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“ The What, How, and Why of Pentecost "

May 11, 2008- RCL Year A, Pentecost

The Rev. Mark Byers

I was looking at my calendar on the wall as I began working on today’s sermon. I noticed first the photograph at the top, which has been in my view since the beginning of the month. My wall calendar is “Castles 2008.” May’s Castle is Chateau de Villandry, in the Loire Valley of France. It has extraordinary gardens, and was built in the early 1500s around an earlier fortification from the 1300s. It’s an exquisite picture of a fortification that has been transformed into a grand palace with gorgeous gardens: a sword beaten, not merely into a plowshare, but into a business complex and entertainment center.

It’s funny to me that it’s considered a castle, because typically when I think of a castle, I think of a rough place that was used by a ruler or powerful aristocrat to dominate or defend his or her lands by military power. That was the bargain by which society was governed when the original castle was constructed: nobles defended and secured the lives of their subjects in return for their labor, military service, and loyalty. Then my eyes strayed to the date, and I noticed that May 11, today’s date, says this:

Mother’s Day

(USA, CAN, AUS, NZL)

And then, underneath,

Pentecost

Interesting. They don’t, every year, share the same date. But this year, they do, and on my calendar of castles, Mother’s Day gets top billing.

Maybe Pentecost suffers from having a name that no longer means anything to most people. Mother’s Day is pretty hard to misunderstand, obviously. And even within the church, most folks probably don’t know much more about Pentecost than that we wear red and celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the faithful. Some have called it the birth of the church.

Pentecost is also more, historically, than the occasion upon which the Holy Spirit was given to the church. Like Chateau de Villandry, it began as something other than what it has become. And like the Chateau, it has, for many Christians, become a curiosity, something that we see, but that doesn’t really have the same significance it once did. Pentecost, to use an analogy, is no longer a castle, nor even a chateau. It is, for many, an obscure curiosity. It doesn’t fit into the center of the life of most people any longer, as it did for early Christians and even the established church of Christendom. In our re-secularized world, Pentecost seems as much a museum piece for our culture as Chateau de Villandry is for western Europe. If you are not in church on Pentecost, the vast majority of the country will not think it’s significant. Try forgetting Mother’s Day, and you will get another response entirely.

Before we get too deeply into why Pentecost retains or doesn’t retain its importance to a faith community such as ours, let’s look at how it came to be.

The Origins of Pentecost

The Apostles were in Jerusalem for Pentecost, “all together in one place.” There were Jews from all over gathered in the city, where the Temple was located until its destruction some thirty or so years later. Pentecost is from Greek, meaning “fiftieth.” It is referred to within Judaism, because this was first a Jewish festival, and continues to be one, as “Shavuot,” which means “weeks.” The Greek and Hebrew names both allude to the fact that it came, originally, seven weeks after the harvest. Thus, the fiftieth day, or the “festival of weeks.” It has come to be dated, among Jews, fifty days from the first day of Passover. This day was specified in scripture as the day on which offerings from the harvest would be brought to the Temple. Shavuot, or Pentecost, is one of the three principal feasts of Judaism, the other two being Pesach, or Passover, and Sukkot, or Tabernacles.

I learned, in seminary and from my own reading, that as the world of Judaism changed, so did the meaning of Pentecost. Just as the world of Chateau de Villandry changed from feudal lords to nation-states, and from castles to mansions, so Pentecost came to mean something different as fewer people farmed for their livelihood and more lived in towns and cities. Pentecost came to be observed as a festival commemorating the giving of the Torah, the Law, on Mount Sinai. Thus, Passover commemorated the escape from Egypt, and the Feast of Weeks, the new law given to Moses and the Israelites only a few weeks into their forty years of wandering.

So here again, God brings multiple points of our heritage together to make new meaning and reality. At the feast of weeks, while the apostles were still wondering, “What next?”, God sent the Holy Spirit among the people. The part we often recall is that people from different nations were able to hear other people speaking to them as if it were in their own language. They spoke “in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” And what they hear from the speakers is an account of “Gods deeds of power.”

Some people now have difficulty believing this is an accurate account of what happened. People had trouble even then: “They are filled with new wine.” They’re drunk. People still make jokes, when they travel, about how drinking makes it easier to speak other languages, really meaning that drunk people misjudge their ability to communicate, just as they misjudge their ability to drive or make… relationship choices, shall we say?

Personally, I don’t see why, if we are willing to concede that God created the universe and continues to exercise lordship of it, we shouldn’t give scripture the benefit of the doubt on this as well as a number of other points. Would this really be THAT hard for the Creator?

But I digress. What exactly does it matter that God did this?

