Birth Cry

Acts 2:1-21

            Something is wrong with this picture.  People don’t start spouting off languages that they have never learned.  What languages?  This stuff is nonsense.  These people must be drunk.   So runs the first anti-Spirit argument in the Church’s history.  Or at least the first argument that we know of.

            The Day of Pentecost.  Not one of those twelve disciples of Jesus got up that morning thinking that anything very amazing was going to happen. It was the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Weeks so-called, that took place seven weeks after Passover. It commemorated the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai.  Whatever else Pentecost was about, it certainly was never on anyone’s mind that the festival of Jewish national and religious identity was going to be a time when the doors were blown open, the breath of God palpably breathing life into a community, and the outbreak of Divine Fire of the kind not much seen since Moses’ famous burning bush.  The very experience of Pentecost turned out to be international, multi-cultural, and pan-ethnic, not a national holiday celebrating that chief of all Jewish sacredness, the Torah.  Jesus had promised that the Comforter, the Advocate would come. He had promised that power from on high would clothe his community.  But no one expected anything of this sort to happen.

            It is ironic that this mind-blowing experience would take place in the middle of a festival celebrating the Law.  Religion specializes in law, in regulating human conduct, in policing morality.   People frequently suppose that religion, of whatever sort, is actually about making people good, with some believing that if we get to be good enough we will qualify for everlasting life.  It is quite a shock to find out that God is not tamable, quantifiable, willing to be sequestered under the confines of human categories and schedules.  No, by God!  If God wants to rush in like a mighty wind, unleashing dreams and sparking visions, then God does just like that.  God is not only lamb, but tiger; not only dove, but eagle; not only fragrant incense smoldering in a smallish pot, but a great big bonfire so hot it will roast your skin if you stand too close to it for very long.

            Isn’t it rich?  No one believes prophecies very much until something happens and people run scurrying to the books and charts of antiquity to find out whether there was ever anything like it, or any prediction of it.  So that is what they did, I think, on the morning of Pentecost sometime around the year 29 CE, best we can calculate.  They said, “Aha! Here is it in the Book of Joel, which of course we read every day.  ‘The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.  (All flesh!) And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.  Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”  If you keep reading you will find yourself in the thick of language describing events that signal the end of one world and the beginning of another, things that clearly fall outside history or even future history.  What Joel says and what happens on Pentecost is that God can never again be said to be apart from people.  God has filled them with good things, and they will never be the same.

            Now it happens that the Holy Spirit did not just appear out of nowhere, but in fact had been around forever.  The Holy Spirit had brooded over the darkness of the primeval waters of creation.  The Holy Spirit had been that Wisdom that emanated from the Creator as stars were bursting into flame and planets spun out of the cosmic breath.  The Holy Spirit had spoken by the prophets.  Jesus himself had been driven by the Spirit into the wilderness after his baptism.  He had returned, filled with that same Spirit.  His whole life had been a spirit-filled life par excellence.  And all of those things are bits and pieces of the story that we tell about how God is not only the Source of all things, but God is somehow present in everything, in everyone, and everywhere.  The Holy Spirit is the code word for talking about God being in the here-and-now.  There was never a time that God was not, just as there is no place where God is not.  The Eternal is now.

            Pentecost is not only a day and event that happened once upon a time.  Nor is it an annual chance for the church to act wacky as if somehow that is what the Spirit of God is up to.  Pentecost is the experience of being filled if you are empty, of being brought back to life if you are a huge pile of dry bones, of finding yourself if you are wandering about aimlessly, of being empowered to live a life of service if you are in the hole of selfishness, of finding your flesh tingling with exquisite sensations if you have been dead to bodily joy, of being electrified and vivified if you have been hopeless.  And it is more.

