Text: Acts 2: 1-21
The Gifts and Challenges of Pentecost
In addition to being Children’s Sunday, in addition to being New Members Sunday, today is also, for those of you who pay attention to such things, Pentecost Sunday. My comments this morning will be brief, but I’d like to use what time I have to suggest that Pentecost speaks to an essential part of growing up, an essential part of being human, and an essential part of being human today. Having received new members, and in the first service, having heard from and seen all of our kids, it seems fitting to spend a little time thinking about what it means to speak in the language of faith, what it means to find one’s voice, and what it means to discover resources inside of us, and outside of us, that help us to live well. The story of Pentecost is a story about speaking in new voices, but it’s also a story about listening, being able to understand one another even when we’re speaking in languages we can’t quite recognize, using tongues or idioms that feel strange. Pentecost is a gift, for it reminds us that understanding does occur. It reminds us that through a common Spirit given to each of us, we can hear each other, respond to one another, and recognize our shared humanity.
Recall the story with me. It takes place in the second chapter of the book of Acts, which is really part II of Luke’s Gospel, its sequel. Part I is about Jesus and his ministry. Part II is about what happens after Jesus goes away. One of the crucial features of the Christian narrative is that Jesus does go away after the resurrection. He doesn’t linger. Instead, he insists that the work that he came to perform wasn’t really dependent upon him. He insists that it belongs to all who heard and responded to his message, to all who come after him. He insists that the healing and life giving Spirit that he embodied didn’t belong to him exclusively. That same Spirit, the Holy Spirit, would be given to all who followed after Jesus. And that’s exactly where the book of Acts begins. Jesus ascends into heaven, after which the Spirit is poured out upon the disciples.
It’s a strange, bizarre text of Scripture, but I love it. The writer says that the disciples were gathered together in a house, and the sound of a violent wind came and filled the house. It says that divided tongues of fire appeared, and that one of the flames rested on each of them. And it says that they all began to speak in languages that they did not know, that they could not previously understand, but that now they could.
And yet there’s more. The wind was evidently so powerful that it attracted a crowd, who all gather at the house. Those in the crowd are astonished, because Galilean peasants were speaking in tongues that people from other cultures could understand: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia – these are just some of the geographies that are mentioned. “In our own languages we hear them speaking,” the spectators say. And then finally this detail: it’s an ecstatic scene, filled with exuberant speech, to the point that many mistake it for a scene of drunkenness. And so there’s Spirit, there’s wind, there’s language, there’s listening, there’s understanding…and there’s ecstasy in the midst of it all.
What do you make of this story? How do you understand that notion of Spirit, a Holy Spirit, descending upon people, filling them with a kind of fire? I’ll confess that for much of my life, I regarded this story with a good deal of skepticism. But over the years I’ve come to trust and believe in the story of Pentecost.
In part, that comes from an encounter with a man in Cuba, who spoke about an indigenous practice there called Santeria, which calls forth any number of spirits in its ceremonies. When I asked him about Santeria, he told me to read a book called Flash of the Spirit, by a professor of African art at Yale, of all places, named Robert Farris Thompson. I did read it. The book described a series of rituals, stories, dances, musical expressions and visual arts that called forth the spirits, allowing them to enter human lives in moments of grandeur, moments of awakening, in a flash of beauty, power, and love. Some of the spirits were connected to ancestors, those who came before. Some of them were capacities that somehow filled their human hosts with bravery, or generosity, or wisdom, or an embracing compassion. Some assisted with things like fertility, or accompanied humans as they went through trials. Some guided individuals as they passed into death. There was a spirit, it seemed, for each significant life moment that people might pass through, and they could be summoned as various situations arose, to provide the help that was required.
That book transformed how I encounter indigenous spiritual practices. But it also sent me back to the story of Pentecost, and the Holy Spirit, in a new way. It’s the category of Spirit that connects what we do with such disparate traditions as Santeria, or Vodou, or Candomble in Brazil, or Lakota rituals in South Dakota. Suddenly, our practices and stories began to seem deeply akin to those other practices. After all, do we not invite a Spirit to come every Sunday when we open with our call to worship? Do we not ask a Spirit to be a part of our lives whenever we call upon the name of God, whenever we pray to have our hearts enlarged, whenever we ask for wisdom, or courage, or understanding? Do we not call forth the ancestors every time we gather for a funeral, every time we pray that the spirit of those who have departed might be with us? After the pastoral prayer, do we not often sing, “Come and fill our hearts with your peace?” Is that not an invitation to become possessed – possessed by the Spirit of the living Christ?
That’s not an erasure of our agency. It’s not about becoming automatons in the service of some strange entity that enters us from without, like the spores in that old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I understand it to be something that’s already inherent within us, a capacity that already exists inside us all that allows us to flourish and thrive. It’s an enhancement of a capacity within each of our hearts that grows and expands under the right conditions, like an ember becoming a flame. The Holy Spirit, in this sense, would be that which allows people to do extraordinary things, things that seem impossible. Things like offering forgiveness to someone who hurt you. Things like finding the strength to endure after life has dealt you a blow. Things like being able to communicate with other people across a great chasm of language and culture, and to understand one another. Things like finding joy, ecstasy even, in the company of others. Things like what can happen in a community such as this, when young people and old people and everyone in between gather with one another, and eat together and pray together and sing together – where else in our world does that happen? Call it what you will. But I’ve come to believe it’s a flash of the Spirit. I believe it’s evidence of a Holy Spirit, coursing through the world, through your heart and mine.
