pentecost
acts 2:1-21
the gospel of john 14:8-17
for St. John’s Christopher Street, June 9, 2019
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The Holy Spirit is fire. She is wind. She is power, and movement, and energy. She is the breath that moves between our bodies and the trees. She is the thread of possibility between relationships.
She is called the Companion, the Ghost, the Spirit, the Intercessor, the Advocate, the Guide.
She is a paradox, and brings holy danger, because change is a sacred risk. We don’t always know what to do with her, how to notice her in the world, how to faithfully follow her direction, how to leave room for her to act without being stuck in our own inaction, or without mixing up her work with our flawed human structures.
But sometimes, her power is so fierce and she brings herself so definitively that we don’t need to question whether she is here, and has a message for us.
It’s Pentecost. But at the top of our passage from Acts, the disciples don’t yet know the impact this festival day will have on them. They are together, in one place. I imagine it as a similar scene to their previous gatherings, where the risen Christ shows up. Doors locked, an anonymous building, hushed voices. It’s more than the 12, I think this group includes the faithful women, the latecomers, the poor, the sex workers, those who have clung to the feet of Jesus. They are still grieving their teacher’s death + ascension, their bodies still reacting with shock at the terror of state violence, still scared that they will be next, wondering how best to continue. Remembering that radical love is met with oppression and violence by Empire. But remembering too, how the radical love that Christ brought changed their world.
This has been the story so far:
Jesus came and was baptized by water and anointed by the Holy Spirit, a dove alighting on his body. He began a ministry of healing, preaching, feeding, renewing, reversing, offering an alternative to the powers and world-as-is.
One of his last acts was to wash the disciples feet on the night he was handed over to the Roman and religious authorities, inverting yet again the expected power structures, leaving his followers with the commandment to love one another as Christ himself loved – a risky, all-encompassing, fervent, truth-telling love.
And Christ died for that message, for that ministry. He was publicly, painfully, executed. But that wasn’t the end.
Jesus resurrected appeared to the disciples, telling them to not be afraid, showing the wounds that were still present on Christ’s body, sending the disciples to be blessings. When they tried to return to their old lives, when Simon Peter returned to the fishing boat, Jesus called them back to the shore, to love their neighbors and care for each other.
Then Jesus’ body, a body so like theirs, fleshy, blood pumping through veins, weeping, wounded, was raised up to be with God. This marks their own bodies as holy, our bodies as holy. The disciples keep having to make sense of a world that isn’t what they expected, even as they hold their grief, but it’s a world where God’s abundance shows up in unexplainable and surprising ways. They keep being pulled out of their daily lives into something new and unknown by God.
When the disciples are together again on this festival day, locked in a room for fear and uncertainty, I imagine they are trying to carve a space to process their trauma, to figure out how to interact with the world after all that’s happened, constantly being tempted by their old lives and the status quo. They are turning inward for comfort, which isn’t always a bad thing, but it can keep us stuck in old patterns.
And then the Holy Spirit shows up.
This is no longer a quiet and secluded gathering. It isn’t safe, and it isn’t contained. The Holy Spirit comes with the howling of a fierce wind, so momentous and loud that a crowd gathers around the house. She makes her presence known to the disciples and to those gathered.
She comes as many tongues of flame, alighting on the bodies of the disciples, enabling them to speak in a multitude of languages. They are conduits for God, the Spirit coursing through their bodies. They are transformed again into the body of Christ, united not by culture or language or gender or class, but by Divine grace.
And those listening? Who were full of wonder, or thought the disciples were drunk? Each person understood the works of God in their own language, whether their first language was Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, a local dialect, or signed communication. They didn’t have to change themselves, or have an elite education, or ask their neighbor what was being said. God met them where they were at, and proclaimed God’s goodness. The Kin-dom is for them too, not just the disciples who already believed.
And that’s power. The Holy Spirit showing up, giving a glimpse of the Kin-dom of God, where every person is understood, where diversity is welcomed and not met with required assimilation. As I was preparing this sermon, I kept being drawn to a modern retelling of this Pentecost story – who would be there when the Holy Spirit shows up and changes the course of our lives? Because like the disciples, we know violence. We know trauma, and we know the fear that keeps us stuck in systems that hurt everyone involved, and that hurt our planet.
I imagine the Holy Spirit at Stonewall, drag queens and trans women of color and my non-binary siblings all glowing from her presence. I imagine her at the state capitol, when disability activists are present with mobility aids, interpreters, calling for accessibility to be the norm, not an afterthought. I imagine her at the funeral of a young black man who was killed by police brutality, and her being with his far-flung relatives who can’t afford the plane ticket to be there. I imagine her showing up in the dead of night, when someone starts giving up on God’s good creation, a comforting and insistent presence to stay one more day, then one more.
But I most imagine her disrupting the small, daily moments when we choose the status quo over the dreams of God. She is present when we most want to return to our lives as-they-were, when the seductive lullaby of complacency is surrounding us. She redirects our impulse to turn away from God, and remembers our stories, our histories, the holy griefs we are carrying long after everyone else has moved on. She lights those on fire. She transforms them. She wakes us up.
Something I often keep to myself are the moments when I physically, viscerally, feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. She makes herself known to me in times of deep prayer, in pastoral moments with my queer coworkers who don’t go to church, and when I am finally able to move past my embedded bias’ and encounter someone unknown to me as an image of God. And I know that I’m not the only one with these experiences, because the Holy Spirit is our breath. And she is power. But naming her presence? It’s countercultural, often dismissed, or viewed as “crazy” (and I don’t use that word lightly, because I know the ways it is used to harm).
It’s important to say that Pentecost is a story of the end times. The transformation that the fire of the Holy Spirit brings means the death of the world-as-is. “The young will see visions and the elders will dream dreams, and they will prophesy my new creation”. This is not a comforting text for all people, since God’s new creation will require us to let go of the privileges we have that are at the expense of the most vulnerable. Letting God’s dreams break into ours can mean a rupture of our worldview, a rupture of the hierarchies we have been formed by. And that’s scary. But it’s sacred.
We cannot go back once the Holy Spirit brings her fire to us. It will be tempting to. It will be tempting to return to our quiet, safe, secluded spaces as the disciples did. To go about our days, only working to afford food and rent, not allowing ourselves to dream of alternate ways of being in the world. To ignore the ways God brings new life, and renewal, and repairs our broken relationships. To hold back when we want to dance, or sing out the ways that God is present in our lives. These temptations are particularly dangerous when paired with the systems that seek to control our bodies and our expression, particularly dangerous paired with capitalism, white supremacy, and nationalism. In contrast, the Kin-dom of God is a dream of abundance, where everyone has enough to eat, has clean air, safe water, shelter, social and medical services, and mutual relationships of care. Where the resurrected, physical body of Jesus is Divine and present in each of us and our neighbors. Where the Holy Spirit is relentless, showing up again and again to shake us out of our illusions of control.
The Holy Spirit is a wonder, and her presence is a terrifying, glorious, possibility. She can’t be regulated to one day of the church year, and it’s pointless to try – instead she is always and already bringing the fire of Pentecost to our everyday lives. To the bread and cup we share at God’s table. To the relationships we nurture. To our prayers. She is present and moving through the world, weaving together our stories of resilience, and power, and healing, and mourning, transforming them for the sake of God.
So spin your breath with hers, and let her presence kindle sacred flames.
Reed Fowler 