The Day of Pentecost A - May 28, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

The Day of Pentecost, Year A - Sunday, May 28, 2023

 

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio of the sermon

I love that voice within the tradition that reminds us that however much we study, whatever we think we know with certainty and say about God definitively, we are never doing more than pointing toward the apprehension of the mystery that even in the revelation of Christ remains mystery. “If you think you have come to understand God, it is not God that you have understood” is often how it is phrased.  Or, “if on the road you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”  It is not that we are left ignorant, but that our knowing is unavoidably subjective and partial.  The apophatic stream of spirituality is a good balance to an abundance of language about God in that the apophatic proclaims what God is not, the utter inadequacy of language, the necessity of mystery and silence alongside proclamation and creed.

So, if you have already decided that you know what the feast of Pentecost is, what it means, then what you understand is not Pentecost.  Bridging the historical event to our world means stepping with great humility and care into the task of taking into account what the event says about God and holding those claims as the basis by which we implore the Spirit of the God who was present in the upper room.  The Holy Spirit comes to expectant and open disciples, yet on her own time and in her own way.  The Holy Spirit is not a respecter of barriers between persons and effects understanding across different languages and cultures and begins to make of many a new oneness that transcends labels and hierarchies.  The coming of the Holy Spirit is a promise fulfilled and an ultimate fulfillment that awaits us. This reality is given fresh meaning and hope. 

A bit of unpacking these ways of the Spirit…
Because Acts 2 is often characterized as a joyful coming together of divided peoples, it is good to remember that in that social context this shared understanding of separated peoples in the one Spirit would have been absurd, irrational, offensive, and dangerous.  Ethnic and racial divisions and identities gathering together and understanding one another undermines the social order and fractures a system of empire built on perpetuating rivalry and violence.  And yet both in the gathering and its shared experience of humanizing the enemy, as St. Peter explains, God’s long-promised dream of justice and neighborliness based on mutual respect and sharing is coming into being.  No longer is identity and security based on the terms of Rome - in subjugation, victimization, and capitulation - but in the divine image given by God from which all persons derive value and acceptance.  Thus the first moments of what will come to be called the Christian church are characterized by barrier-dismantling respect and equality of men and women, young and old, Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  As Paul will say later in the letter to the Galatians, those labels are no longer authoritative, but oneness in Christ is the eternal reality of human life.  And so these believers find themselves in an either/or of the story of prejudice and segregation or hospitality and reconciliation. 

Let’s apply this vision to the current state of American Christianity.  If Christians are to be known for our love for one another, our care for the outsider and needy, our welcome of the stranger, our focus on reconciliation and respect, how are we doing?  Certainly followers of Jesus live out all of these new creation ways of being in countless acts of care.  But there are also ways in which data point to the opposite: the sad realities of decline, scandal and widening and deepening polarization within and among denominations and churches.  The world of just a few years ago which was relatively familiar and stable has slipped through our fingers.  In the face of such change, some Christians are choosing to hunker down and cling to a romanticized vision of the past, ignoring or attacking the swirl of social, political, and religious change happening around us.  Others view this isolation as fundamentally unfaithful to Jesus’ call to love the outcast and victim and have decided that the church in its current institutional form is basically hopeless and that direct engagement with practical justice work is what is needed.    

The story of Pentecost gives us a way forward that is better than either being stuck in a past we cannot recover or seeking to bring about a future that is beyond our power. We can be realistic and hopeful. We can believe that the vision of Pentecost community is still relevant, still God’s dream, and acknowledge that this dream will bring suffering - misunderstanding, suspicion, rejection.  In liminal time, we are invited to grieve and hope.  Grieve what is dead and is not coming back.  Hope toward what is possible, what new opportunities unfold within our imaginations.  I saw a conversation with a bishop recently who said, “we are experiencing Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday all at the same time.”  I regularly see stories about the increase of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and isolation.  That churning of disorientation, anxiety, and excitement you feel? Welcome to the club.  There is no magic fix, no instant escape in a new structure, program, movement, or event that promises to alleviate our fears.  The gift the disciples received was about how the Holy Spirit would blow through their prejudices, their grievances, their privilege, and their entitlement to make possible a church where brother and sister were the only labels that had any meaning. From that gift, the community has an identity and purpose.

