of life that don’t lend
themselves to analysis or reason or clear explanation. They are the stuff not only of poetry but
fairly bizarre poetry. They are
mysterious, beyond taming, defying ordinary experience.
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| Pentecost by J. Garemijn (1750) one of 14 paintings of the mysteries of Rosary in Saint Walburga Church, Bruge, Belgium |
Take for example Luke’s description of The Day of Pentecost
in Acts 2, an account that the Church reads every year. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the
disciples sends them reeling into tongue-speaking, a phenomenon certainly not
unknown in some Christian circles as well as in other religious groups, but
which surely doesn’t lend itself to mass marketing. The account itself tells us that people at
the time didn’t know what to make of the cacophony of languages, authentic
languages that could in fact be understood by people who actually spoke and
understood them. So what did the masses
do? They pooh-poohed the whole event as
a bunch of people who were drunk. That’s
the sort of response that our own culture tends to make to things it patently
doesn’t comprehend. Well, it’s some sort
of aberration, we say. Or there must be
some mistake in the story itself. We
kick out of serious discussion what doesn’t fit our worldview.
What is with Pentecost, then?
To begin with, Pentecost is an unmistakably hard thing for
many to grasp exactly because it is something that doesn’t originate with human
beings. The point of Pentecost is that
it is a grace-filled event that is initiated by God. And it is not in the strictest sense God’s
response to human prayers, for example.
Nobody in the story is asking for such a thing as Pentecost. Quite the contrary. From heaven, that is from some place outside
predictable experience, comes a sound like the rush of a violent wind. It fills the house where the disciples have
gathered, still a band of directionless people not knowing quite what to do,
though they have been told to “wait.”
They do nothing to provoke this wind or its results. Weird stuff:
divided tongues as of fire alight on the heads of these disciples. They begin to speak in tongues not their own.
Like so many things in the Bible, this story is a
combination of a historical event, an interpretation of the event, and a whole
trunkful of symbols that point to truths far beyond bare facts, symbols that
attempt to convey things well outside ordinary experience. So tongues of fire, a house full of wind, an
outbreak of strange speech all point to something here that is new.
You’ll notice that one of the things human beings constantly
do is to try to understand the new by putting it side by side with something
that we know, or at least something that relates the new to the past. So it is with Pentecost. If we go on to read what follows the wind,
flame, and tongue-speaking, we hear Peter addressing the people of Jerusalem,
saying, “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, at 9 AM, but this is what
the Prophet Joel prophesied, when he said, ‘In the last days… God declares, “I
will pout out my Spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream
dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men
and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit and they shall prophesy.”’”
Now what is interesting is not just that Peter finds an old piece of scripture
using it to explain the newness of the event, but that he chooses something
that itself is laden with radical newness.
If ever you wanted something ancient that blasts open all kinds of
preconceptions, Joel’s passage will fit the bill: he talks about the spiritual capacity of both
sexes, the obliteration of the distinctions of age and experience, and even
sees that slaves and free people are on a par as far as being filled with God’s
Spirit is concerned. To Joel this is
exactly where history is moving. His
prophecy is about the “last days.” So,
if Peter is on to something in pulling Joel into his sermon, he is saying that
this Pentecostal phenomenon is in fact the opening up of a whole new world. As
much later the Book of Revelation will say in a similar vein, this is “a new
heaven and a new earth, for the former things have passed away.” And, “the One who sits upon the throne says,
‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,” and “Behold, I make all things new.”
Now you get the idea.
That’s why Pentecost doesn’t sell particularly well. You know as well as I that “all things new”
is not something that the human race is exactly good at wanting. Sure, we’ll take a new house, a new
automobile, a computer upgrade: it’s
fine for things to be new, as long as
we have them. But we? There is a tremendous resistance on the part
of human beings for us ourselves to be made new. Transformation is something that by its very
nature means that we’d be turned inside out, our values upended, our opinions
reversed, our thought patterns rearranged, our behavior overhauled, our vision
radically altered. People don’t want
that kind of change as a general rule, and they jolly well don’t want to pay
for it.
