Pentecost Sunday
5 June 2011
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
New York City

I had a dream this week. I know why I had the dream, because I have been putting some plants into the ground around the church here, and whenever I spend much time doing gardening, I have a dream about growing up in California, and particularly about gardening at my parents’ home when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It was a small house, originally only two bedrooms, but then we were a small family – two adults, a child and a duck. So it made sense for us. But the house sat in the middle of a very large plot of land – a half acre, in fact. And even after you took off about a third of the land for what seemed like the largest vegetable garden in Christendom, there was still a lot of property to be landscaped.

Now, not that I have any tendency toward compulsion, you understand, but all of that unplanted land was something of a challenge to me. And, so, when I was home from the university, I would do the gardening. At first it was just mowing and weeding. But then I began to look at magazines. And whatever I saw in the gardening magazines, I built. One summer it was rock walls, so that year my somewhat puzzled father and I took the truck and went out into the country and brought back loads of rocks. The next year, it was pathways, so pretty soon there were flagstone paths going everywhere – including one that went up to a fence and stopped dead in its tracks.

My partner in crime with all of this horticultural creativity was the lady next door, a woman named Georgia. She was also the first person I ever knew really well who died. But that is another story. Georgia was a gardener, par excellence. And while our place was decorated mainly with leggy geraniums, she had hibiscus plants and jasmine vines, and rhododendrons growing in the shade, and even, heaven help us, a bird bath. You can see where this was all going. She was guilty of aiding and abetting the crime. She taught me what to plant, how to plant it, how to take care of it, and even sometimes, how to fix it when it got sick.

Our gardening forum took place at the end of the evening’s work. After a few hours of work on the latest rock garden or path or row of shrubs, I would hear her kitchen door open and out she came. I turned off the water and would stand at the fence and talk with Georgia for – sometimes, I think – an hour or two.

We talked about the plants and the latest project. We talked about restaurants the she went to with her husband Henry. We talked about growing up, and what it means to be adult, and I learned from her – with the typical teenaged misconceptions – what it meant to be sophisticated, what it was like to be unencumbered with children – for she and Henry were childless. In short, we talked about the adult things that you cannot talk with your parents about. Years later, I learned from psychologists, that what I was getting in these long talks with Georgia was non parental adult validation.

Whatever it was, it counted. Looking back on my relatively happy childhood and youth, Georgia stands out like a beacon, a landmark in my coming of age. I can still remember those talks over the fence, deep talks, profound not so much for their ideas – who can get excited about how to plant nasturtiums or where to find fresh abalone? – but for the tone, the depth, the acceptance, the ways in which they touched the growing edge of a young man. They were deep conversations.

Now how a young man came of age in the sixties is of relatively limited interest. But my point and purpose in telling this story is this: At the heart of the matter, I think those conversations – those deep conversations – show us by analogy something of the nature of God and the Holy Spirit. Let me explain.

The Christian experience of God is three-fold. We don’t have three Gods because each of our experiences of God is all about the same purpose – there is no division of motivation or of divine purpose – our single unified God is dead set on loving us. One motive, one goal. Loving us with all of his divine heart.

That threefold modality of God works like this. It is like a conversation. God begins a conversation with each one of us. In the first instance that conversation is about discovering who we are. When Israel was in slavery in Egypt, she learned from God that far from being a bunch of nobodies in bondage, she was someone. She had dignity and standing in the eyes of God. God spoke with her. God’s words spoken to her called her into a new self-understanding, gave her a new sense of being. God made her, created her, a people. God engages us in a conversation and in that conversation we discover who we are, we are created.

Then, in the second instance, the divine conversation is about who we might be. We call that a conversation about redemption. People talk about redemption because the circumstances of the human world do not correspond with the promises of creation. In redemption, God’s word comes closer to humanity than it ever has been before. We call God the Redeemer, the Word because words are signs of the presence of another, because words show us something and in this way they reveal God, and words have power, they can change a state of affairs into something else. So God continues to converse with us and his word shows us the way out of our limited situation.

And in the third instance, the divine conversation is about getting personal. When we speak of the spirit of God, we are speaking of God who takes root in us from the inside. God from the inside is the God who changes us, who works on us from the interior. The conversation which God has begun with us becomes much deeper, and calls up deeper and deeper levels of our selves. In the presence of god’s word within us we begin to be changed, shaped from the inside by this internalized word of God, which promises us not only a richer understanding of our selves, but a clearer identity of our destiny in God.

So the way God works on us goes like this: Our conversation with God tells us who we are, who we might be, and how we are going to get to our destiny.

That experience I had of those incredibly deep, time exploding, bonding conversations with my friend were, for me, examples in this life of what it means to have a deep conversation with God, one in which we come to know the spirit of God more fully.

The late Richard Norris, an emeritus professor of Theology at Union Seminary here in the City, spoke of the holy Spirit which came down on this day of Pentecost, as that modality of God which reveals humanity as men and women on the move. The readings for today’s mass confirm that conviction. We are people on the move.

In First Corinthians, the spirit is described as the giver of gifts, the one who provides the tools for the proclamation of that divine power of God which puts us on the move. In the gospel, the spirit is pictured as the one who takes sin out of the picture, by forgiving us and making us able to move forward into peace. And, in the book of Acts, our first reading, the spirit is pictured as wind, and wind in scripture is connected with life and power.

If you would find where the spirit of God is working in your experience, look for those moments of deep conversation, where you discover who you are, where you are given vision about who you might be, and where you gain the hope and the power to become a man or a woman on the move toward God.