Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Day of Pentecost- Sunday, May 20, 2018
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
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| Br. Scott Borden, OHC |
Of all the principal feasts in the church year, Pentecost is near the top of my list. Sure, I love Christmas... and yes Easter is great... All Saints Day... I'll give you Epiphany... But Pentecost is right up there... easily ahead of Ascension and Trinity... For in this feast that third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, gets the bulk of the attention.
One of my favorite pastimes to prepare for sermons is to see what The Rt. Rev. Mr. Google has to say. And, as you might guess, the answer is plenty. But as with all things Google, you have to add a fair amount of salt to everything.
One helpful site was able to give me a selection of sermons by denominational category. There were 5 Roman Catholic sermons, 3 Anglican sermons, 32 Church of God sermons, and a whopping 98 Baptist sermons (I'm guessing mostly Southern, but it was not specified).
Well what self-respecting Meyers Briggs ST could resist such an attractive nuisance... Not me.
As I was hoping, there was a pattern. All 5 of the Roman Catholic sermons began with a nod to the day being the birthday of the church. All 3 Anglican sermons seemed to have nothing in common with each other... but they were very tasteful. I mostly avoided the Church of God sermons. And the Baptist trove all seemed highly interested in the various gifts of the Spirit.
OK – so I did delve into one of the Church of God sermons... It started out with the observation that the Book of Acts up to the point we heard about today is much like the Genesis books... Genesis tells the story of creation until sin rears its ugly head. And Acts tells the story of the formative church until Apostacy strikes... I clicked away after that.
Google did not seem to be brining to me the Spirit of Wisdom...
The notion of Pentecost as the birthday of the church is certainly venerable. I've even heard of a practice in some congregations of singing "Happy Birthday" to The Church – a practice I would have to describe as a crime against liturgy...
If by "the church" we all understand that it refers to the gathering of people and not so much to the institutions and hierarchy, I'd more enthusiastic, though singing "Happy Birthday" would still be a crime... But I suspect that for many, including many leading the singing, the institution is exactly what is meant.
Across the street at the "washed in the blood Pentecostal holiness church" the focus is not so much on birthdays as on ecstatic prayer. Over the years I've had the honor of being present for a number of ecstatic prayer services – I've even sung in a gospel quartet that fueled some of the ecstasy. I have far more respect for that style of worship after having been in the middle of it – but I'm also quite certain that is not the language of worship for me.
So, what can I make of Pentecost if I am neither comfortably Pentecostal nor willingly traditional? All this speaking in tongues is intriguing, but also, for me, profoundly uncomfortable. And yes, I have been involved in worship services where folks all around me were verbalizing extatically in some unknown tongue.
Curiously, the Lectionary gives us an alternative today to reading the story of Pentecost from the book of Acts – which would seem like having an option on Easter of not reading the story of Jesus rising... but there you have it.
We could have read from Ezekiel – the story of the valley of dry bones to be exact. This is one of the greatest illustrations of a mystical vision – of the action of the Spirit – a vision in which Ezekiel sees a monstrous collection of dead bones take on sinew and flesh and draw breath. Its relevance to a day when the Spirit is so prominent is profound. For breath, pneuma, is Spirit. The ancient languages use the same word for breath and for spirit. These bones come to life and take in the Holy Spirit when they take in breath. It is another view of the action of Pentecost.
Most of us who hang around monasteries and pray a lot have experiences now and then of messages coming through from some spiritual source... they are, to a greater or lesser degree, mystical in-breakings or encounters with Spirit. If you have them enough and on a fairly grand scale, then you can be called a Mystic. On this Day of Pentecost when we remember this gigantic mystical/spiritual in-breaking, it's worth remembering a bit of our mystical heritage.
The religious tradition is more littered with mystics of one sort or another than we sometimes think. Some argue that Ignatius of Loyal and Martin of Luther had one common trait – they were mystics. England, and it is not obvious why, has contributed more than its fair share of mystics, though the Church of England is, by and large, a staid and highly intellectual, or just plain drowsy, institution. Yet it has produced luminaries like William Blake, Evelyn Underhill, and John and Charles Wesley to name a few. The Wesley's are described as having triggered the great awakening in the Church of England that leads in a fairly direct line to the Pentecostal movement in the US.
In the US, our mystical tradition spans centuries. The Quakers and the Shakers have deep mystical roots. Jonathan Edwards was a great leader and mystic within the New England Congregational movement. Martin Luther King Jr was a deeply mystical presence. When he told us he'd seen the place where all God's children could play together, I don't think that was just incredibly beautiful prose, I think it was an honest retelling of a mystical experience.
All of that is to justify my own little experience preparing for this sermon. I was pondering what to make of all that speaking in tongues and such. I was focused on talking and communicating and languages and that sort of thing. And then I heard in my mind a voice that said "It's not about speaking. It's about listening."
It's great for the Apostles that they get to speak in, apparently, every language in the known world. But the miracle is that everyone gets to listen. The Spirit speaks in such a way that everyone can hear. The mighty and the meek, the rich and the poor, the clean and the corrupt, people of the right race and people of the wrong race... everyone gets to listen.
Surely the Spirit, not bound in any way to time or place, speaks to us today in a way that we can listen – in a way that is tuned perfectly to each and every one of us. But we tend to want to talk rather than to listen.
In the Gospel reading today Jesus laments that he has much to say to the disciples, but that they cannot bear to hear it – they cannot bear to listen... But not to worry – the Spirit of Truth will come and lead us into all truth.
That is our journey. We still cannot bear to hear all that God has to say, but bit by bit we are being led by the Spirit in the direction of truth – of true knowledge of God's love. But we cannot know God's love without sharing God's love.
Kenneth Boulding, one of my favorite economists – who also happened to be a devout Quaker and mystical poet – says in a sonnet:
We know not how that day is to be born
whether in tongues of fire and wings of flame
as once at Pentecost the Spirit came
or whether imperceptibly as dawn.
But as the seed must grow into a tree,
so life is love, and love the end must be."
It strikes me that for most of my life I have thought of Pentecost as a day for speaking. But the story from Acts is as much about listening as speaking... about drawing breath – spirit...
So in the Spirit of Pentecost think of nothing to say. Just breath. Come Holy Spirit.
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