Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
The spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
The Book of Common Prayer tells us that there are seven principal feasts observed in our church. Traditionally and by common consensus Easter, the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord, is the principal festival of the church year—the feast of feasts, if you will—but next in dignity is today's feast, that of Pentecost. It is the day that closes out the long Easter cycle that we began more than ninety days ago on Ash Wednesday. And it's a great feast…isn't it? Well, let’s be honest: for most of us, it's not.
A recent article in the [UK] Church Times was titled: “In the Parish: why is Pentecost undervalued?” The author, Sally Welch, begins by saying that Pentecost as a festival made very little impact on her as a child. Then fast forwarding to young parenthood, she notes:
…I was startled one Sunday by the appearance of jumpers and scarves of vivid scarlet making a strange contrast to the duns and heathers of the rest of the church going outfits. “It’s Pentecost!” crowed an over-enthusiastic curate. “We celebrate by wearing red!” This was my first introduction—a congregation-wide wardrobe malfunction—to one of the major feast days of the Christian Church.
I think we've all had such experiences, some rather more unfortunate than the wardrobe malfunction that Ms. Welch refers to. I've seen red streamers, felt banners with multicolored butterflies or silver doves, sheet cakes celebrating the birthday of the church, very large puppets, birds—preferably white—set free though usually not venturing very far, the gospel proclaimed in assorted languages, and various other liturgical actions, all well-intentioned perhaps but faintly embarrassing, at least to me. My favorite story is from my parish in Harrisburg PA where one year the children were all given helium-filled red balloons. Inevitably several escaped and got tangled in the overhead fans where they remained dangling throughout the hot summer and into autumn, limp and spent and altogether a rather sad memorial of a distant feast.
Why is it so hard to celebrate Pentecost in a way that engages us at a deep level? Partly of course it has to do with the very subject matter, which in this case is the very figure of the Holy Spirit. What do we make of this Holy Spirit? Who is this Spirit and what is its nature and its job description and how does it fit into the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity? Happily, next Sunday is Trinity Sunday, and I'm confident that our preacher will unfold this mystery for us once and for all. But today we are asked or invited or forced to reflect on this a bit...perhaps in anticipation of next Sunday’s great reveal.
One of the reasons it is so hard for us to wrap our hearts and minds around this feast is that there is not just one Scriptural story pointing to the outpouring of the Spirit, however we might understand her, but several. We are all familiar of course with the account from the Book of Acts which takes pride of place. And what a story it is. Ten days ago, we celebrated the Ascension where, as Jesus departs from his friends he tells them to wait for the promised gift of the Spirit. And they wait for ten days praying together and likely getting a little antsy. And suddenly the Spirit is poured out upon them--tongues of fire resting on their heads, people speaking in languages that were understood by others without benefit of Google Translate, new energy, new direction, renewed purpose and a novel way of being in the world, a way that would become known as Christian. It's all very exciting, even if it doesn't make you want to wave a red streamer.
But there is another story, one of several, which also speaks of the outpouring of this mysterious Spirit. We heard this morning the Evangelist John offer us a rather different account. In his version, there's no waiting fifty days. It's Easter day in the early evening and the disciples are gathered in Jerusalem in fear and confusion, with locked doors and locked hearts when suddenly Jesus is there with them. In a model of succinctness but with marvelous energy, Jesus twice greets his disciples with the word “Peace.” He shows them his wounded hands and side as if to confirm his identity. And he breathes on them. (I think most of you are aware that in both Hebrew and Greek, the word for breath is the same as the word for spirit, so there’s a lot at play here.) And then Jesus doesn’t simply invite them, but commands them: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And he sends them out to be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation in an unforgiving and alienated and alienating world.
These two stories are quite different, but they are not contradictory. In some ways they complement each other deeply. And which are we celebrating today…God breathing God’s spirit again into the clay that is Adam and you and me? God overthrowing the linguistic confusion and pride of the Tower of Babel? I hope both, and perhaps many others as well. We can have it both ways. Yet the question remains: who is this Spirit of which both stories speak?
Consider for a minute the possibility of looking at the wind or at breath. In a sense we can never do that except perhaps with very sophisticated scientific instruments or under certain unusual circumstances. In everyday life we don't look directly at wind or breath. At best what we look at are the effects of the wind and breath. We notice the fluttering of leaves on a tree or waves moving over grasslands or clouds scudding across the skies. Perhaps we feel a cooling caress on our cheeks or hear a fierce howling. Sometimes it’s the destructive effect of forceful winds uprooting trees or driving wildfires. Or the mysterious scent of distant flowers or a decaying carcass or whatever. It's the wind, the air, the breath that brings us these. But it is not given for us to see the wind. We know it by its effects. I believe it is the same with the Holy Spirit. As Jesus says in another context: “You will know them by their fruits.”
The spirit of God, the spirit of Jesus, that which/whom we call the Holy Spirit can't be apprehended directly, but we can see it and experience its effects. We see it in creative work around us. We see it in surprising reconciliation between and within people. We come to know it in a thousand little acts of love which punctuate world and our lives. And we celebrate it in the experience of human solidarity. St. Paul in that wonderful passage from his Letter to the Galatians offers a list of the fruits of the Spirit, extensive but by no means exhaustive: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Paul adds: “Against such things there is no law.” No indeed. See these and while we are not directly seeing the Spirit, we are seeing the Spirit’s footprints. Become these, and we become Spirit bearers whatever our faith or family or lack thereof.
We can’t, I’m afraid, define the Spirit or reduce Spirit to a concept or a category. But we can rest assured that whenever and wherever God’s spirit is loosed upon the world, if these signs are present, there is God. And we can be equally certain that God’s spirit does not act by anger, hatred, ignorance, rudeness, envy, exploitation, indignity or a multitude of other sad and destructive attitudes, habits or works which oppose and frustrate the Spirit of the living God.
On Pentecost, I often think of my experience as a child growing up in a Polish religious tradition. And among Poles, as among almost all the Slavic peoples, Pentecost is not much about red vestments. In fact, in Polish the name of the feast is Nieziela Zielone, that is to say, Green Sunday. And on that morning—terribly ecologically unsound but what did we know back then? —whole birch trees were cut down and set up at the doors of the church and around the altar and the pulpit. There was no mistaking it: Pentecost was and is above all else a feast of life, a feast of new creation, a festival of new birth. Yes, this Slavic custom likely points back to a pre-Christian agricultural festival. So, I might add, do the Jewish festivals of Passover and Shavous, the latter otherwise known as Pentecost among Greek-speaking Jews. It is a folk custom that speaks with an insight that begs to be emphasized. And that is that the Spirit of God, however we understand Spirit, is all about life, abundant life, fullness of life. And that God is on the side of life always: yesterday, today and forever.
Some of you may remember our late brother Roy Parker whose calligraphy was so beautifully done and so popular, and none more so than his simple work that quotes Irenaeus of Lyon, a second-century Bishop. It says simply: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” That, my friends, is Pentecost today and tomorrow.
But remember there is a second line to this epigram from Bishop Irenaeus which is equally important: “…and that life consists in beholding God.”
May we each today catch some glimpse of God or God’s footprints, in the power and agency of the life-giving Spirit.
And now, friends, perhaps it is time to pick up those red streamers and party. Amen.
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