So here is a great and puzzling irony. Religion, or at least Christianity (if by it
we mean the Jesus kind of spiritual practices) turns out not to be nearly so
interested in change as it is in preserving the status quo. It isn’t that what’s old is no good, but that
the refusal to be open to what the old (like Joel’s prophecy) actually points
to in many cases is ignored and rejected because it’s disruptive.
Now you would be a rare congregation indeed if at this point
some of you are squirming in your seats wondering who this guy is who is
preaching the possibility of life-altering change when what we pay preachers
generally to do is to assure us that everything is all right even as it
is. You have a venerable history at
Christ Church, and you have been in business since 1661, which means your
ancestors in this place were using the Prayer Book of Queen Elizabeth I. Who am
I to tell you anything?
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| Christ Church, Old Durham Parish, Founded 1661, Chartered 1692 |
Let me assure you that the issue at stake here is not just
any kind of change as if change itself involved transformation. No, sometimes transformative change calls us
back to ancient truth, things that native and aboriginal people, or indeed
people in the ancient world, knew and understood, and which the power-enchanted
ages succeeding them have forgotten.
That’s the difference. When
you’re talking about eternity, there is no past or present or future,
none. Eternity is far beyond
“future.” It transcends time and
space. Which is the point of
Pentecost. The Eternal (heaven) breaks
into time. The Divine infuses the
human. Spirit comes like a shattering
wind and fills the material. This is
neither a matter of idolizing the novel and new or getting defensive and picky
about protecting the old. Suddenly, the
message of Truth is that all the categories that separate us—sex, age, race,
social status, intelligence, experience, and anything else—are out the window,
blown away by this wild, powerful Spirit.
And behold, we are at last what we’re created for: dwelling places, sanctuaries, of that very
Spirit.
That’s
where the rubber hits the road, folks.
That is what Jesus embodies, Paul taught, the Apostles all came to
realize so much that most of them gave their lives living it and teaching
it. It is what precious few people have
dared to live out fully because it is never easy and it often looks crazy. St. Francis was one of the best
examples. St. Clare was another. And if you start poking around in the stories
of others that we call holy, or saintly, or models, or virtuous, we begin to
find out that, yes, there really have been hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands, of ordinary souls that have caught the vision and have been so
altered by it that they’ve too dreamed dreams and have turned them into little
and sometimes gigantic pieces of Spirit-filled reality. Samuel Issac Joseph Schereschewski,
Lithuanian Jew turned Episcopal missionary, pecking out on a typewriter
translations of the Bible in Chinese with the middle finger of his partially
crippled hand; Sojourner Truth, former slave, preaching to the poverty-stricken
and to white congregations, working to abolish slavery and to secure women’s
rights; Margaret of Scotland, queen who took loaves of bread to the hungry sat
listening to and counseling the poor; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose faith led him
to plot the assassination of Hitler for which he was hanged; Thomas Gallaudet,
son and husband of deaf-mutes, who closed the border separating the deaf from
the hearing; and on and on the list goes, of ordinary people filled with the
Spirit who have defied odds, championed the outcast, faced down the powerful,
resisted oppressors, stood up for the vulnerable, spent their livelihoods
lifting up the miserable, who have painted, written, chiseled, designed,
invented, believed, struggled, lost, won, lived.
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| Sojourner Truth |
Pentecost may be out of this world, but it is not out of
your reach. If you feel the impulse to
be more loving, to exercise more care, to tone down your dislike of difficult
people, to resist the forces that eagerly pit people against each other and sic
the privileged on the vulnerable; if you feel a stirring in your soul to become
more the person you know yourself to be but can’t quite pull it off: stick with it. Seek and you will find. Wait till the Spirit has come upon you and
power of the Most High overshadows you.
It will take you to places you never have imagined you’d go, doing
things that even you may not understand.
But you may be sure that the Spirit of Comfort, Truth, and Love will
never leave nor forsake you. For it is
in the likes of you and me that love creates a space where the Holy Spirit
makes a dwelling.
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| Queen Margaret of Scotland disembarks among the poor she served. |
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017
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