Pentecost, May 15 2016
Acts 2:1-11; Ps 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23
Brookdale

Today is Pentecost, the special feast day of the Holy Spirit and the birthday of the church, an event recalled in today’s first reading.  We Christians tend to focus on God the Father and on Jesus.  The Holy Spirit isn’t mentioned very often except at Pentecost.  When my sister, who was always kind-hearted, was young, she used to pray to the Holy Spirit, because she thought he must be lonely.

But today I want to look more closely at the Pentecost event, as recounted in the first reading.  What does the Holy Spirit have to do with the wind and the fire of Pentecost?  What does Pentecost have to do with the church?  Why could the apostles suddenly speak in tongues?  And what does any of that have to do with us?

It sometimes seems as if the Holy Spirit suddenly appears in the New Testament as some sort of totally new revelation, but in fact the Hebrew Scriptures often talk about the spirit of God.  The spirit of God refers to the action of God on earth.  The words for spirit in Hebrew (ruah) and Greek (to pneuma) both mean “breath.”  The spirit of God is the breath of God.  Breath is essential to life, and God’s breath or spirit imparts life.  So when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils, he was imparting some of his own spirit or breath—his own life—into Adam. The spirit of God inspires (literally, “breathes into”) the prophets, so with their breath they can speak God’s word.  Today’s psalm reading mentions the creative force of God’s breath, in the form of wind, which brings rain and brings the barren desert to life:

If you take away their breath, they perish
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your [breath], they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.

The violent wind that “fills the house” at Pentecost is a sign of that same powerful creative spirit or breath of God, the Holy Spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures.

But it is not the only one.  The flame that appears above the heads of the disciples does not mean that Peter or Andrew’s hair has somehow caught on fire.  Fire was a symbol of God’s presence in the burning bush that Moses saw.  A scriptural book of the time, the Book of Enoch, described heaven as surrounded by tongues of fire, just like those that appear above the heads of the disciples.[1]  So the point of the account in today’s first reading is that heaven is breaking into earth when the Holy Spirit inspires these disciples.

Okay, so that’s what the Holy Spirit has to do with Pentecost.  But what does that have to do with the birthday of the church?  After the Ascension, Jesus is no longer with the disciples, but he has promised to send them his spirit—that is like his breath and life.  Just as God took clay and fashioned Adam, and then breathed life into him, now God takes this motley collection of disciples and fashions a new spiritual body of Christ out of them.  Then he breathes life into this new body—remember that mighty wind inside the house—and turns them into a living assembly, a church.  The early Christians experienced the Holy Spirit as a kind of gigantic energy field, which filled them with power and enabled them to do great things.

Furthermore, this church potentially embraces all lands and all peoples—that’s what “catholic” (small “c”) means.  The curse of the tower of Babel is undone at Pentecost: everyone can understand what the disciples are saying.  The “tongues” of fire translate into the different “tongues” or languages spoken by the visitors to Jerusalem who heard the disciples.  So Pentecost creates the church and breaks down the barriers that separate nations and ethnic groups.

What does all this have to do with us?  Is the point of the first reading merely to recount some history?  Was this just some miracle that happened two thousand years ago? I don’t think so.  The point is about today.  We are the disciples.  Look at the other people in this room—at Mary, Grace, and Jeff.  See that little tongue of flame above their heads?  That energy field is still here.  It wants to enter and empower all of us.  It wants to renew the face of the earth.

[1] See Michael Barber, “Why Tongues of Fire?” The Sacred Page blog,  http://www.thesacredpage.com/2011/06/why-tongues-of-fire.html