What can we say May 28? The Day of Pentecost

    {Check out my 28 minute talk, "Hope as Arsenic," which I was supposed to give in Minneapolis for the Festival of Homiletics, but due to my hospitalization and the doctor grounding me, it's on video now for their video package - and for you to view too!}

   AND: for lots of our folks it's not the Day of Pentecost, but Memorial Day. How to give a nod to the day without it overwhelming the Gospel? I've found that a mere mention of someone who died in World War II or some allusion of visiting a military cemetery covers things well enough?

    Acts 2:1-21. I’ve echoed what many have said - that Pentecost is the “reversal of Babel.” But do I then imply diversity is a problem to be fixed? At Pentecost, the miracle is understanding, not sameness. God delights in diversity and understanding. A far cry from the dominant ones saying “You must speak our language here.”

   Willie Jennings has dubbed Acts 2 “the epicenter of the revolution,” “the revolution of the intimate.” God breaks everybody open so they can be a radical new, welcoming, fully engaged community. Notice it was no grand strategy on the disciples’ part. God just did this. It was uncontrollable – like the wind, with immense if unseen power. 

 Jennings wisely notes they may well have asked for the Holy Spirit. But not this! This is real, “untamed” grace. Is it like Mary learning the Spirit has overshadowed her?

   We love the idea of Pentecost – and yet, as mainline Protestants, don’t we suffer s kind of reticence about the Holy Spirit? Which isn’t wrongheaded: I’ve heard so much sappy chatter in my lifetime about who’s got the Spirit (and thus who doesn’t), where the Spirit is (and thus isn’t), powerful emotional experiences that feel to me to be more about intuition and native-born gushing than a movement of the Spirit – so then, perhaps in the way Protestants have barely spoken of Mary in order not to be Catholic, I’ve shied away so as not to be confused with the emotivism that dominates so much of American religiosity. 

   I love Mark Noll’s summary of how Christianity spreads to other, different places: “Christianity appears more and more as an essentially pluralistic and cross-cultural faith. It appeared first in Asia, then Africa and Europe. Immediately those who turned to Christ in these ‘new’ regions were at home in the faith. When they became believers, Christianity itself became Asian, European and African. Once Christianity is rooted in someplace new, the faith itself also takes on something from that new place. It also challenges, reforms and humanizes the cultural values of that place. The Gospel comes to each person and to all peoples exactly where they are. You do not have to stop being American, Japanese, German, or Terra del Fuegian in order to become a Christian. Instead, they all find rich resources in Christianity that are perfectly fitted for their own cultural situations. It is by its nature a religion of nearly infinite flexibility because it has been revealed in a person of absolutely infinite love.”

   Maybe Pentecost isn’t talking so much as listening. Thomas Merton: “The mystery of speech and silence is resolved in Acts. Pentecost is the solution. The problem of language is the problem of sin. The problem of silence is also a problem of love. How can one really know whether to speak or not, and whether words and silence are for good or for evil, unless one understands the 2 divisions of tongues – Babel and Pentecost. Acts is a book full of speech. The apostles down downstairs and out into the street like an avalanche… Before the sun had set, they had baptized 3000 souls out of Babel into the One Body of Christ.”

   When rethinking Pentecost, it’s worth recalling that, in Judaism, Pentecost is the day that commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. And don’t be tempted to say We have the Spirit, the law is kaput. The Spirit enables the fulfillment of the law; have you read Matthew 5??  The Spirit doesn’t unleash a burst of emotion; the Spirit plants and grows holiness in us. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5). He/she is the “Spirit of Holiness” (Rom. 1:4).

   Growing things? Pentecost was also the celebration of a harvest. The Spirit, when you were sleeping, caused things to grow – and we humbly give thanks to God for the fruit of the earth. Do you garden? Or do you know someone who farms? Tell your people about the Spirit moving over the fields.

   1 Corinthians 12:3b-13. I see churches dubbing Pentecost “the birthday of the Church,” as if it were a party for a 4^th grader. If it’s a birthday celebration, it’s way more sober, almost tragicomic or ironically sad, as if the church is at some advanced age and in very poor health.

   We have squashed what we named earlier: that God loves understanding but not sameness. We church folk have tried for “agreement” to pathetic excess. If we form little clubs of semi-Christians with whom we agree, we get narcissistic, or incestuous spiritually. We forget we are all foolish in various ways – which is why we need one another, and why God gave us one another.

   And our witness? Francis Schaeffer, the godfather of modern evangelicalism, wrote powerfully in The Mark of the Christian that Jesus : “made clear what will be the distinguishing mark of the Christian: ‘Love one another.’” “It is possible to be a Christians without showing this mark, but if we expect non-Christians to know that we are Christians, we must show the mark.” He calls this “the final apologetic.” He adds this that should make us shudder: “In our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world: upon his authority, he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our observable love toward all Christians.” Wow. And spot on.

  I also admire Ephraim Radner’s thoughts in A Brutal Unity. Assessing theological strife in the Middle Ages, ferocious but never dividing the church, he suggests that “What they achieve is not so much agreement, but rather a path that allows members to be joined to the figure of Christ.”  “It was when Jesus was walking around with his disciples – and yet they were confused, mistaken, and Jesus quite deliberately included Judas, and even washed his feet and ate and drank at table with him.  The thief was already thieving, and the greed was already growing, and the disappointment in Jesus’ claims was already gnawing.  This was always a part of their unity.”  Such inept, broken people managed to succeed as God’s laborers, not so much because they were right and proved others wrong.  Tertullian noted how foes of Christianity had to admit, “See how they love.” Have we relegated Paul to weddings, when he was speaking of the church? “Love does not insist on its own way.”

   And then this, from Hans Urs von Balthasar (and notice that, by citing Schaeffer, Radner and von Balthasar, I could hardly find 3 theologians more divergent from one another – yet one on this theme of the church being one!), in Does Jesus Know Us? Do We Know Him? “We cannot find the dimensions of Christ’s love other than in the community of the church, where the vocations and charisms distributed by the Spirit are shared: each person must tell the others what special knowledge of the Lord has been shown to him.  For no one can tread simultaneously all the paths of the love given to the saints: while one explores the heights, another experiences the depths and a third the breadth.  No one is alone under the banner of the Spirit, the Son and the Father; only the whole Church is the Bride of Christ, and that only as a vessel shaped by him to receive his fullness.”

   John 20:19-23 was covered pretty thoroughly, with good illustrative stuff, in this blog just one month ago (April 16). To those thoughts I would just add, since it’s Pentecost, I always wonder if there should be a colon instead of a period after Jesus says “Receive the Holy Spirit” – since he then illustrates what that implies, what impact it will have on them, nothing emotional, but something harder: “If you forgive…” Mind you, the church doesn’t feel they hold such “keys” any longer. But I wonder. When we condemn or ostracize, isn’t that a mis-use of that key, or a loud witness that the Holy Spirit is not in us at all?

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   Check out my Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, which examines each act in worship and after exploring each in depth, asks how we and our people might actually enact that is daily life.