The Day of Pentecost

23rd May 2010:   Sung Eucharist (9.00 am) & Holy Eucharist (11:45am)

Preacher: The Revd Philip Wickeri

Readings: Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17

                                                                                             

 

Come Holy Spirit

 

            Pentecost Sunday.  The end of the Easter Season and the beginning of ordinary time, depending on how you count the Sundays and what you mean by ordinary. However, the Day of Pentecost itself, as it is recorded in the second chapter of the Book of Acts, was anything but ordinary.

 

It was something like this.  More than a hundred people gathered together in a large room, probably in a house of a wealthy follower of Jesus in Jerusalem.   It was fifty days after Passover, the feast of the unleavened bread, the first agrarian festival of the year. These early followers of Jesus were waiting, waiting, for something to happen; they weren’t quite sure what they were waiting for, but they realized that God had promised something to them.  And then came a sound from the heavens like a rush of wind and it filled the room.  Luke tells us it was the Holy Spirit coming into their lives.  The wind pierced them like tongues of fire above and inside of them.  They were devout Jews from all around the ancient world, and we are given a list of where they came from. It is an amazing list of nationalities and ethnicities, of people who spoke different languages, people who usually did not speak with one another, but who now could understand what was being said. The witnesses to the event were confused and perplexed by what they heard and saw, but it left a deep impression on them.  Peter, in his sermon, tried to explain what had happened.

 

This was Pentecost. The gathering was out of control. The Holy Spirit opened the church to the Gentiles. The Christian community could no longer be confined to an intimate group of Jesus’ disciples; it broke all bounds and in time moved far beyond Palestine. It included all who would listen to what the Spirit was saying. The Spirit inspired the community, it empowered the people and it became the driving force for mission.  In the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), people became separated from one another by arrogance, pride and sin.  At Pentecost, scattered peoples were brought together by grace, still many and yet one, having a unity in the Spirit, but diversity in language, culture and ethnicity. What a wonderful event.

 

            Many people like to speak of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church.  But this is not what the Bible says or what the Church teaches.  And it is certainly not how the early Christians saw the Pentecost event.  The Church was already there.  The English word for Church, in Greek κυριακόν, literally means “that which belongs to the Lord.” Fourth and fifth century patristic writers believed that the Church had begun with the calling of the people of Israel, or, in the case of St. Augustine, even with the birth of Adam. The early Christians did not see themselves as a voluntary association of individuals who chose to follow Christ, but as a faithful remnant who belonged to the Lord, the new Israel, women and men who had been brought together in the Lord, in the mystery of God’s work of creation, redemption and sanctification. The Church was already present before Pentecost.  It the New Testament, the Church can be seen in Jesus calling of the twelve, with Peter’s confession at Caesara Philippi and, especially, in the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples.

 

The Spirit, the Heavenly Comforter, the Advocate whom we hear about in today’s Gospel was with God’s people from the beginning.  But Jesus’ disciples had to be open to receiving the Spirit.  On the day of the resurrection, on Easter evening, in the house where the disciples had gathered and locked themselves inside out of fear Jesus came and blessed them and breathed on them and said, "receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20: 21-22). The Holy Spirit was with the disciples many weeks before Pentecost.  But it is worth dwelling on this earlier event, because it will help us understand what happened in the story we just heard from Acts.

Jesus commissioned his disciples by breathing on them, opening his mouth and pouring what was inside of him into them so that their hair stood on edge and their eyelashes fluttered and they could smell where he had come from -- not just Golgotha and Galilee, but way before that -- back when the world itself was being born. Anyone standing there that evening with any memory at all could smell Eden on his breath: salt brine, river mud, calla lilies. They could feel their own lungs fill as they themselves were brought back to life. It was Genesis reborn, as they were created all over again by the power of the Spirit that was coming out of his mouth. (This description is from the American Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.) This was already the church, but it needed to be rekindled and enlivened. Jesus did that for his disciples because he breathed love, and sent the Spirit

 

Pentecost, then, is not the birthday of the church. We might say it is the re-birthing of the church and of all the individuals who had been brought together in Jerusalem and went out to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Pentecost we celebrate today is a reminder to us that we need to be open to receiving the Holy Spirit, again and again, for only in this way will we be made alive in Christ.