            What better day to celebrate New Birth than the day when this whole community called Church was born, wailing its birth-cry in myriad languages, dripping with joy, its timidity melting in the flames that settled on every head?  What is going to happen when, in a moment, David and Theodore are plunged into the waters of baptism (would that we had a font big enough to bathe them both in water deep enough to resemble the burial of Christ in the tomb, which is what it is supposed to look like!)?  What is going to happen to you when you arrange yourselves around the font and ultimately feel drops of water falling on you like showers of grace and blessing?  Will you shudder with excitement that the Spirit of God comes upon you, freeing you, strengthening you, leading you to the Truth of who you are in your deepest Self?  Will you miss the connection between the Spirit and the Water and the Power and Source of your life?  Will it be just another day, when you say the same things in the same tone of voice that you have said as long as you can remember?  Or will it be as if you suddenly find your voice, and a language that comes from somewhere deeper than your brain, stranger than your dreams, in which you simply cut loose and say, “Yes!”? 

            I am not trying to talk you into pretending to be impressed on Pentecost in a way that is not real for you.  But I do believe that the Spirit of the Lord God is running through this place right now, as powerful as if it were high voltage, and stealthy as if it were a silent ghost.  And it is not because today is somehow special and singular.  It is on the loose every day.  You have only to let yourself be open:  open to the power that is already yours.  And in due time, that Spirit will make out of you and out of us all a people that will do amazing things.  Be open.  And just you wait and see.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014

Down and Up

John 14:8-17  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

            For as long as the world lasts, we’ll probably continue thinking on some level that up is good and down is bad; that God lives somewhere in the sky; that heaven is where God lives and thus must be somewhere up, up, and away; and that if anything like Jesus or the Holy Spirit comes from heaven to earth it must involve a coming down.  In other words, it is virtually impossible for us completely to free ourselves from thinking spatially about these things. 

            What to do?

            I have long been on a program to call all that into question, enough so that people can begin thinking differently about it, a program which I continue to think is worth the effort.  But I have to admit that there is, after all, some value in the up-and-down kind of thinking, as limiting as it is.  One might even say that there is built into the human experience a predisposition to thinking that up is better than down because in all human cultures that seems to be the way we imagine spatial values, with few exceptions.  So when we come to Ascension Day, which we celebrated ten days ago, we imagine that Jesus after his resurrection went “up” although we know perfectly well that heaven, being everywhere precisely because God is everywhere, is no more up than down.  And when we come to today, Pentecost, our prayers and hymns say things like, “the Holy Spirit came down on this day from heaven, lighting upon the disciples,” and “Come down, O love divine.”  We know the limits of that language if we have been hanging around the world longer than about five years, though we still use it. 

            So, without exactly throwing in the towel, I invite you to move in the direction of seeing that there is some usefulness in thinking about life and death, God and humanity, heaven and earth, time and eternity in up-and-down terms.  Before it is over with, I think you’ll be able to see that we wind up in an amazing place where the adverbs “up” and “down” blend together and disappear.

            Let’s start with the motion of baptism, since that is the centerpiece of our Pentecost celebration.  You have heard me tell you before my mantra about baptism:  when you forget everything else about baptism remember that it is “down under and back up again.”  If you remember that, you will not likely forget that baptism is a way of ritually acting out and applying Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Down under the water is like “down into the grave.”  It is a symbolic burial.  And “back up again” is the movement of the resurrection.  Remember that the best kept secret in Christianity is that the resurrection does not happen after you die.  It happens in your baptism.  When we come out of the water and back up again, we are indeed united with the Risen Lord, and we thereafter are living in the resurrection.  It has no end, to be sure.  But its effective beginning, certainly symbolically, is in baptism.

            When you think about it, all of life is a matter of going down under and coming back up again.  Peter Senge and some colleagues describe that process in a very interesting book called Presence, one of the most deeply theological books I know, although it says nothing formulaic about God.  [Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers,  Presence:  An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (New York:  Random House/Doubleday/Currency, 2005).]  They speak of the “U,” which captures the motion of traveling downward and coming back up again. The three parts of the U are sensing (observing, becoming one with the world), presencing (retreating, reflecting, allowing inner knowing to emerge), and realizing (acting swiftly with a natural flow).  Traveling the U, going down and coming back up, involves letting go of our pre-established ways of thinking, going down into deep reflection, and coming up having let go of our own will, ready not to impose that will on a situation.  We could put this in a dozen, perhaps a hundred, different ways and it would amount to the same thing:  letting go and being open.  I suggest that that is exactly what our mythical language of “dying and rising” is getting at.  Each day, each moment, we have the opportunity to hear the call to let go, to rest in silence for a time, and to rise again, living in openness from a place quite different from our ego with its habit of controlling and imposing its will on situations. 

