Happy Pentecost! Today marks the end of the 50 days of Eastertide and we start going into what is normally called “Ordinary Time” – the time between the Monday after Pentecost and the day before Advent. The other period of Ordinary Time was after the cycle of the feast of Lord’s Birth through to Ash Wednesday . These are the “big ticket” events and we live through Christmas and Easter looking towards Christ with a sense of hope and joy and an expectation of what is to come. And then we hit Ordinary Time and everything gets a little flat. The fact that this Ordinary Time into which we are going falls at the start of the Summer Holidays makes it feel flatter still.
We’re exhausted by all the celebrating, we want a break. Some take the time to stop coming to church, because really there’s nothing going on until Advent, right? Wrong! This is really a time of fertility and nurturing and harvesting. We are now tasked with living the Christian faith and the meaning of Christ's resurrection in our ordinary day-to-day life.
We’ve gone through Holy Week and celebrated the resurrection of Christ and our eternal life in him. Now what? Now what? How do we live as Christians and how do we bring meaning of Christ’s resurrection into this time and into our world. That’s the question Pentecost seeks to answer. And if we don’t take the time to understand how the Holy Spirit feeds into that answer, then all we will be doing is waiting for the next great feast.
So what happened in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost? The community of disciples are gathered because of the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot). Jesus had promised the arrival of the Holy Spirit not long after his departure - and sure enough, on the festival day itself, the Holy Spirit arrives. The scene is spectacular and chaotic: a violent, rushing sound like wind, and then “divided tongues, as of fire” rested on their heads - not a fire that destroys, but rather like the fire that Moses encountered at the burning bush, which was “blazing, yet it was not consumed” (Exodus 3:1-2). The Spirit’s immediate effect is linguistic: many are empowered “to speak in other languages,” and at the same time, each person hears the testimony in his or her native language. A friend likens it to a meeting at the United Nations, in which each person hears (through a headset) the proceedings translated into his or her mother tongue. There is a sense of togetherness and unity: diverse as they are, everyone understands and can communicate. In the end, they are all in a state of bewilderment and awe. What happened?
On one level, the disciples were given a voice by which to proclaim the Good News. That same sense of togetherness creates a commonality that we can start to understand as Christianity – a common life in Christ. And the advent of the Holy Spirit meant that they now had a direct connection to God in the wake of Jesus’s ascension, and they are now encouraged to tap into that spirit to give them encouragement and energy for the evangelizing that God now calls them to do.
And that ability to tap into God’s energy, the ability to discern how God is breaking into our world is the key concept.
You see, Pentecost did not just happen and end in Jerusalem those many years ago. The Holy Spirit continues, and has always continued, to reach out, to spread its energy in and amongst us for the sole purpose of bringing God’s love into the world. Striving to orient our lives to God, unconcerned with our own standing and focused instead on being a vessel through which the Holy Spirit can do work in the world can make this Ordinary Time so very extraordinary.
Orienting our lives towards God through the Holy Spirit can show us that Pentecost still happens in the here and now:
• When we wake up to the fact that even one life killed by gun violence a year is one life too many, that is a Pentecost moment.• When we finally hold as true and just that a woman’s right to have agency and control over her body is hers alone, that is a Pentecost moment.
• When we get fed up enough to proclaim that a church that seeks to exclude or marginalize people because of their sexual orientation or gender may not actually be very Christian, that, my friends, is a Pentecost moment.
And in these Pentecost moments, the Holy Spirit can help us raise our voices against those forces who act in ways that are directly opposed to our Gospel values and baptismal covenant. We can move away from living a life according to our own self-centered and worldly desires, to one in which our sole objective is helping give birth to God’s love into a broken world.
When I started thinking about becoming a priest, I was encouraged by my then rector to see a spiritual director. Her name was Sister Marylin and she was a Sister of St. Ursula. She was a bit of a made-for-television nun – Irish, no nonsense, but extremely devout and loving.
At our first meeting she asked “Do you know why we’re here?”
I said “Well, I want to know if I should become a priest.”
She said “No, that’s not the reason we’re here, dear.”
I said, “It isn’t?”
“Nope”, she said, “We’re here because you want to know what God will is for your life.” And with that change of perspective, I spent the next few months in deep prayer and contemplation, and had my first experience of deliberately trying to step back and discern how the Holy Spirit was working through my life. Instead of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I started asking God what God wanted me to do with my life. And to be clear, discernment takes work and you need to make a conscious decision to practice spiritual discernment, especially at important junctures in your life. I was thrilled that I heard my vocation to ordained ministry even more strongly at the end of the process, but sometimes the Holy Spirit reveals things differently than what I expect. Oftentimes, God gives me what I need, not what I want.
So, on that first day of the Church, on that first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit showed up. And it was nothing like the disciples of Jesus could have expected. It was shocking and chaotic; it was confusing. And out of that chaos the Goods News of eternal life in Christ starting to get out and changed the world, and continues to change the world.
We are here in church because the Holy Spirit is still being poured out. The Spirit must have at least settled on each of us at some point this morning, because it was the Spirit that got us in the building. But there is a difference between getting a little singed and truly being on fire. This is our Pentecost question: Do you want to live as one who is willingly caught up in the violent rush of wind that propels you forward to do God’s work in the world? Or will you completely ignore or fight the Holy Spirit every step of the way?
Are we willing to forsake ourselves and our own needs and live in the knowledge that God is with us regardless of what life throws at us? Or will we settle for a life in which we believe that there are some things God can’t handle and that we know what’s best for us?
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