That’s the gift of Pentecost. The challenge, however, is that so much of the time, an entirely different spirit seems to be at work in our world, one that makes understanding difficult, one that cleaves our lives apart, one that disparages and degrades human lives and cultures, one that induces us toward conformity, or paranoia, or confusion, or silence. Not every spirit, it turns out, is holy. There are, as the writer of the hymn Amazing Grace puts it, dangers, toils, and snares of the spirit that can and do trap us. Sometimes we have to struggle with everything in our being to remain open to the Holy Spirit, that Spirit that enables us to retain our sanity, our moral bearings, and our very humanity.
I was thinking about all of those things this week as the carnage in Gaza unfolded, as our sanctuary friends passed the two month mark of their residency with us, after yet another school shooting. Surely one additional gift of the Holy Spirit, one further dimension of the event of Pentecost, is to actually find our tongues, to find our voices, and to speak in a language born of the Spirit, born of that which strengthens and upholds human decency amidst so much inhumanity. Surely one of the gifts of Pentecost is to trust that when we do speak in such tongues, a mutual understanding will yet emerge. Surely the promise of Pentecost is that there does exist a common spirit within us all that can ignite our shared humanity, even across unbridgeable chasms.
After the gruesome spectacle of Monday, when the Israeli military killed 61 protesters and wounded some 2000 more, I was at a loss for words. The inhumanity was grotesque, and staggering. And so I turned to the words of another whose writing and whose humanity I admire, a writer named Ghassan Kanafani. In particular, it was a brief story entitled “Letter from Gaza,” published in 1956, that I returned to, a story that I commend to your attention. It’s a story of Pentecost, about finding language, about finding one’s voice, and ultimately one’s very humanity.
The story takes the form of a communication written to friend who has emigrated to the United States to flee the difficulties of life in Gaza. The writer of the letter has just been accepted into a graduate program at one of the University of California schools, and his friend Mustafa, to whom the letter is addressed, has gone out of his way to prepare for his arrival. Mustafa has written about “a land where there is greenery, and water, and lovely faces,” and the narrator confesses that he longs for such a place, longs to escape the confines of his existence. The writer recalls growing up with Mustafa, and their dreams of living another life. But then he abruptly declares: “I won’t follow you. “I’ll stay here, and I won’t ever leave.”
The rest of the letter is an attempt to articulate why. On the eve of his departure, just after returning from a holiday, his brother’s wife asked him to visit his 13 year old niece, Nadia, who had been hospitalized after a military raid. He goes, taking a bag of apples with him. At the Gaza hospital, he finds Nadia propped up in bed, he says, “with a profound silence in her wide eyes, her face calm and still, eloquent as a tortured prophet.” They exchange greetings, and the narrator describes the gifts that he has brought Nadia – in particular a red set of pants she had asked for. Nadia trembles, and it’s then that she lifts the sheet draped across her, revealing her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. “Never shall I forget the grief which had molded her face and merged into its traits forever,” the narrator writes. When the visit is over, he stumbles onto the streets of Gaza under blazing sun, and strangely, weirdly, unexpectedly, Gaza felt brand new to him. It seemed, he tells his friend Mustafa, as if it were just a beginning. “Everything in this Gaza throbbed with sadness, which was not confined to weeping. It was a challenge; more than that, it was something like reclamation of the amputated leg.”
Nadia, he came to learn, had thrown herself on her brothers and sisters during a military attack in order to protect them. She could have run away. She could have saved her leg. But she didn’t.
“No, I won’t come to California,” the letter concludes. “I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is, and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend. We are all waiting for you.”
Come back. We are all waiting for you. Those words are the gift of Pentecost, calling a friend, and readers too, back to their humanity, back to a sense of moral sanity, back to a sense of conscience, and meaning, and purpose. So ok, it’s a dramatic example, but no more dramatic than anything that occurred this past Monday. And it exemplifies one of the most important meanings of the Pentecost event. Any time a spirit of courage and resolve is discovered, any time a spirit of love and connection is found, any time we’re given voices to speak our consciences, we may be sure that it is a Holy Spirit working within us. I thank God for the words of one such as Ghassan Kanafani, and for all of those who are finding their voices right now, in a time of grotesque inhumanity. I give thanks for the Holy Spirit that gives rise to those voices, and that enables us to hear and respond to them.
But I give thanks for the smaller gifts of Pentecost as well. The gift of this community. The gift of a gentle Spirit among us that allows children to speak and adults to listen, that allows the aged and the young to intermingle with one another, that somehow and in some way allows us all to find one another amidst our differences, and to speak words of love and support to one another. The gift of new members, of new relationships, of new connections. The gift of friendships in Haiti, and in so many other places. The gift of our voices, rising amidst so much babel, so much inhumanity.
May such a Holy Spirit dwell within your hearts. May such a Holy Spirit possess and transform us, humanizing us across whatever chasms separate us. May the small and large gifts of Pentecost reside within us all.
