Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Mr. Eric Anthony
Pentecost C - June 5, 2022
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth… You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (John 14:15-16).
This morning I want to consider the role of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ, first at Pentecost, then in the history and present practice of the church, and finally as our hope for what the church ought to be and can be.
On Pentecost day, the disciples are “filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gives them ability” (2:4). With this ability they proclaim what Luke calls “God’s deeds of power” to a crowd of Jewish immigrants. Now, these would likely have spoken Greek, so what is the point of this new ability?
Language is the uniquely human gift. It helps form the basis of our reality as individuals and as social groups, and shapes the core of our being, the deepest part of ourselves. The miracle of Pentecost, then, is larger than the instantaneous possession of a new skill. It is the miracle of intimate communion with the Holy Spirit, which brings the gospel of peace to those who were once far off, allowing them to accept that gospel and put on Christ. On Pentecost, the body of Christ is (re-)animated as three thousand join together in the Spirit. And in this event, Jesus’s promise of greater works is fulfilled.
And from then on, the church continued in these glorious works, always acting in accord with God’s will and establishing God’s kingdom of peace on earth.
Well, not exactly.
Pentecost is a good time to consider what the body of Christ, the church, has in fact done in its two thousand year history. What followed this wonderful beginning?
The church has indeed worked wonders and miracles, and brought healing and peace to millions over its two thousand year existence after Pentecost. But that’s not the full story, not the full truth; and we need to reckon with the full truth. In addition to all the good the church has done, it has also allowed great evil to continue, and itself perpetrated great evil in our world: patriarchy, imperialism, war, persecution of minorities of all kinds, environmental degradation, and so, so much more. We know the church still commits these and other sins today, even if we do not often acknowledge them - or only acknowledge that other Christians do them. The very people who ought to have acted the best have acted the worst. The people who ought to have loved most have hated most.
We must lament. We must confess our sins to God and repent of them. And we must acknowledge that we also have been wounded by the sins of the church and the world. We must admit that the situation is overwhelming and the redemption of the church - the healing of Christ’s body - often seems impossible. Only by making this confession, only by repentance and honest longing for the kingdom, will the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of peace, abide in us.
Now, we do have another option. We could rely on peace of the world that Jesus warns against, the peace that is willful ignorance of the reality around us. It’s a very tempting option for those of us who live comfortably, who do not have our rights violated or our lives destroyed, and who have plausible deniability when we claim we don’t see others - especially our brothers and sisters in Christ - doing the violating and destroying.
Of course, to take this path is to lose all, which is why our Lord reacts so strongly when Peter beings to rebuke him for predicting his own death: “He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:22-25).
The peace of Christ comes to us when we lose our lives for his sake. So how do we do this? Through faith, hope, and love. But only when these are real, only when we use them to lay down our lives. Theologian John Caputo expresses it well: “When is faith really faith? Not when it is looking more and more like we are right, but when the situation is beginning to look impossible, in the darkest night of the soul… So, too, hope is hope not when we have every reason to expect a favorable outcome… but when it is beginning to look hopeless, when we are called on to ‘hope against hope,’ as St. Paul says (Rom. 4:18)… This is above all true of love, where loving those who are lovable or those who love you makes perfect sense. But when is love really love? When does love burn white hot? When we love those who are not lovable or who do not love us - in short, when we love our enemies. In other words, we are really on the way of faith and hope and love when the way is blocked; we are really under way when the way seems impossible, where this ‘impossible’ makes the way possible.”
Too often we give up on the impossible and seek easier ways out. We try to save our life. We give into the spirit of slavery and fall back into fear. And in fear the fight, flight, or freeze mechanism kicks. We try to control others, forsaking the nonviolence of Christ, despairing of the power of the Spirit to work through our speech and gentle actions, trying to make things happen on our own. This is how you get the crusades. This is how you get coverups of abuse. Or we flee, leaving the desolate areas, the poor and the needy, those without hope in the world, lest we become like them. We despair of changing the situation and do not want to feel like we have failed. This is how you get the suburbs and a middle class, comfortable, cultural Christianity completely lacking a prophetic voice. Or finally, we freeze, cementing the old ways of doing things, the old theologies, the old sins. We lack hope and believe the most we can do is secure what we have and ride out the storm. This is how you get an aging church with little to say to the younger generations, loudly complaining about loosening morals without seeing the liberation of those finally casting off their chains after millennia of oppression.
Let us roll out the same scroll today that Jesus opened in Nazareth and hear prophet of hope speak to us: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert… to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise” (Isa 43:19-21).
The message of Pentecost is clear:
We must heed the word of the Spirit that brings us into intimate contact with God’s deeds of power and their author, Jesus. This we do by faith in the gospel message and in the continuing presence of God in the church today, whatever our past and present unfaithfulness. For “the one who calls us is faithful, and he will [sanctify us].”
We must prophesy in the Spirit, giving voice to dreams and visions of what the church and the world might be like. This prophecy will include lament and mourning, but through these find joy. This we do by hope in the coming of the kingdom of God.
And we must do the works Jesus did, works of healing and mercy, works of forgiveness and compassion, and even greater works than these. This we do by love, laying down our very lives for one another, and especially for our enemies.
We will not do this perfectly, for it is impossible. But we worship a God of the impossible, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead. We have the Spirit, who “helps us in our weakness,” who “intercedes* with sighs too deep for words.” And let us always remember that “whenever we are weak, then we are strong.”
Amen.
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