“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”
Pentecost counters and redeems our empirical obsessions, it seems to me, the deeply entrenched idea – and it is actually important to remember that it, too, is an idea – that reality is essentially and only what can be sensed and experienced materially. To the contrary, some of the most important things in life are precisely what cannot be seen and known empirically, that is to say, through sense experience, nor can they be measured in the way one thinks to measure the world of our senses. Marina Warner’s observation about education relates to the natural, “The things that matter most cannot be measured.” The marvel of Pentecost is that it opens us out to an important intellectual and spiritual idea that belongs to religion, particularly the Christian religion, namely, that the things which cannot be seen and experienced are made known through the sensible.
Pentecost marks the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples gathered once again “with one accord in one place,” this time after Christ’s Ascension. Such things as the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Spirit are empirically meaningless – we can make no sense of such dislocations of time and space; they are simply beyond the empirical. And yet the way in which the Ascension and Pentecost are made known to us is through the sensible and empirical. And perhaps, nowhere more profoundly than in the story of Pentecost as Acts presents it.
“Suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind … and there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire.” Sounds and sights through which something is communicated but only through similies, through metaphor. “As of a rushing mighty wind” which is to say that it is not a rushing mighty wind; “like as of fire” which is a far different than saying that it is fire. And what is the ‘it’, here? The spiritual reality of God the Holy Ghost, the invisible yet effective presence of God with us.
As Jesus makes clear, the Holy Ghost is the Comforter, the strengthener. He who dwells in us is the one whom the Father sends in Jesus’ name. We are dealing with the spiritual mystery of God as Trinity, something which can only be taught to us through revelation. Revelation is simply what God makes known to us about himself and about ourselves, too. Pentecost uses the images of wind and fire to signal the spiritual power and truth of God and our lives with God through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. It can’t be quantified; it has to be experienced not sensibly but intellectually and to be sure emotionally, too; it is about hearts and minds. It, too, is ultimately about teaching.
Teaching, teaching, teaching, and teaching through remembering, remembering “whatsoever I have said unto you,” as Jesus says about the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, Pentecost brings out the reality of our participation in the life of God through Word and Spirit and by Word and Sacrament. Our worship signifies the deeper truth of our lives as spiritual creatures where the things of the empirical world are made the vessels of transforming grace.
There is something profoundly sacramental about Pentecost. Through wind and fire, the least concrete and the most elusive and intangible of things, we are made aware of what is spiritual and invisible; it belongs to the concept of the sacraments as being “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given to us by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive this grace, and a pledge to assure us thereof,” as the Catechism so eloquently and simply puts it (BCP, p. 550). The sacraments effect what they signify but the point is what they signify. The water of Holy Baptism is more not less than H2O; the bread and the wine of the Holy Eucharist are more than bread and wine; they become the body and blood of Christ, the effective means of our participation in Christ’s passion and resurrection. We are gathered together in the Spirit and made aware through the things of this world about the eternal truths of God and about our life in God and with God in the places where “live and move and have our being.”
This frees us to the world and to our lives in the world because of our life with God and in God. Pentecost makes known the unity of God in and through the diversities of tongues and languages, in and through the diversities and differences that are part of the material world and our human world. That material world exists empirically in its own terms as a kind of potentia, the potentiality of energy; its truth and actuality is found in the God who creates and redeems, restores and sanctifies, the God who gathers all things into unity with himself.
Pentecost illustrates wonderfully that new sense of our redeemed humanity. Out of the Babel or confusion of the tongues of the world comes unity, the unity of praise and divine order that is the counter to the presumption and pride of our humanity. The story of Pentecost explicitly recalls the story of the Tower of Babel and provides the great Pentecostal insight. What is that? Simply that the human community has no unity in itself. Pentecost recalls us to the unity and order or truth of our human lives as found in the life of God. Apart from that we are nothing and have nothing. But Pentecost celebrates the fullest possible redemption of the empirical world of the senses; they are made part and parcel of our life with God.
The Descent of the Holy Ghost is Pentecost’s proper theme but it also teaches us about the essential nature of spiritual life. Far from being a repudiation of the material, it signals how the material world belongs to Spirit and how our lives in the world are lived to and for as well as with and in God. This is the wonder and the truth not just of Pentecost but of our lives in faith. The Church is brought to life in this descent of the Holy Spirit to proclaim and make visible this new reality. It sets us in motion in lives of faith and love and completely challenges the ghetto mentality of contemporary religion and culture, a religion and culture of the dead and the dying. Pentecost calls us to life and witness in joy and peace, in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, and all because of what it teaches.
“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost, 2015