The Holy Spirit is offering us two gifts needed to be disciples in this era: expectant readiness and prophetic imagination.  In expectant readiness, we remember that the Spirit takes the initiative, the Spirit brings illumination and clarity for action, the Spirit is the reconciler and unitive power of the church.  We almost always prefer order, control, predictability, and immediacy.  When we are humble and trusting, we have to suffer the death of what we think God should do, what would benefit us, and how we can take credit.  God ushers us into the unknown and unknowable to remind us that being fragile, mortal, finite creatures is not a problem to be solved - God knows that is what we are - God made us that way! - but that it is in our very need and limit and dependence that the Holy Spirit blows in and through us - not because we are special and own the copyright - but so that we know we are earthen vessels of the holy, the treasure is sheer gift that we do not control or possess even as we are instruments of its glory.

The phrase “prophetic imagination” comes from Walter Brueggemann, who wrote in the book of the same name, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy.  The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation…. We must do what we can to open up our imaginations to a radically different set of future possibilities…”  Brueggemann goes on to point toward the practices of prophetic hope that subvert the cosmic and social powers of division.  Generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness which continually seek to recognize and honor the human dignity of the neighbor - these are the ways we dissent from empire and declare that Jesus is Lord.  Our identity and vocation is to disrupt and subvert the forces of division and domination through acts of hopeful resistance in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We Christians believe that in the end, in a new heaven and new earth, what is now obscure will be made clear, what is now partial will be made complete, what we have not seen will be seen, what we cannot imagine will be real, and we will enjoy Christ face-to-face with brothers and sisters from every tribe and language and people and nation forever and ever.  The end that began with Christ, continued at Pentecost, and breaks into our present with fresh wind, renewed hope, awakened imagination, can continue its presence and work in us and in our world.  To the One who calls us, prepares us, prospers our efforts, and holds us in life be glory and praise, now and forever. Amen.

Day of Pentecost - June 5, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Mr. Eric Anthony

Pentecost C - June 5, 2022

Acts 2:1-21

Romans 8:14-17

John 14:8-17, (25-27)

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

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.

Day of Pentecost - May 23, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

The Day of Pentecost - Sunday, May 23, 2021

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

God chose a most auspicious day of crowded diversity in Jerusalem to usher the body of Christ on their new and various endeavors. There was no happenstance on the day chosen for the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Christ, to take center stage.

*****

The name Pentecost comes to us from the Hellenist name for one of three pilgrimage festivals of the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew name of this festival is Shavuot. Our contemporary Jewish brothers and sisters started celebrating their version of Pentecost/Shavuot last week.

Shavuot in the first century had many layers of meaning, some tracing back to Passover. On Passover -- another pilgrimage festival -- the Jewish people had been freed from their enslavement to Pharaoh. On Shavuot, they were given the Torah and became a nation committed to serving God.

Shavuot also was a festival for the first harvest of wheat and was also referred to as the festival of first fruits.

Shavuot attracted a lot of pilgrims in Jerusalem. As one of the three main festivals, it would have obligated all male Israelites within 20 miles of Jerusalem to come to the temple for worship.

Many proselytes (gentiles who had converted to Judaism) and many Israelites settled abroad would have made the effort to travel to Jerusalem for this occasion.

The reading from Acts today describes Jews who have traveled from regions as remote from Jerusalem as present-day Libya, Italy and Turkey - in a time when long-distance travel was arduous.

And for this festival of the end of grain harvests, servants would traditionally have been given leave for the day. Many servants and probably quite a few slaves would have taken this opportunity to join in the celebrations.

So, I hope you get a sense of how crowded, cosmopolitan and busy Jerusalem would have been on this day of Shavuot. Think: St Peter’s square on Easter morning or Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

*****

And most of this crowd would have communicated in a variety of languages. But the most useful to communicate with other linguistic groups than your own would have been the Koine. Koine was a common form of the Greek language.

Koine is important to mention for this feast of Pentecost for you could argue that’s the only language that would have been needed.

It was, to the first century eastern Mediterranean, what international English is today to the arena of globalization. How often nowadays do we consider that if the message has been broadcast in English, the whole world has surely heard it?

Most people would have understood a good deal of Koine. Many educated people would have been proper speakers of it. But for most of them, it would not have been their mother tongue -- with all that a mother tongue carries in emotional richness and nuance.

Pentecost was the Koine name for Shavuot because it came on the 50th day after Passover. The root of Pentecost is Pente for 5. Why 50 days? Well, one of the Passover mitzvahs (good deeds) was counting up daily a “week of weeks” until an offering of the first harvest of wheat could be made in the temple at Shavuot. Seven weeks is 49 days. Shavuot comes on the 50th day. Most Jews to this day, consider the word Pentecost does not capture what Shavuot means.

