by CCW | 20 May 2018 15:00
Pentecost is a fascinating spectacle, perhaps even more fascinating than the fashion ‘fascinators’ of yesterday’s beautiful and moving royal wedding, a scene at once of pomp and circumstance and of piety and devotion, of joy and love. There is more to it than simply what meets the eye. Even more so with Pentecost.
It begins with the titles: “The Day of Pentecost Being the Fiftieth Day After Easter commonly called Whitsunday,” which at once recalls an ancient Jewish festival celebrating the first-fruits of the harvest of grain fifty days after the Passover and the Christian festival of Christ’s Resurrection, Christ being “the first-fruits of them that slept”. Pentecost has very much to do with the life of Christ in us, it seems, but that life is one that draws us into the very life of God as Trinity, the point which the Gospel makes clear. Through the coming down of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, Jesus says, “we,” meaning God, “will come unto him,” meaning those who “love [Jesus]” and “keep [his] words.” Only so will we find our abiding in the love of God.
The liturgical colour for this day in the tradition of the Church is red and yet Pentecost is commonly called Whitsunday, literally, ‘White Sunday’. That seems confusing and paradoxical. Why Whitsunday? Because this day, too, like Easter is about new life and new birth, a day in which baptisms and confirmations also took place, a day when souls were joined to the great spiritual company of the Church Universal “having washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” recalling Christ’s sacrifice and our participation in the work of human redemption. The colour red also refers to the tongues of fire which came down upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem. And so it becomes the symbolic colour for the Apostles, meaning those who are sent having learned the things of God.
And if that is not confusing enough, we have the whole fascinating spectacle of Pentecost as “a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire,” “rest[ing] upon each of them.” Wind and fire are strange and evocative images, elusive and yet significant, that speak profoundly to the spiritual mystery of God. There is more to Pentecost than what meets the eye. More than appearance there is the reality of Pentecost and its meaning for us in our lives, our lives in the spirit, our lives as spiritual beings. The Holy Spirit is often symbolised as a dove, the dove of heavenly peace. The presence of the Holy Spirit with us and in us is symbolised as wind and fire; not to be sure, the winds of war and destruction nor the fires of technological progress which equally enchant and destroy us. No. It is the wind and fire of God that transform us. These are all images that teach and act as metaphors and similes for the reality of the Spirit.
What is it all about? Unity and order. The human community has no order, no unity and no truth in itself. Pentecost redeems the chaos and confusion of the story of the Tower of Babel, a story which has been largely misunderstood as being a just-so story about the origins of different languages and cultures. Such a view would suggest that such things are a kind of divine punishment and something negative. In fact, the story of the Tower of Babel is about human presumption and tyranny in the attempt to impose one language and one culture, a feature of all and every form of totalitarianism and fascism. It presumes the arrogance of our own self-sufficiency. The building of the Tower of Babel was an attempt to deny the God-given differences of language and culture which are positively created by God as already declared in Genesis 10.
Pentecost celebrates the real unity of the human community which is found in and through the diversity of cultures and languages as authored by God. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues,” Luke tells us in Acts, celebrating the true diversity of tongues. They “began to speak with other tongues” but only “as the Spirit gave them utterance.” In other words, it happens not through human arrogance and presumption but by way of grace, by way of the Holy Spirit, the giver of all good gifts. It is unity in and through diversity as divinely given, and not as human or social constructs. Neither unity nor diversity are achieved or determined by human fiat and presumption. It is about our abiding in what is emphatically God-given.
This is the point of the lovely and ancient 9th century hymn, the Veni Creator Spiritus, translated in the 17th century by Bishop John Cosin, and found in our Prayer Book as part of the service for The Ordering of Priests. “Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart.” And what are those gifts? They are the six gifts of the Spirit found in the Hebrew text of Isaiah 11: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord;” but which in the Septuagint translation became the traditional “seven gifts of the Spirit” by the addition or inclusion of “piety.” Note that all these gifts associated with the Descent of the Holy Spirit are intellectual and spiritual gifts which speak directly to the truth and redemption of our humanity as grounded in the life of God.
We meet in the Spirit whose condescending means that we are taught “all things” and have “all things” brought “to [our] remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In that constant teaching and constant abiding in the love of God lies our transformation, the real dynamic of our lives. It is found in our being gathered into the life of God. Here in the liturgy we are reminded that we are the children of God. “God [having] sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” means that we cry out in the ecstasy of the liturgy, “Abba, Father.” Thus “we all with open face,/ beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, /Are changed into the same image from glory to glory,/ even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” We are being changed by what we behold in the mystery of Pentecost, the mystery of our participation in the life of God. We are being changed into who we are in God’s eye so that we may “act in God’s eye what in God’s eye we are” (Hopkins).
This is more than what meets our eyes, more than what simply appears. Alden Nowlan, the ‘forgotten poet of Stanley,’ Nova Scotia, just outside of Windsor, captures the Pentecostal mystery in a poem called “Daughter of Zion.” It begins with an honest but blunt description of an ordinary woman with “bloodless lips” and “the ugly knot of salt-coloured hair” wearing a “shapeless housedress with its grotesque flowers,” a dress which is “sadder” he says, “than if she wore black.” She is described as “avoid[ing] the sun, crossing the street with eyes cast down” as if seeking the darkness which “could be bought like yard goods” to “stuff her shopping bag with shadows.” It is the picture, it seems, of a soul in despair and distress, downtrodden and uncertain, unremarkable and almost invisible.
“Who would look at her twice?” the narrator asks, before revealing another side, the inner side of her life and being as caught up in the mystery of Pentecostal wind and fire. “What stranger,” seeing this woman, the narrator says, “would suspect that only last night / in a tent by the river,” at a revivalist and evangelical meeting, “God Himself, the Old One, seized her in his arms and lifted / her up and danced with her, / and Christ, with the sawdust clinging to his garments and / the sweat of the carpenter’s shop / on his body and the smell of wine and garlic on his breath, / drew her to his breast and kissed her,/ and the Holy Ghost / went into her body and spoke through her mouth / the language they speak in heaven!”
It is a powerful depiction of the Pentecostal mystery of our human transformation, a strong reminder that we are more than what we outwardly seem to be. We are transformed into souls “made apt for worshipping,” as Dante puts it, by love. The sensual and the erotic are gathered up, as in Plato’s Symposium, into something intellectual and spiritual in which we find the truth of our being. As in Alden Nowlan’s poem, in our seeming unloveliness we are made lovely by the Spirit of Love in us. It is all about who we are in the sight of God and in the presence of the Spirit. But only if we will attend and behold those things.
Here in our liturgy, we “speak with other tongues,” as it were, speaking “the language they speak in heaven,” knowing ourselves to be more than our everyday experiences. Pentecost is about the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, our lives as lived with God. We live in the mystery of God, in the peace which the world cannot give but only God gives. “Peace I leave with you,” Jesus says, “my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” The peace of Christ is symbolised in the Holy Spirit coming down upon Christ, upon the Apostles, and upon the Church as a dove. This is the peace that changes everything because it changes our whole outlook. It counters our fearfulness and our anxiety, our presumption and our pride “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
Pentecost gives us another view and understanding of our humanity. The real truth, dignity, and beauty of our humanity, individually and collectively, is found in the transforming power of God’s love. Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples. It gives birth to the Church, the very image of the redeemed human community of diverse tongues and languages, of different cultures and places yet one in the praise and worship of God. Our challenge is to live this mystery and dance in its ecstasy.
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/05/20/sermon-for-the-day-of-pentecost-2/
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