Sermon for Pentecost
“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.
