Sermon for Pentecost
He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance
“The old world,” Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) famously claimed, “made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” thus capturing and anticipating the materialistic spirit of Darwin and Marx that still haunts our thinking. Pentecost provides the strongest counter to such determinisms. It does so not simply through the many, many examples of the “confluences of mind and matter, and indeed, of mind precedingmatter,” as John Lukacs observes about contemporary science (At the End of An Age) but by way of a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world are made the instruments and vehicles of spiritual grace.
It is all about the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church as the spiritual community of our humanity. As such, and as we have seen throughout Eastertide and the Ascension, it is about the redemption of our humanity. It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal, in God.
The simple point is that the human community has no unity in itself, only in God, and only in our being gathered and guided by God’s Holy Spirit given to us, as Pentecost teaches, through these signs and wonders, through these sacramental realities, we might say, which envision our unity and our understanding. For all of the ecstatic and experiential features of the Pentecost story, what stands out are the qualities of things intellectual and spiritual that redeem and sanctify every other aspect of our lives individually and corporately. As the Gospel makes clear, Pentecost shows the indwelling power of God in himself and with us. “I am in my Father,” Jesus says, “and ye in me, and I in you,” and all through the truth of God as Spirit, transcendent and beyond, yet immanent and near. It is all through the Comforter “abid[ing] with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth.” “Ye know him,” Jesus says, “for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you.” Pentecost is about the indwelling love of God in us. This happens only through teaching, only through the opening of our minds to the spiritual realities of God and of ourselves. “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