 

            One thing to remember about today’s verses from Acts is that the people each heard in their own native language (vs. 8, 11).  The miracle is not that they were able to understand Aramaic, which would have been the language that Peter and the others spoke, but they understood in their own languages. The different languages and cultures of the Galileans, the Parthians, the Cappadocians and the rest were preserved, their cultures were reaffirmed, they didn’t need to learn Aramaic, Latin or Greek, but despite the differences, they were one in the Spirit. This is what the Church is all about.

 

            Anyone who has been to an international gathering of Christians knows what that means.  When bishops gather at Lambeth conferences, when the World Council of Churches holds general assemblies, when Christian youth delegations meet in Taize, they get a glimmer of that first Pentecost.  People come from all over the world, and they bring with them their languages, their cultures their ways of doing things and they gather together around a common table. We see this here too at St. John’s Cathedral, where people come to hear the Gospel, and receive the bread and the wine, using words from their own languages, whether that be English, Chinese or Tagalog. We get a glimpse of this too in more ordinary times of fellowship. I used to enjoy being with friends at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, for you often didn’t know, when you gathered for a meal, what the language of the table would be. There were priests and scholastics from all over the world, and the language that was settled on at the table (Spanish, French, Chinese, English, Polish, etc.) was the one that most people felt most comfortable with.

 

            For those like me who couldn’t always follow the languages at the Jesuits’ table, like me, there were always the translators who would help us out.  Our faith and our fellowship and our Church exist in and through translation.  Think about that. Translation, the interpretation of tongues, is quite literally an embodiment of the Word made Flesh. I like to think of translators as the stewards of the tongues of Pentecost, and we need them for our life together. This begins with St. Jerome, who is the patron Saint of Translators for his rendering of the Bible into Latin.  The translation of the Bible into English is one of the things that helped to create and renew the Church of England. Bishop John Shaw Burdon (1874-1897), the Third Bishop of Hong Kong, who often preached right here in this Cathedral, helped translate the Bible and the Prayer Book into Chinese. I studied with Bruce Manning Metzger, the main translator of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible that many of us use as our regular Bible. He made the Hebrew, the Greek and Aramaic come alive. And I cannot end this litany of translators and translations without mentioning my wife Janice, whose translations of Chinese theology, prayers, hymns, and church statements have helped to give a voice to the hopes and commitments of Chinese Christians over the past 25 years. All who translate, who help others read and hear what is written and said, do it as an act of love. Translation in the Church is love in action embodied in the work of the stewards of the tongues of Pentecost.

 

            The Spirit of Pentecost enlivens, it recreates, it brings together, it empowers it translates, but above all and in all, it breathes the love of Christ Jesus into us. This was the point made many centuries ago by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), that greatest of Catholic theologians, the model for priests, the Doctor Angelicus of the Dominican order.  His famous Pentecost sermon deals not with the verses from Acts, but with one verse from the Psalm appointed for this day (104:30) as it is interpreted through the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

 

When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.[1]

 

             St. Thomas tells us that this verse says four things about the Holy Spirit that comes to us at Pentecost: the nature of the Spirit, which lies in the ruach or breath of God; the purpose of the Spirit’s activity, which is the continuing of creation and the renewal of the world; the working that accomplishes this purpose, that is, the going forth from God; and the object of the Spirit’s working, which is to instill Christ’s love in us.  In other words, this one verse from Psalm 104 tells us who the Spirit is, why the Spirit acts, the actual acting of the Spirit, and what the Spirit acts upon. Readers familiar with the philosopher Aristotle will recognize here the four causes of the world: the formal, the final, the efficient, and the material. 

 

I admit that St. Thomas is not always easy to understand, especially early on a Sunday morning, and I have so compressed his thinking here that I make him even harder.  (Like Thomas, I am more used to giving lectures than preaching sermons.) But the Spirit is the Spirit of all Truth and St. Thomas left us a prayer which is very easy to understand and remember, and which I want to leave with you.  

 

            He wrote it Latin, and because this is Pentecost, I hope you will forgive me for reciting the first sentence in Latin. This is the way the prayer was remembered by generation after generation of Catholic Christians and aspiring priests[2]:

 

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium:

et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.

 

            And now in English

 

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.
 Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created.
And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

*****

 

 


[1]The Holy Bible  : New International Version, electronic ed., Ps 104:30 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996, c1984).

[2] I reproduce the whole text in Latin here: Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium: et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.  Emitte Spiritum tuum, et creabuntur.
 Et renovabis faciem terrae Oremus. Deus, qui corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti: da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere; et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.