Pentecost

Preaching on Acts 2:1-21

There have been moments in my life where I am sure that the Spirit of God was present. It’s a tough call though – where do you go to get that belief unambiguously and authoritatively affirmed?

I have had moments of an influx of life-giving sacred emotion when my own internal reserves had long run out, when circumstances or another person coincidentally offered the specific words or actions I needed. Maybe they were just ordinary encounters of friendship and affection. It’s hard to say.

My suspicion, though, is that we are led astray by our expectation that the Spirit will come with fire from the heavens, that it will be appreciably alien; and that keeping an eye out for the cosmic distracts us from the everyday places that the Spirit is already entering into our world. In my mind, the Spirit of God is ubiquitous.

As we enter the fourth month of the universal experience of quarantine, with a third of people reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety, that hope for an intervening external power grows stronger and stronger.

We witness the death of George Floyd, a Minnesota man working security at a Minneapolis bar, who was detained by police and who died when the arresting officer knelt on his throat for minutes. For decades, George led Bible study and Christian community development in Houston’s Third Ward. We witness the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a young woman in High Park whose family called the police to help her get from her apartment to CAMH., found her dead on the ground below, and believe that police were involved in her death. She helped at every cookout of the Peace Community Church of Jesus Christ here in Toronto.

I want someone to reach down from on high and to make it right once and for all.

We know that God’s vision of the world is just and equitable, where God is close, all have homes, jobs and food and those who only live to a hundred are considered cursed.

How do we reconcile the small movements of a ubiquitous spirit and the discrepancies between our world and that vision? How do we hold the faith that God created the world and called it good, that God puts God’s spirit & breath into all things, that no power nor principality can separate us from God’s love, that the reason we struggle to notice God’s presence around us is the same reason fish struggle to notice the sea?

I struggle with that question – how does the sanctifying brush of an ordinary and ever-present Spirit contribute to the coming of God’s kingdom?

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We don’t know what John the Baptist was doing. Paul imagines the descent into water as an experience of resurrection. Others talk about being washed clean. The marking of foreheads is reminiscent of being anointed with oil. The text of the baptismal ritual invokes the watery chaos of creation, the parting of the red sea, Moses drawing forth water in the desert. It is dense with symbolism.

As Jesus is baptized, the Holy Spirit descends as a bird; there is a light from the heavens, there is a voice saying you are my beloved son. The old order and hierarchy falls away, he is no longer anonymous, and is initiated into his calling.

Today, we celebrate – at long last – the story of Pentecost. After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the apostles struggle with how to live out their calling. As we have heard, they choose to live together and share resources, they experience and interpret visions, they’ll take on unexpected allies, and will have mysterious escapades. Before any of that takes place, they’ll spend the 50 days between the Passover and the Festival of Weeks hiding out in a little room.

During the Festival they will be initiated into their calling, the old order and hierarchy will fall away, and they will no longer be anonymous. The Holy Spirit will come again, and mark each of one of them as we are marked, only not with water but with fire.

If we struggle to wade through the symbolism an immersion in water, how can we possibly make sense of divided tongues of flame?

Long after both Jesus’ baptism and the Pentecost experience, but long before the Gospel accounts of either, the apostle-who-had-once-been-known-as-Saul mysteriously escapes from prison by way of an earthquake, pops in to Athens, and then spends 18 months starting a church in Corinth.

I am sure that, at some point, the spirit came to the Corinthians, but Paul wrote them sprawling epistolary exegesis because something seems like it didn’t take. They were a community drawn from all parts of Corinthian life, and the social divisions and hierarchies of their world continued to be present in their community. Some wouldn’t share the best parts of the communion meal, others thought the rules didn’t apply to them, others sought to take power by means of spiritual authority.

The old order seemed to be re-establishing itself. While a moment of transformation had taken place, the community seems insufficiently attentive to ever-present Spirit, and its sanctifying brush. They were clearly failing to live into the promise of the kingdom.

