Sermon for Pentecost
“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples in Jerusalem to give birth to the Christian Church. An event, to be sure, of mystery and wonder, it is also more than an event. It is a teaching, a doctrine, and one which gives rise to our life in the spirit, our life in communion with God.
A Greek word, Pentecost simply signifies the fiftieth day after Easter and commemorates the promise of the Ascension, the coming down of the Holy Spirit, designated as the Comforter or Strengthener. It communicates to us a profound and special reality. The descent of the Holy Spirit gives birth to the Church. That is the special reality, the reality of the spiritual community in which we “live and move and have our being.” We have forgotten, I fear, the radical nature of the Church as a spiritual body and communion. To recover this sensibility and understanding is the constant task but most especially at a time when the meaning and the reality of the Church has been so completely discredited and dismissed by those within and without the churches because it is looked at largely in sociological and political terms. Pentecost teaches us the profound truth that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God, and no truth in itself apart from God.
The story of Pentecost is the story of the redemption of the human community. In ways that deliberately recall the ancient Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, a story understood to be about human presumption as well as a just-so story about the different languages of our humanity, Pentecost celebrates the diversity of tongues and cultures and peoples by making them one. Through the diversity of tongues one thing is heard and understood by all. There is unity in and through diversity. They are one in the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost reverses Babel. One thing is heard in and through the diversity of tongues and cultures; it is the praise of God. Rather than a project of our devising, Pentecost is God’s work. And unlike the work of Creation and Redemption, Pentecost is visible and tangible to us. There is something heard and something seen, “a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire” and wondrous words that are spoken in the things that Jesus says about the Holy Spirit. Nothing is hidden. And we are made very much part of the story. This is all part of its special wonder.
O Lord our God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thine apostles and send them forth to preach the Gospel to the nations: We bless thy holy name for thy servant Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, whose labors in propagating thy Church among the English people we commemorate today; and we pray that all whom thou dost call and send may do thy will, and bide thy time, and see thy glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