I’m glad you asked. First, it matters because God promised that He would send the spirit into the world in order to help the apostles accomplish the mission given to them. And this miraculous event functions on different levels: the wondrous, because it is virtually unheard of, and the metaphorical, because it presents a picture of people from vastly different social and cultural realms able to understand God in their own language, which was not the language spoken by the apostles. It also functions to recall the apostles, and the audience of the book of Acts, to the Tower of Babel, where God is said to have “confused their language” to prevent them from following through on the prideful act of building a tower with its top in the heavens” in order to “make a name for themselves.” One might interpret the act of reversing the “Babel” story as recreating unity of understanding among people in order that they hear without impediment what God has done and is doing among them. It is a sign, a foretaste, of a time to come when God, acting through His creatures, will draw human beings together into common understanding of God’s station in the universe and their bond with one another. And it will be accomplished, just as Israel’s deliverance and the giving of the Law were, in collaboration with human agents.

Here there is an enormous question to be asked that may not have occurred to you today, but will occur to the vast majority of us at one point or another, if it hasn’t already. It has been a challenge to the faith of multitudes of people over thousands of years: Job asks this question in the Old Testament, and I’ve asked it, and some of you are asking it, in one form or another. Why doesn’t God just change reality so it looks like it should? Can’t God fix this place? Sometimes it seems that God doesn’t have the job skills to accomplish what it is that we say He’s trying to do, or chooses to act as if He doesn’t. Suffering, and greed, and injustice, and the willful, ignorant destruction of our glorious, beautiful garden seem to be the order of the day. Human pride, folly, and sinfulness seem to have given us almost limitless capacity to sow destruction, or to ignore the plight of fellow human beings, or both. And sometimes it seems as if all the church can say is, “Someday things will be better.” Or it offers condemnation, and ignores its own flaws. Or it says, “There’s no such thing as sin. Everything’s all right, and we should all feel great about ourselves.”

I wouldn’t find it helpful, to make an analogy, to have someone to come to my house and tell me, “One day, you will have a dishwasher that works.” Or , “The reason the dishwasher doesn’t work is because YOU BROKE IT.” Or even, “All is well with the dishwasher; you simply need to accept it for what it is.”

I might, however, appreciate someone who came into my house and gave me the ability to name a problem, figure out how it happened so that I might prevent it recurring, and the means to begin addressing it myself. That would not mean, of course, that nothing would ever break in my house again. But it would mean that, because I am not helpless in my own home, that I could make better choices when problems do occur. I might even, if the occasion arose, help another homeowner to learn similar skills and wisdom. And I would probably, if the person acted often and kindly, come to view them not simply as a “service provider,” but as a friend and collaborator deeply concerned with me and my home and family.

And that person, we might also suppose, is deeply concerned not just that things break in homes, because any simpleton knows that. You wouldn’t call a person like that a repairman, although clearly such a person would know how to fix things, and is concerned that they are broken. But that person, if they existed, would also realize that not knowing how to act wisely and skillfully within one’s own home is a form of bondage, and no true friend would ever allow another to be a slave in his or her own home.

Chateau de Villandry is known today for being a pretty place with a wonderful garden. As lovely as it is to visit a place like that, Pentecost is more than just a relic of another era without any current use. It is God’s gift to faithful people, the act of saying, “What I did before, I will do again now. I will give you the appropriate tools and understanding to live in faith with the job I’ve given you to do.” When God gave the law at Sinai, which faithful Jews commemorate on Pentecost, the appropriate tools and understanding were suited to newly freed people who were journeying to the land that had been promised to them. They were given the rules by which they would understand and order themselves.

At Pentecost, the apostles were given the gift of the Holy Spirit, a sign and new reality meant to equip them to journey not to the Promised Land, because literally they already lived on that land. Rather, the Spirit is God’s transforming power to do through it what we would be unable to do by ourselves, which is to remake all of the world into the new Promised Land. If we ever wonder why it is that God doesn’t simply “fix” everything, it is because if that happened, God would take away the very freedom that gives our choices meaning. There’s always a tension in scripture between the freedom to choose God’s path and our own path. At Sinai, while Moses was being given the tablets of the law, the newly-freed Israelites were getting anxious and melting down their carefully hoarded jewelry to make an idol to worship. At Pentecost, some people were able to hear God’s word in the speech of the people touched by the Spirit. Some people just thought they were delusional or drunk. We are told all the time, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll fix what’s wrong in your home,” by government, by self-proclaimed experts, by corporations, by family members and friends. And we have the freedom to listen to them. But we also have the freedom to allow the Holy Spirit to move within us, to fulfill God’s mission for us in our own home, in this community and the world God has given into our care.

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