*****

So our Christian narrative of Pentecost is not happening on Shavuot gratuitously. On Shavuot, the disciples of Jesus are hoping for a “breather” of a holiday together, but not the “breather” they’re going to get. The disciples have been on an emotional roller-coaster for about 2 months now.

It started gloriously with the festive entry of their teacher into Jerusalem. It then quickly unraveled in confrontations culminating in the arrest, torture, crucifixion and death of Jesus on the eve of Passover (of which Shavuot is a continuation).

And then, when they felt most lost, anguished and guilty, came the incredible and yet real resurrection of Jesus. But that did not constitute the happy end yet.

After his appearance and teaching to a variety of disciples, Jesus is removed into heaven, leaving the disciples at a loss once more, though a very different one this time.

Would you feel a bit stressed in their place? I reckon I would be a thorough mess of paradoxical feelings and disorientation, if I were in that Jerusalem house on the morning of Shavuot.

*****

And on that very morning, these good Jews have gathered together, supposedly to celebrate this festival as a community; a group of insiders glued together by amazing experiences.

As our Br. Randy once suggested, they now feel “Home Alone”, without the physical presence of Jesus to exhort them to do the right thing.

He has promised them an Advocate, one who would go with them, teach them, and ultimately defend them in judgment. But for now, they are staying put in Jerusalem and going about their usual ways.

*****

And then, quite suddenly, the house seems to come alive with rushing currents of wind that howl. I imagine the house, as in a cartoon, when an explosion makes all the shutters and doors bump on their hinges and buckle as if expanding. And just as suddenly, the disciples’ heads are as if on fire. If nothing will throw you out into the streets, this probably should.

The disciples become part of the Spirit’s rush; they flow with it. And they start to converse with the crowd of onlookers in the adjacent streets who have come to see what the commotion is all about.

And whatever language it is that the disciples think they are speaking, they are heard in their interlocutors’ mother tongue, whichever that happens to be.

I imagine the disciples hearing themselves and hearing the questions and interjections that respond to them in various languages that they don’t know, and yet, now do speak, and trying to not stop to think about it, for it’s too weird for words but it is obviously working anyway.

They proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, risen and ascended in words that touch the hearts and minds of the many Shavuot pilgrims they meet.

They convey to their fellow Israelites and to the proselytes that the “Age to Come” is here and now, Peter even channels the prophet Joel to convey that.

And word gets around, in whatever language. And more locals and foreigners come running to see and hear -- in their own tongue -- what these simple Galileans have to say.

*****

And so, millennia after Babel divided humanity in misunderstanding and mistrusting entities, the moment of Pentecost gives birth to the universal church. It reverses the curse of divisiveness; not by effacing the differences but by making deep communication possible across them.

As a man who became an Episcopalian on the day of Pentecost 2000, I appreciate how the Holy Spirit, with a somewhat Anglican touch, I may add, demonstrates the effectiveness of spreading the gospel in the vernacular of the people you are reaching out to -- no matter what your language of origin may be.

*****

And so, on this day of Shavuot, God chooses to change the arena and the medium of the gospel. After freely constraining himself to the human limitations of a human life (time, space, suffering); after experiencing human life from within, (as Irenaeus described in the sermon we heard last night) the Spirit chooses to give godself to the nascent church.

We now host God in our deepest self; whether we let God inform us or resist God’s inspiration. For we are still free; free to tune into the Spirit or not, but unconditionally provided-for in God’s Love. We are all sharing in the first fruits of God’s harvest in the Christ Jesus whose Spirit lives in us.

*****

So,will I let my heart, mind and soul catch fire? Will I turn to whatever neighbor is at hand and share the best news ever in a way that transcends our differences? Will you?

It’s early days yet. It’s quite soon to tell whether the Early Church, here assembled, will hear the gospel and stand up for God.

But it’s never too late to be joined to the cornerstone which the builders rejected. We can yet build up the Kingdom of God’s Love, God’s Republic of Universal Welfare.

*****

In closing, let us pray with a verse from Psalm 51 that seems fitting for this feast of Pentecost:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your holy spirit from me.

(Psalm 51:10-11)

Amen.

The Day of Pentecost - May 31, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

The Day of Pentecost - May 31, 2020

Numbers 11:24-30

Acts 2:1-21
John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” Jump back people! We got violent wind, tongues of fire, and bold preaching! That’s some good stuff!

It was the day of Pentecost, the Festival of Weeks, Shavuot, the Jewish celebration of the first fruits of summer, and the celebration of the giving of the law to Moses at Mount Sinai. Devout Jews are gathered together to celebrate what they believe; that everything we grow and everything we have comes from the hand of God, and the most precious of all is the Torah, the gift of the Law. All are gathered together in one place, and what happens? The Holy Spirit interrupts… a party. 

