I think I’ll gamble on trust | a Pentecost sermon

A Pentecost sermon by Jamie Howison on Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4)

It is a striking scene—a rather wild and even unsettling scene—in which, just as Jesus had promised, the Holy Spirit of God descended upon the disciples and quite radically filled them anew for the work that lay ahead. I wonder if any of them hesitated for a few seconds, with questions around whether they were up to what was happening to them. Perhaps Thomas, the rather dour and serious one, who’d had such doubts about the resurrection? Or maybe Matthias, who had just been chosen as the twelfth disciple to take the place of Judas Iscariot? Maybe. But whatever fear or hesitation they might have initially experienced, it was quickly burned away by that rushing wind, the vision of tongues like fire, and this all but incomprehensible ability to speak in languages they’d never even heard before.

The Holy Spirit was now present to them, just as Jesus said would be the case. That word “spirit” is multi-layered. In Greek the word is pneuma, in Hebrew ruach, and in Latin spiritus, and for all of the differences between the languages, on this particular word there is a remarkable consensus. It means wind and breath, but in all three languages it also crosses over to mean something like soul. Certainly with both Latin and Greek, the root word has been carried over into modern English usage. Think of the word pneumonia, for instance, which is an infection that inflames the lungs and makes it difficult to breath. Or how about the word aspirated, which is another medical term, or the word inspire, both coming from spiritus.

Picking up on the image of breath, but with an eye to the modern English version of the ancient word, Frederick Buechner offers the following:

God… is Spirit, says the apostle John. Thus God is the power of the power of life itself, has breathed and continues to breathe life into his creation. In-spires it. The spirit of God, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, is highly contagious. When Peter and his friends were caught up in it at Jerusalem on Pentecost, everybody thought they were drunk even though the sun wasn't yet over the yardarm. (Buechner, Beyond Words)

Everybody thought they were drunk. And then Buechner quietly adds one very brief two-word sentence to that statement. “They were.” They were, but he doesn’t mean that the accusations that they’d been drinking at nine o’clock in the morning were correct, but rather that they had completely succumbed to the power and presence of the Spirit of God. Drunk, but not in some sloppy way that was related to drinking themselves into oblivion, but rather filled with the utterly new wine of God’s spirit. Of course they were beside themselves… but also completely centred within themselves, in the presence of that Spirit.

And from a quick read of Peter’s sermon in which he cites at some length the prophet Joel, you’ll see that being filled with the Spirit—intoxicated by the Spirit—doesn’t take away good judgement, clear thinking, or fresh inspiration (there’s that word again… inspiration). And while there is a vivid wildness to this story, as the book of Acts goes forward we rarely see anything quite like this again. Instead the Spirit is with them in a way much closer to what is offered by Jesus in the Gospel according to John, when the Spirit is called the Paraclete; the advocate, comforter, counsellor. In Greek the word Paraclete literally means “someone who is called to come alongside someone else,” so in fact Jesus is saying that the Spirit of God comes alongside of each of us as advocate, counsellor, comforter, companion, and guide.

But you know sometimes you have to be still, attentive, patient, and all but stubborn in discerning the presence of that Holy Spirit. It think of the times when people really struggled to believe that God was yet present to them. Imagine yourself a resident of London during the bombings of the Second World War, or the drought and famine across the Canadian prairies during the 1930s. Imagine that family sitting in Intensive Care at the hospital while someone they love deeply—whether a parent, a partner, or even a child—succumbed to the worst strains of covid or to some cancer that had just progressed too far for treatment. Is God’s spirit there, in such places? Yes, but sometimes you have to sit very still to discern that presence. How unlike Jerusalem on that day of Pentecost when you could understand the disciples, no matter what your mother tongue.

The quieter discernment came very much to mind this past week, when I received an email message from an old friend, who in his retirement is currently serving a small Anglican congregation in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. He asked me how we might respond to those who say that we are dying as a church, at least partly because of the ways we are trying to not exclude those who are different or struggling or questioning. And he knows of what he speaks, because he is seeing his little congregation age and gradually diminish, with few younger members being added.

In my response I first noted the impact of covid, then added that the whole “spiritual but not religious” dynamic seems to have pretty much caught the imagination of many, and particularly those under the age of 35. I noted that according to Tom Bandy—one of the leading figures in the area of church life and dynamics— membership in various voluntary organizations (from Kiwanis and the Shriners to community clubs and churches) has been in a gradual decline since the 1960s. In Bandy’s view North Americans born after about 1960 are far less likely to join any such organizations than were our forebears.

A notable exception to the decline, I suggested, appears to be the mega-churches, many of which are enormous. Robert Capon saw this coming some twenty-five years ago in his book The Astonished Heart, but in his view it is all going to end up being a rather massive flame-out. So much of that sort of church, he writes,

…sells what the market demands: religion, not Gospel; goods and services, not confrontation, life enhancement, not redeeming death. Besides, it’s far too close to being the entertainment industry at prayer… But size and numbers guarantee nothing except the lowest common denominator of everything. (Capon, The Astonished Heart)

It is a sweeping indictment, no doubt, and while I’m sure there are mega-churches that are offering ministry of real integrity, too often the giant machine that is built ends up shortsheeting even the best dreams of the founders.

And so I recommended that my friend take a look at Phyllis Tickle’s 2008 book The Great Emergence, which set out a picture of things that says that every 500 years the people of God have to hold a massive rummage sale, sorting out what to keep, what to let go of, discerning along the way what really matters. Such a rummage sale, she argued, takes at least 50 years to truly settle out. So at 500 BCE came the rebuilding of Judaism after the Babylonian Captivity; 500 years later came the birth of Christ and ultimately the birth of what was to become the church; 500 years after that came the collapse of the Roman Empire and the birth of things like the Benedictine way; at 1000 there was the traumatic splintering of the Eastern Church from the Western; at 1500 came the beginning of the Reformation, and all that it entailed for Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. You can’t pin a precise date to any of these monumental periods in the life of faith, I explained to my friend, but rather see each in terms of a sort of pivotal period. If we are now 500 years from the Reformation, Phyllis Tickle would say, it is no surprise that everything—everything—is in a state of change and flux.

I closed my email with a question, followed by just a few thoughts. “Where does it all go from here? Frankly, none of us can know, but rather just remain faithful to what we hold as core to our faith, and at the same time open to whatever new things the Spirit of God might be doing.”

That’s trust, you see: to be open to whatever new things the Spirit of God might be doing in our time, in our churches, in our lives. The alternative is to scramble madly to try to preserve something under glass, and that might be precisely the last thing we will need over the next fifty years. The other alternative would be to throw up our hands, give up, and try to be Christians in our own little silos. But isolated silos aren’t where Christians are meant to be.

I think I’ll gamble on trust and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit of God.