Pentecost: Cycle C 21-22

PENTECOST SUNDAY

Acts 2:1-11 | 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 | John 20:19-23

Oh God, who by the mystery of today’s great feast sanctify your whole church in every people and nation, pour out, we pray, the gifts of the Holy Spirit across the face of the earth, and with the divine grace that was at work when the gospel was first proclaimed, fill now once more the hearts of believers.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The name of this feast is Pentecost, has reference to the number 50, but most importantly, it is a feast that is part of the Jewish heritage, their Jewish tradition, and it was a feast of harvest.  So you can imagine, when people live on the land, when they live just dependent on the soil and the rains, when harvest comes, and especially if it’s a rich, beautiful, fruitful harvest, there’s great parties, great rejoicing.  And so I want you to realize that, when this feast carries this name, it’s because it has something in it that’s very similar to that experience.  We’ve lived in this world for a long time.  People have been struggling from the very beginning of the story of Adam and Eve until now to understand fully who God is and why we’re here and what we’re supposed to become.  These are questions that have been, in a way, seeded in each human being that comes into the world. 

I remember so vividly there was an image in one of the readings from — I believe it’s Matthew, and he’s talking about the planting of seeds.  And it’s a story of the farmer plants these wonderful, beautiful seeds, like human beings, beautiful, innocent people being planted on this earth.  And they’re there, and then an enemy comes along and throws weeds in there, and then there’s something negative.  And there is this cry from the workers.  The farm workers go to the owner and say, “Someone’s done this terrible thing.  There’s now something impure and not fruitful in this field.”  And the owner says, “Let it go.  Let it go.  Let them be together.”  That’s such a beautiful image for me of something that is probably one of the strongest, most important things for us to keep in mind, is that the world, by intention of God, has impurity, lies, things that are not only not fruitful but very destructive, poisonous even.  Why would he allow all of that to be here unless it had some very important role to play?  And that is the role of what life is about, a struggle, a struggle between flesh and spirit: lies, traumatic things that people do to each other versus this wonderful healing, transforming presence of a God who loves us in our imperfection.   

So I want to start with some of the images in that second reading, and it’s Romans.  It’s talking about there is this thing called the flesh, and if you’re in it, you cannot please God.  Now, I don't know what you think of flesh, but sometimes people think, “Well, that’s —” You think of flesh, you think of maybe it’s about certainly something human, but a lot of people think it’s about their sexuality, that we have these dirty bodies that have these cravings, and those are unattractive to God, and how could they be if God created them.  There’s all that negativity around the word flesh, but I want you to try to imagine this: flesh is that time in our life when we’re caught in something that is destructive.  And I want — no, it doesn’t refer to — quite as clearly as I want you to feel it, but it’s about the times we’re in depression and darkness and self-hatred because of the fact that sin is in the world, and we get tainted by it.  We’re either the victim of it, or we perpetrate it, and it creates this dichotomy in us.  And we think that we’re both good and bad, and then when we concentrate on what’s bad, we go into this spiral of darkness and death.  And if you’re in that, you cannot please God, because you know what you’re doing.  It’s not because God is not there for you.  It’s because in that darkness, you sometimes feel unworthy, and you feel distance from God.  And the last thing you think is that God is there, right with you, longing to enter into your life and heal and transform and bring life to your mortal body.  Now, isn’t it interesting that in this image of the flesh, it’s something in you, and it’s just, as Paul said, just as Jesus is able to raise from the dead, that part of you that feels dead, that isn’t alive, that is seemingly such a burden to carry, Jesus can — if he can raise from the dead, he can raise that from the dead, and he does it.  And the way he does  it is the most amazing thing.  He promises to forgive and overlook your sin, and more importantly, he promises to send someone in you to take care of you, the Advocate — the Advocate. 

That’s what this whole feast is about, Pentecost, the fruitfulness of the end of all the work that we’ve had during this whole thing with the Old Testament and then to the New Testament.  It’s about this plant that has been growing, this seed that has become the fullness of what we might call the church, which is believers believing in the life that God has given us and becoming instruments of light for the world.  That’s what we’re celebrating in this feast, and that fullness of the evolution of human consciousness now, as we have the — we had the Father in the Old Testament, then the Father and the Son in the New Testament, meaning the Father reveals himself as who he really is: compassionate, loving, caring.  And now we have the final phase of the presence of God in you is now an Advocate, two roles: to teach and to remind — to teach and to remind. 

