The Feast of Pentecot
Sunday 23 May 2010
St. John’s Church in the Village
New York City
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

Send out your spirit and we shall be saved, and so you shall renew the face of the earth.

One of my favorite psalms, and one which years ago, I did in careful calligraphy for a friend who happened to be the priest at my University. It was a gift in thanks for his friendship and guidance and for helping me to understand the Episcopal Church and find my way into it.

And today it forms the gradual psalm for the Eucharist, as we gather to bring Easter to a close with the celebration of Pentecost.

There are two things going on at Pentecost, each of which bears some examination.

First, Pentecost is about God being with us in a new way. Now that happens in all kinds of relationships. Very good parents are often so graceful about the way in which they change their style of parenting, and in that way they change the way in which they are with their offspring.

I was lucky. I had the best father in the world. And, he was the best, in large measure, because he knew about changing the way to be with a child as he grew from boy to lad to man. My father was a strict disciplinarian when I was young, he believed that being able to do things, to do them right and to be on time was important. There was no arguing with him on those points at that time. He was also a fine teacher, even though he only had a high school education. All the way through the mysteries of algebra, the theorems of geometry and the exotic angles of trigonometry, his good, solid mind helped me to see things which my teacher at school could not get into my thick head. As I grew older, he began to be with me in different ways. We would talk about morals and values when he cut my hair out in the garage—we were poor, and that was a way to save money. I learned about the secrets of the family to sound of scissors and clippers. Slowly, there came a change. It began with my learning some things in college that he did not know and my sharing them with him. The new role he claimed for himself became crystal clear one day when I actually taught him something—as it happened, how to repair a broken kitchen knife. We had become not so much father and son, as two men sharing insights.

So, our relationship grew and changed, and if you think of it, you will probably come up with stories in your experience about how your important relationships evolved and changed.

So it was with Jesus. The disciples knew Jesus as a teacher and as a miracle worker, and as a religious leader. He was a Jew, they were mostly Jews. He was a man of the first century, and so were they. Then, they went through the horribly upsetting, disjointing experience of his death. It seemed all over. And then the puzzling experience of the empty tomb and the even more puzzling evidence that in some new way he was still with them. The post resurrection appearances, we call them.

We commemorate these events liturgically in the church’s liturgical year. The season of Epiphany is the disciples getting to know Jesus the earthly teacher and worker of wonders. Lent is the preparation for the crisis of the passion. Easter is the glory of the resurrection and for the last seven weeks, we have been enjoying the appearances of Jesus told from the perspective of these first century men and women who were the first disciples.

Something is going to change. The first clue about the change was in the Ascension of the Lord, when he is taken away and he promises to be with his disciples in a new way. In a sense, that is the coming of age of the disciples. And today, we celebrate Pentecost and the story of Pentecost, told in Acts is a real doozie. Where the disciples had known God as the man who walked with them, fed them, and healed them, now they know God as tongues of fire and gusts of powerful wind which both literally and figuratively blew them away.

But All of this is about Jesus being with his friends in a new way. Time was slipping away, the first century was coming to an end, history would begin to move onward and the culture would change. Pretty soon Christianity would move westward along the Mediterranean, across Europe to England, and then to places that the early disciples did not even know were there. Eventually, it even made it to New York.

It was going to become essential for God to make himself known to us in new ways. He would always be the same God, creating life, correcting sin, healing illness, offering new life. But he would begin to do it in different ways, and it would become important to speak of it in new ways.

In Pentecost, the life of Jesus is broken open and spread across the world like fire or wind. I grew up in California, and every summer a substantial part of the state goes up in flames. A grass fire is a thing of terror and power, and it, perhaps better than anything else can give you an image about what the wind and flame of Pentecost must have been like.

If the Christian faith was to be a universal faith, and God had been nudging us along in that direction since the days of the prophets in the Old Testament, then it needed to be freed from its anchor in ancient Palestine and made to take root in different cultures and historical situation.

We grew up. We needed a faith for a new age, a faith to speak about and to the world we actually live in. Pentecost is about god giving us this new way of being with us.

One of the ancient symbols of this new way of being with us is the pomegranate, which in Christian symbolism is a reminder of the fullness of the suffering of Christ and the spread of his gifts across the world. In a sense, Pentecost might be the season of the pomegranate, because it is the time when we think of Jesus being broken open and his seeds, if you will, being spread across the world in all cultures.

And that is the second thing to think about as we hear the psalm: Send forth your spirit and so you will renew the face of the earth. If Christianity is a universal religion, and God is a god intent on being with us in all manner of new ways, then it is the task of the contemporary Christian, living among men and women of all cultures, to find in many cultures the traces of God, of Jesus the son of God, and the evidence of the holy spirit. Maybe the job of the Christian is to be the one searching for pomegranate seeds. It may be true enough to think of the seeds of the pomegranate as reminders of the seeds of god’s own presence which we find in our own faith, but also in aspects of other authentic ways of knowing god representative in other cultures and theologies.

The vocation of the Christian is to live in a complex world with diverse perspective and views. And to know what we believe to be true of God. And to know other cultures and ways of thinking which may be parallel to our own or offer commentaries on our own way of knowing God and the world.

To pick our way in the new world, God gives us, today, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century named seven: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and wonder. Neither time nor interest allows exploring all of them, but wisdom, understanding and knowledge are all about knowing Jesus Christ deeply and thoroughly, and conforming ones life to his. Courage is all about standing up for what you know to be true. Wonder and awe is the perpetual posture of amazement at the god who has done the things our God has done. Arming yourself with these gifts, through study, prayer, devotion and service will enable you to look at the world around you and determine which things are of god and which things are either indifferent or evil.

It can be a tricky thing to live through the change of a relationship. It was a shock to learn that I could teach my father something after so many years of his being the teacher. But if we are to be adults in the faith, we are called, I think, to embrace a mature understanding of God. That maturity comes, I am convinced, through the miracle of Pentecost, which we celebrate today as we bring to close the miracle of Easter and set about living in response to its mysteries and its challenges.