I can just hear myself: “This is inconsiderate. I know Jesus told us he would send us an advocate, but I mean, he should have given an indication of when this was going to happen so we could be prepared. Seriously, he should have scheduled this with us.” But the Holy Spirit is not concerned with my need for neatness, order, organization and preparation. No, the Spirit shows up when she shows up. Our job is to watch and wait and get moving when it shows. The Holy Spirit interrupts what we know or think we know. And it interrupts violently… with wind… and fire… and Galileans.

If you know me just a little bit, you know that I am going to read this morning’s story from the Acts of the Apostles and the thing that is really going to jump at me is the whole bit about: Are not all these who are speaking in our languages Galileans? … They are filled with new wine. And I can most certainly relate with Peter’s righteous indignation when we stands, raises his voice and says: "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning.”

 

Are not all these Galileans? … Surely they’re drunk. That’s what jumps at me, especially during this past week when I watched in disbelief a video of a white person in Central Park calling the police on a black man who insisted that she abide by the park’s rules and put her dog on a leash. God forbid this black man would challenge her sense of white privilege. “I’m going to call the cops. I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” Are not all these Galileans? … Surely they’re drunk. That’s what jumps at me in this reading, especially this past week when I watched, with a certain amount of disturbing numbness, a video of a handcuffed black man face-down on the street pleading for his life because he is struggling to breathe as a white police officer mercilessly presses down on the black man’s neck with his knee until the black man stops breathing. Are not all these African-Americans?... Surely they’re drunk.

Even if we have a hard time with the whole idea of miracle, we can get the whole notion of the Holy Spirit interrupting through wind and fire because we can insert the visuals… but Galileans? It really points to the terrible human propensity to make assumptions based on where someone is from, or what they look like, or where they went to school, or where they work, or how much money they have… 

And what about the assumptions we make in order to distance ourselves from the person to whom we are pointing our finger? The first thing I thought when I watched that video of the white woman calling the cops on the black man was: “She is a racist conservative.” But she is not. She identifies as a progressive who supports progressive causes and supported Obama’s presidential campaign. So much for what I am sure I know and my neatly black and white assumptions! So when I read: Are not all these Galileans?... and my mind translates it to Are not all these Hispanics?... Surely they’re drunk, I know in my heart that I can choose to leave it at the level of my ego, or I can engage in the much harder exercise of taking a hard look at myself and confessing with humility that I too have Galileans of my own. So when the Holy Spirit interrupts violently through wind and fire, oh yes, that is scary. But when the Holy Spirit gets to us through whoever the Galileans are in our life, speaking a language we can understand… what do we do with that?

Christianity is a religion of language. We monks recite and chant psalms full of words throughout the day. In the creation stories of Genesis, God births the very cosmos into existence by speaking: "And God said."  "In the beginning was the Word," we read about the Incarnate Christ in the beautiful prologue of John's gospel. We profess our faith in the language of creeds and prayers and liturgy and music all full of words. And in the Book of Acts, on the day of Pentecost, the disciples were “filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." 

Those of us who speak more than one language can really understand that language is much more than its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. A language carries culture, history, psychology, and spirituality. To speak a language other than one’s own native language is to orient oneself differently in the world- to see differently, to hear differently, to process reality differently. To speak across barriers of race, culture, religion, or politics is to challenge stereotype, and to risk sneers, mockery and ridicule. It is a brave and disorienting act.

What language do we really need to be speaking at this moment in time when our nation seems to be growing more and more tribal and even faith communities turn on each other for lack of effort to learn to understand each others language? How can we learn to speak and comprehend each other’s language so that we can experience the limits of our own words and perspectives? How can we learn to speak and comprehend each other’s language so that we can discover that God's deeds are far too great for a single tongue and a single fluency?

O come, Creator Spirit, come and make within our souls your home; grant us your seven-fold gift of grace: wisdom, understanding, counsel, courage, knowledge, godliness, and joyful awareness of your grandeur. O come, Creator Spirit, come and enrich our tongues and speech with grace, that we may all become your prophets able to speak and comprehend languages across barriers of race, culture, religion, or politics. O come, Creator Spirit, come and shed your love in all our heart, that we may all truly become your incarnate Love and the true Body of Christ. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Day of Pentecost - Year B: May 20, 2018

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.