            Pentecost has everything to do with going down and coming up.  But it is not perhaps what you think.  It surely is not what the traditional language implies.  Pentecost is not a matter of the Holy Spirit “coming down” except in the sense that coming down can mean the great joining the small, as when an adult bends or kneels down to look a child in the eye or to hear what the child is saying or to share a moment of supreme importance with the little one.  Pentecost is an infusion.  It is a filling.  It is a breathing of life and energy into an otherwise dispirited, innervated, confused and paralyzed community.  Like all the other events in the story of salvation, Pentecost is not a one-time event, but a reality that makes itself felt time and time again.  When we feel—justifiably—that we are little more than a sack of dry bones, here comes Pentecostal wind, breathing new life into us.  When you appear to be a fallow field, just waiting to become fruitful and productive but somehow unable to do that on your own, the fire of Pentecost can rush through you like sparks through stubble, consuming all that holds you back and igniting your energy to do what you have believed was impossible.  So if you want to locate Pentecost on the U, somewhere on the journey between going down under and coming back up again, it is right there at the bottom, exploding, giving you the kick that lifts you into new life.

            But Pentecost is really even more than that.  I mentioned that last week we were celebrating the ascension of Christ.  The ascension is not a commemoration of Jesus’ flying up into the sky and out of sight, but rather that the entirety of human nature, which he himself embodied, he took with him into the very life of God.  Do you get that?  Your human nature and mine becomes a part of the godhead, the life of the Trinity, the essence of God.  No longer can we talk about God and humanity as being distinctly separate.  We get a taste of that in the gospel for today.  “Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied,” says Philip.  Jesus replies that when we have seen him we have seen the Father, because he and the Father are one.  That is powerful language!  It means that if we are united with Jesus, then we are united with God.  There is no getting around it.  Your life, your decisions, your struggles, your heartaches, your aspirations, your energies, your laughter, your work, your prayer is the ground on which you meet God.  God is in your body, God is in your mind, God is in your imagination, your dreams.  You will discover the Most High God in the most lowly depths of your own experience.  There is no place you can go where God is not.  And that is the miracle and meaning of Pentecost.  It really is quite simple.  It is about God’s Spirit being in you and your spirit, your nature, being inextricably bound to the reality of God.

            That is why Baptism is down under and back up again.  It is about traveling the U down into the grave and all the dark places and finding there the power which raises you up.  It is about journeying with Christ through the sicknesses in which you find strength, through the failures in which you learn to cope, through the times when you doubt your own worth and yet come to the indescribable peace of accepting yourself as simply human.  Baptism keeps going on and on because there is literally no end at the end of the U.  The more we travel the U, the more we see that we haven’t finished one trip before another begins.  The deaths and resurrections begin flowing together.  “Up” and “down” glide together and become indistinguishable, because the worst things can be blessings and the best things can turn out to push us to our knees.  Past, present, future all mix together in a timelessness which we mostly know through the moments that send shivers of excitement through us, or the sights and sounds that move us to tears, or from the occasional minutes when we find ourselves still in the presence of God while praying or meditating.  All of it is Pentecost.  All of it is resurrection.  All of it is taking to heart that nothing about us is or ever can be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

            Thomas Diaz and his little brother Felix are going to be baptized now.  Thomas I think is most excited by the knowledge that he is going to get a candle when he has been baptized in water and sealed by the Spirit.  The candle will burn and go out, but the fire of the Spirit never will.  It is the energy that will raise him up from every fall and the light that will shine through him and before him in every dark place he will ever go.  And that is your gift too.  Down and up, up and down:  God is in motion, and the motion of God is always God attempting, so to say, to nestle in your heart.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013