This Week: Pentecost
Gospel: John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
There is so much to do with Pentecost, we don’t lack for conversation points. Or, at least, we shouldn’t.
There is a thing about the principal feasts, though. That we need to get the “right” meaning or that we need to focus on them a particular way. And when that is our mindset, then yeah, they get pretty old after we’ve done this a few times.
Most young preachers have little trouble finding something for a half-dozen sermons in feast day like this one. We’ve got the spectacle, the languages, the Holy Spirit herself. We have the Acts reading or the gospel. And the gospel has some interesting bits to offer, too.
And because next week is Trinity Sunday, we might feel compelled to avoid theology this week since we can’t avoid it next week. Or maybe we talk about the Holy Spirit in particular and let the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Trinity go until next time.
Or maybe you refuse to do active theology in church. That’s a choice, I suppose. We can then focus instead on a practical, experiential expression of it.
But the one thing we can’t avoid talking about, however, is the Holy Spirit. And I suspect there is a great opportunity with Year B to draw some connections.
Holding themes together.
As we’ve been talking about for several weeks now, the gospels share the final teachings of Jesus before the Passion. We’ve been at it for a few weeks now.
While they aren’t directly about a Holy Spirit message, they highlight an ongoing theme in the work Jesus is doing and which he says the Advocate will be doing—namely a completion of joy in the world.
We know that we are to love one another. And while we get this hypothetically, we struggle to see what this looks like for us in a world that isn’t ordered by the command to love one another.
But Jesus says that his love and joy is poured into us and comes alive when that same love and joy is shared and comes alive in others.
We’re talking about the Dream of God stuff—which is the stuff the Advocate helps happen. The gospels, therefore, have given us a runway to engage with the mission we bring with us into Pentecost.
The other option
We can see the pairing of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday as a great opportunity to blend the character of theology and our convictions into our lives. The Holy Spirit as the persona of God that is with us, just as the Triune God alreadyparticipates in with itself in a true divine dance.
It is personal, incarnational, and real. Us with one another as God is with us in the reality of the world. In the muck and mire and the joy and the glory.
This isn’t so much an other option as it is an also option. It fits great with the John gospel passages we’ve been reading.
We do need to get the languages right, though
This is one of the mistakes we make with Pentecost. And one churches consistently make. We love the spectacle and want to replicate it—just like people want someone to ride in on a donkey on Palm Sunday or play Mary and Joseph for Christmas.
But the character of the Pentecost event is that people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people who did know them could hear and understand the Good News.
Any sense of spectacle that doesn’t help us hear that particular message is a grave mistake. Pentecost is about expanding and including, not confusing and excluding.
I’ve sat through readings of Acts not knowing what I was hearing or with many voices at once ensuring none of us could understand the gospel.
It is essential we understand the priority of understanding here.
And let’s not talk about birthdays
This isn’t the church’s birthday. So let’s try to avoid calling it that.
I understand the desire to celebrate Pentecost in particular. And the image may be enticing, particularly because we treat birthdays as important.
I know some people really hate the image, and I’m a bit more sanguine (and understanding), but it really is a kind of distracting idea that brings in conflicting priorities.
It seems strange that we would need to say anything more than this is a principal feast of the church, that it was one of the three oldest and central feasts of the church, and we ought to celebrate it as such.
And the day itself is so full of imagery and theological opportunity to invest ourselves in it so easily that we don’t need these shorthands to want to join in.
But mostly, I don’t want us thinking birthday of an institution when we should be thinking co-participation with God in a love revolution.
It isn’t the church that should be on our minds, but the trust God has in us to make the world heavenly.
I’ll leave us thinking of the counter-cultural beauty of Bilbo Baggins’ birthday at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Rings. Bilbo didn’t accept gifts for his birthday, he gave gifts to others for his birthday. That is a closer image to Pentecost than wishing the church a happy birthday.