Br. Scott Borden, OHC 

This Day of Pentecost is such a show stopper - with its Tongues of Fire and its speaking in tongues... its mighty wind... and the promise of "another advocate" - which seems strangely stiff in the midst of the swirl of other images... Who can get all that excited about another Lawyer...

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.

Day of Pentecost Year A- June 4, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Day of Pentecost- Year A - Sunday,  June  4, 2017

Br. Roy Parker

The readings have been selected partly for the sake of illustrating a less institutional possibility for the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the reading from Numbers the story goes that the majority of chosen elders stuck to the plan of following Moses out of the encampment to the Tent of Meeting to take their places round about the Tent. In due course the Spirit of God came to rest upon them, causing them, in chorus, to prophecy ecstatically once and then no more. On the other hand two of those chosen happened to stay behind in the encampment for whatever reason. 

A liturgy I once attended depicted them as illustrating the accusation leveled at those in the Upper Room in the Book of Acts - as being drunk on new wine - and the point made by Numbers is that these two who stayed in the camp were gifted with sustained prophecy, whereas those who obeyed the rules prophesied but once.

This alarmed Joshua, Moses' assistant, who proposed putting an end to such behavior. But to the apparent challenge to his authority Moses makes the more vigorous response:  "Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!" Apparently the gift of the Spirit is not limited to those who strictly follow the rules; in fact, it appears to be enhanced by a little transgression, a reminder that sometimes toeing the line gets you exactly nowhere. Bp. James Pike used to refer to the apostolic succession as "the sacred plumbing," and this incident in Numbers would be a sort of renegade piping.

Then there's the reading from John which emphasizes the general availability of the Spirit because Jesus calls out for every thirsty one to come to him and drink. But according to Raymond Brown, the oracle of the John Gospel,  the verse "out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water" requires adjustment. He observes of the present translation that its unChristological interpretation of the source of living waters is due to Eastern Christian influence, affected by the Eastern reverence for Origen who emphasized that the perfect gnostic could become - through spiritual understanding of the Scriptures - a bubbling source of light and knowledge for others. In other words, the better reading of the verse would be "out of his (Christ's) heart shall flow rivers of living water," or "from within him shall flow rivers of living water," which is consistent with the Fourth Gospel's presentation of Jesus as the Wisdom figure par excellence. For example, compare "On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink . . . " with the Proverbs verses "Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. She calls from the highest places in the town . . . Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed " (Prov.1:20-21; 9:3,5) The various passages about Jesus as the true bread, we're reminded, refer primarily to the nourishment offered by the wisdom of his teaching.

The Spirit offers herself as a torrent, but how do we come to Jesus and drink? In the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, Jesus says, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is who is saying to you 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." So, asking is involved as well as coming and believing.

Asking for the living water of the Spirit has a varied treatment in the Gospels. Jesus tells us in the Synoptic Gospels that for us who know how to give good gifts to our children the Holy Spirit is guaranteed in abundance if we ask our heavenly Father, but of course we must ask. Yet in the Fourth Gospel Jesus says, "I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him."

I suggest that these scenarios of our asking and Jesus' asking can be harmonized under certain conditions such that our asking springs from an unknown part of ourselves as demonstrated by the Oregonians who at the cost of their lives intervened on behalf of the Muslim teens being abused on the train.  There the asking is a kind of casting oneself upon the torrent of living waters which flow from Jesus' inner being, a real abandonment of oneself to divine providence, where the agent is actually Jesus.

 
This can be put in more electronic terms: When the ordinary image of God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt, a Christian hard-wiring kicks in, activating the circuitry printed on our motherboards, including images of the Crucified like the serpent elevated in the wilderness for healing. There our asking and the asking of Jesus become united.

I'll further suggest that the Spirit Herself leads us in the quest, as illustrated by this Billy Collins poem about angels who, after all, as ministering spirits, are understudies for the Holy Spirit.

Of all the questions you might want to ask 

about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time 

besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, 

their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole 

in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word? 

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive 

in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards? 

No, the medieval theologians control the court.

The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions, 

billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful 

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians. 

(Questions About Angels, in Sailing Alone Around the Room, New and Collected Poems, Billy Collins, Random House, 2002.)

This is a picture of how our better angels can lead us in the dance, and it calls to mind an episode in James Michener's novel The Source. In a nineteenth-century Russian village a friend of the local Jewish community is hanging out with colleagues in the saloon when he realizes that a pogrom against the Jews is building around him. He slips out a side door and runs to warn them, and discovers to his amazement that they have commenced a communal dance to purify themselves for death. They have commenced a communal dance, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.