I love the fact that we need constantly to learn more about who we are and who God is, but I love the fact that, even when we know it, we have to be reminded of what we know, because the flesh and the darkness and sin can pull us away from the truth easily, without us realizing it.  So we need the Spirit of God in us, which is promised particularly to those in their darkest place.  He’s constantly saying, “Let me in.  Let me in.  Let me in.”  The misunderstanding of this reading about the flesh is that, if you’re in the flesh, then God doesn’t love you, and he has nothing to do with you.  No, he’s saying, when you’re in the flesh, you have lost something that is your inheritance.  It’s in you.  You’ve just lost awareness of it, and that’s God’s presence, particularly as the Advocate.  And what is the Advocate doing?  He is naming the sin for you.  He’s naming the trauma that may have happened to you because someone sinned against you.  He’s naming it, and he’s building his case against it.  And he’s showing you with clarity, like a prosecutor presents the case against someone — he presents the case against this worldly disposition that we get caught in, this sense that we’re not good enough, that we’re not worthy.  That’s what the world does to us.  That’s what sin does to us.  It tries to rob us of our dignity and our worth, and there’s the Advocate.  He’s saying, “Oh, no, no, no.  I’m sorry.  My client here, he is valuable.  She is valuable.  She has everything she needs that would make me long to be with her.  She is my daughter.  He is my son.  And whatever you’ve done to him, you’re going to be exposed.”  Nothing that evil hates more than being exposed for what it does, because what it really does, it’s not so much the evil that might be performed.  It’s the effect it has on us of robbing us of our dignity, of value.

So now we get to what is it like now that we have the Advocate — the Advocate.  Well, let’s go back to the first reading, because that’s the one that’s most important to talk about when we talk about Pentecost, because the image is that there is this moment in the growing  — the growth of the wisdom of the fullness of what God reveals is not complete until Pentecost.  This is when he finally gave the final full teaching, and it’s so exciting, because if you listen to it carefully, it’s so mysterious that it robs you and me of the responsibility of having to figure out how to describe this thing called God’s presence in me, in you, his intimacy with us.  How do you describe it?  How do you explain it?  Well, here’s an example of what it does, what it sort of looks like in a sense, and if you can figure out how this happened, let me know, because it’s mysterious.  Here’s a group of believers, gathered originally in fear, in a locked room, now filled with an excitement and an awareness of their calling and what they’re going to do.  And they have a keen understanding that, since most all of them denied Jesus, they’re all forgiven.  They know, and they’ve tasted and experienced the beauty and forgiveness of God.  And there they are, forgiven and loved, and they’re gathered together.  Somehow, let’s just say it was a group of people that got together, and they were so excited about the stories they shared.  They just rose to a fevered pitch.  How wonderful this all is, and then what happened is there’s all these observers.  These observers are from all over the world, and the Spirit is so vital to what they’re understanding that they see it.  They have a sense of it.  They have a vision, and it’s a fire.  It’s a fire that comes down from heaven.  It’s obviously the descending Spirit, the Holy Spirit descending into them, and it’s fire.  What is fire?  Could have been living water.  It could have been food.  No, it’s fire.  Fire has two properties.  It enlightens.  It’s light.  So this Spirit coming into these human beings is an amazing enlightenment that they see things they could never see before.  They feel things they never felt before.  They know things about God they never thought they would know.  And then comes the other aspect: purification.  Fire purifies.  You want to find the gold, you burn, you heat the metal until the final — the only thing that comes out is the gold.  That’s an image of the power of the Holy Spirit as the Advocate who comes and cleanses us of all illusions, all lies and heals us of those things.  So what I want you to feel with me is that this experience is not only their experience but all these people that are watching it, and they’re watching it, and they’re listening to them speak.  And it’s like — I don’t understand exactly what it is.  They’re speaking in tongues.  I don't know whether they’re using the classic thing of tongues where you can’t really understand the words, or they’re speaking it in their own language.  But the mysterious thing is everyone from everywhere, from every different language understands exactly what they’re experiencing and what they’re going through.  It’s something about the Holy Spirit as resonance, a resonance of energy and life, light and hope and forgiveness flowing out of people. 

So amazing that the heart of what religion is calling us to is not being bound to rules and laws and regulations but being bound to a truth, a word that God speaks.  And that is that he will dwell within us, and he comes to us in our broken sinfulness.  Why do we always find churches and religions demanding perfection before God comes?  Why do they stress so much God’s disappointment when we sin?  He’s not disappointed, maybe sad, but he’s drawn to us, longing to fill us with the comfort that we prayed for in that sequence.  Rest, refreshment, peace, that’s the mystery, and when you have that inside of you, when you have that indwelling presence, that fullness of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, watch out.  People will understand it, will feel it, even if they’re just standing next to you.  Promise.

Father, this feast is considered to be the birth of the church, the birth of your community of believers.  I pray for our churches, all of them, all different denominations so that they can continue to open their hearts to the fullness of this message, and they open hearts of people to not needing to change in order to be loved but to know that, in their need, they are loved.  In their darkness, they are held in great esteem by a God who wants nothing more than for them to be filled with life.  Bless our churches with forgiveness, understanding, compassion, empathy so they can know and feel the reality of who God is, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.