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Paul writes to the Corinthians, and describes the Spirit as a guest arriving with gifts, each one crucial for us to be together – wisdom, and knowledge, and faith and healing. It draws out that which is inherent, and equips us with that which we will need to collectively thrive and to live out our calling.

It does so, recognizing that we are in community with one another, and that that community requires our diversity and multiciplity. It pays attention to the health of the whole, as though each of us were the interconnected and interdependent parts of the human body – we each need to thrive for that the organism to function as a whole.

When one of us suffers, we all suffer. When one of us thrives, we all thrive.

In the Pentecost story, the formative miracle upon which the church stands is the gift of language – in a divided world, the Spirit offers communication across difference, and the ability to build a huge network of care and solidarity.

In my experience and imagination, when the fire of the Holy Spirit comes it is not a wild conflagration. The tongues of flame aren’t incendiary, but come with the warmth of the hearth or the gentleness of a lantern on a dim evening. It comes with the warmth of an embrace, or as heat on a sore muscle, or as a blanket made with love.

When Jesus went down to the River Jordan with John the Baptist, according to all four Gospels, the Holy Spirit comes down from the heavens as a bird. ‘As a bird,’ there is the translation of the Greek hos peristeran. I was recently exploring the work of Mark Saunders – Christian animist – who stresses that hos peristan doesn’t mean like a bird, but claims that God-as-Spirit becomes a bird.

While we often imagine the Spirit descending like a dove, he also stresses that peristan glosses the huge taxonomical ambiguity in the pigeon/dove family, and that the most likely avian incarnation of the Spirit of God would be the Rock Pigeon – incredibly common in Roman Palestine.

We are invited to see the Spirit of God, for a moment, not as a virginal and otherworldly all-white dove, but dirty and rock gray, with an iridescent green-and-violet neck, living off seeds and berries, the ancestor of the everyday pigeon cooing in our parks, nesting in our eaves.

If we can see that Spirit, we can look up and see the mistrust in the eyes of the multitude of John’s followers melt away. We can see the strength in their movements coming together. We can encounter the power of that connection within history.

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The moral of the story, I guess, is to pay attention to the pigeons, especially when they call someone beloved. It is to pay attention to warmth passing through you, or to the goosebumps on your skin – maybe they have new languages to speak. The moral of the story is to accept the invitation of the Spirit drawing us outward.

Difference exists – each of our encounters with the Spirit will be different, our theologies are different, and our callings are different. We exist in separate worlds, now more than ever. While that gulf isn’t filled, the Spirit working in my world entangles with the Spirit working in yours. There is power in that connection within history.

However it comes to us, I guess, the moral of the story is that the Spirit might offer you a different wisdom than it offers others, and that we require theirs as much as ours to thrive.

For me, in these days, the closest I feel to God is when I rise early and put the house in order. As I fold blankets and start the dishes, my heart reaches past the worries of the day, through far away friends to stretch for the Spirit of God. I feel like I pour God’s spirit into sweeping and bless the floors with divine presence.

Between the floors swept with blessing, and all of the other ways in which the spirit comes to me and shines through me, and all of the ways in which it comes to you and shines through you, and the ways it comes and shines in the each person and all things, perhaps an equitable world might come

A potentially ordinary love is made extraordinary by its entanglement with others. Each falling drop of water is made extraordinary by coalescing into the river. Each divided tongue of flame is made extraordinary by uniting into the fire.

Not Another Black Life is asking us to talk to our Councilor or our MPP about the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet. While there is a provincial Special Investigations Unit offering accountability, they note that a significant proportion of the SIU’s investigators come from law enforcement and they have a history of ruling in favour of police. They are asking us to ask for an independent inquest.

In quarantine, our friends and relations and acquaintances are asking us if we would be willing to call, or to stand in their yard, or to offer to grab groceries. The spirit is not otherworldly or far-away. It is here, in each of our lives, empowering us, and nudging us to accept the invitation – reach out, across difference, and accept the baptism into love.