Pentecost

One morning in late Spring, just on the edge of summer, a group of people gathered. It was the second of the great pilgrimage festivals of Jerusalem, seven weeks after Passover, the day of Shavuot, the celebration of the first fruits of the year’s harvest. Fifty days before, some members of the gathered crowd had witnessed Jesus’s resurrection. They’d shared the news with one another, they’d wondered, and they’d prayed. And they’d waited. Waited for the coming of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth that Jesus had promised them.

It was nine o’clock in the morning on that late spring day.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

I wonder what that was like. Here we are, followers of Jesus, gathered together on a late spring day at nine o’clock in the morning. Can you imagine something similar happening here and now?

Pentecost is the most un-Episcopalian of feast days. Most of us are skeptical of stories of fire from heaven. If we hear a sound like the rush of a violent wind, we assume that it is in fact a violent wind. (This is Kansas, after all.) And if we decide to do anything special to celebrate Pentecost, wearing red is generally good enough. There’s absolutely no need to speak in tongues.

This approach to Pentecost suits my own temperament. But sometimes I wonder if we’re missing out.

When I was in seminary, I spent a summer working as a hospital chaplain. One of my colleagues was a Pentecostal pastor named Bruce. At least on the surface, he and I had very little in common. He was a retired firefighter and a fiery Pentecostal preacher. I was a lawyer and a rather uptight Episcopalian who occasionally added footnotes to my sermons.

We didn’t have much in common, but we got along pretty well—although you might not have known that if you wandered into one of our debates. We would get into these long, crazy arguments over lunch—mostly about the church.

I’m a lot of fun at parties.

Bruce was convinced that preachers had to trust in the Holy Spirit. A preacher shouldn’t prepare too much—and definitely shouldn’t write out a manuscript. A sermon written ahead of time isn’t really a sermon. It’s an essay, at best. And he couldn’t understand our calendar and lectionary. How can the Spirit guide the Church if you’re tied to preaching on readings chosen years or even decades in advance? And prayer, of course, had to be extemporaneous, from the heart, following the Spirit’s lead.

I argued that the Spirit can inspire the writing of a sermon just as well as its delivery, thank you very much, and is present with the listeners, who time and again hear what they need to hear, even when it isn’t exactly what the preacher intended to say. I said that leaving the choice of scripture up to the preacher makes it all too easy to prooftext, to find what you want to find rather than facing up to the inconvenient bits of the Bible. Following a set lectionary keeps a preacher honest. And as far as written prayers are concerned, the old prayers of the church are tested by time. They survive because they speak to the needs of our hearts in a way we’re not likely to be able to improve upon on the fly. That too is the work of the Spirit.

I don’t think either of us managed to convince the other. I’m still a fan of the lectionary. And I’ll fight you for my sermon manuscript. I still love the ancient prayers of our prayer book. Bruce’s arguments didn’t change my mind. And I’m quite certain that Bruce is still preaching and praying from the heart, trusting the Spirit to guide his words. I didn’t change his mind any more than he changed mine.

But I think we both realized that we each had a piece of the truth. And, more importantly, we came to understand each other a bit better.

And setting the dramatic events of the day aside for a moment, isn’t it true that understanding is one of the greatest wonders of Pentecost? The disciples and the gathered crowd understood each other –across barriers of language and of culture.

We may not speak in tongues very often, but Pentecost matters. The Holy Spirit matters.

My own encounters with the Holy Spirit haven’t been much like the dramatic scene we heard about from the Book of Acts. My experience has been more like Paul’s description of a Spirit that intercedes with sighs too deep for words—often in moments that are quiet, holy, seemingly frozen in time, fully understood only days or months or years later. I’ve never seen tongues or fire or heard a mysterious roaring wind. But I do believe that I’ve seen the Holy Spirit working. Sighing. Nudging.

In today’s readings, it was Paul’s words that spoke most to me. His words about the Spirit. But also his words about hope. “In hope we are saved. Now hope that is not seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Hope is a fascinating thing. If you know you’ll win or know you’ll lose, hope doesn’t do you much good. Hope is found only in moments of unknowing. And hope is a seed of action. If we have hope, we can work to make a better world.

The place where we find hope is the very same place where we just might meet the Holy Spirit.

It’s the classic conversion story, isn’t it? You’re in a place of darkness and despair, a time when hope is unimaginable. And then something changes. A light shines out in the darkness. Maybe even a tongue of fire. And suddenly you understand the most basic hope of the Christian faith—that death is overcome and all shall be well. Maybe nothing has changed in your outward circumstances, but everything is new.

And isn’t that Pentecost too?

Whether your Pentecost is quiet or dramatic—a whispering breeze or fire from heaven—may you meet the Holy Spirit. And with the Spirit’s help, may each of us find the strength to live in hope.