Pentecost Sunday
Like wind blowing leaves on a tree, God’s Spirit is unseen, but what can be seen are the effects of God’s Spirit. On Pentecost Sunday, Vince leads us in looking for those effects in our community. (Photo by Phix Nguyen on Unsplash)
SPEAKER NOTES
Pentecost Sunday
Today
- Today is Pentecost Sunday (marked 7 weeks after Easter) —
- One of the handful of Biblical episodes the church calendar returns to every year, so that’s significant, and it’s worth leaning into the wisdom of that.
The Story
The story begins with the Jewish calendar’s feast of Shavuot, 50 days after Passover (which is how we get the word Pentecost — it means literally 50th)
At the feast of Shavuot, Jews remember the story of Moses receiving the Hebrew Law over a ceremonial meal.
Now, putting ourselves back into the New Testament moment, Jesus was crucified the week of the Passover, so, for the earliest followers of Jesus, Shavuot that year came with a mix of feelings. - There’d be some despair — Jesus stood up to the empire with integrity, just like Moses stood up to Pharaoh, but Jesus was killed. Has God’s help run out? - But there’d also be some feelings of hope and mystery — several people have been reporting spiritual experiences of Jesus, as though risen from the dead — in which Jesus would encourage them, strengthen them, to continue his work — what could this mean? - There’d be some anticipation and some nerves — - Jesus had spoken promises to his followers like “you will do even greater things than I will”, which, to these gathered Jews on Shavuot, maybe felt exciting, - but Jesus also had an apocalyptic bend to his teaching, which maybe felt to them like “is the end of the world about to happen?”
And what ends up taking place in that gathering is what today, in the modern world, we would call a moment of collective effervescence — a shared spiritual experience of awe and wonder. - One of those “we all had goosebumps” experiences. - That feels to everyone: whoa! we are a part of something bigger than just ourselves.
The writer of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts begins describing it this way in Acts 2:
Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
And Acts 2’s story of that Shavuot experience indeed wants its readers to be pulled into a MUCH bigger world, - What follows is the famous moment of Jesus’ disciples, though they are all from one region, praising God in the languages of the regions around them — this story is an expanding of the feast table beyond just one small group of Jews. - And then the Apostle Peter stands up and addresses the crowd of oppressed peoples that has gathered around this unexpectedly expanding feast, and to all those tired and heavy burdened under the brutal Roman Empire he commends Jesus of Nazareth’s way of communal, anti-imperial love and nonviolence. - An invitation into what one of my Liberation Theology instructors Joerg Rieger calls “deep solidarity” - Not solidarity based only on sameness of identity, but solidarity based on shared experience of what people are up against, which can hold people together across identities AND honor differences.
Brief Reflection
- For a reflection on Pentecost this year, I want to focus on this description in Acts 2 of how the spiritual experience begins — like wind.
- This is actually a loaded ancient Hebrew idea, deeply a part of these first century Jews’ worldview — the Hebrew word for Spirit, “Ruach”, is also used to express “breath” or “wind”.
- To me, someone who defaults to a bit of a spiritual skeptic, this feels like one of the most helpful concepts in the entire Bible: Spirit is like wind — you can’t see it, but you can see the effects of it. - We can’t see the wind, but we have no problem believing in it, because we see the wind’s effect on trees, we feel it on our faces. It is perceptible, just indirectly. - Likewise, we can’t see God, because God is Spirit, but we can see God’s effect on our world. God can be perceived. - And this perceptible, experiential aspect of God is what has been called God’s Spirit or the Holy Spirit. - God’s Spirit is what makes faith not just ethics and not just carrying a tradition from the past, but something lived, something embodied, something experienced in real-time.
- Different traditions within Christianity (and beyond Christianity) emphasize different perceptions to talk about experiencing the Spirit, and they’re all really worth paying attention to, even the ones that don’t personally feel like home to us. - People say the Spirit feels like peace or love or warmth inside me - People say the Spirit imparts wisdom or knowledge or guidance into a given moment - People say the Spirit gives courage to speak up or take action against unfair power. - People say the Spirit feels like a flow of life and energy that sustains me, or that I can give myself to - People say the Spirit feels like joy or energy that fills me up in a way that makes me want to sing or shout or dance.
- I wonder: Did you have any experience of God’s Spirit modeled for you as a kid? - (Feel free to share in Discord)
- My childhood was much more materialist, not very spiritual at all, so that’s why I default to being more of a spiritual skeptic — - I was formed to believe that the way you come to understand life is by cutting things open and dissecting them, or by observing behavior from afar. - So discovering a less flat, less distancing, more relational approach to life that helps us understand not just blood flow, but the flow of life-energy, not just biological drive, but the drives of love and connection — that has changed me! - Especially East Asian theologies of the Spirit. For example the thousands of years old concept of Spirit in China and Korea is Chi or Ki — the energy source we all participate in; it’s in our bodies and in our relationships. - Chi bears much more resemblance to the way the Hebrews talked about Spirit as Ruach in the Bible than the way my white German heritage has talked about Spirit, as a private matter of conviction (distinguished from public matters of fact and reason). - But because white European thought has been dominant globally for so many centuries, the white German concept of Spirit is considered more orthodox, and many Christians get uncomfortable when Asian-heritage scholars use “Chi” to talk about the Holy Spirit. And that’s just so ironic, because Chi is actually way more similar to Biblical roots. - No shade on the power of private spirituality though! That feels most like home to me because it’s my buttoned-up German heritage, but like expanding my palate for different foods and spices from different cultures, it’s been so good to expand my spiritual palate.
- I should also make space for the fact that maybe some of us have complicated feelings around the Spirit? Some Christian contexts can emphasize God’s Spirit in ways that feel problematic. You’re totally allowed to have those feelings today!
- If you’ll let me, I want to roll with, simply, this idea of the Spirit as like wind — we can’t see God, because God is Spirit, but we can see the effects of God.
- And telling the stories of those effects is how we open ourselves to that collective effervescence we all need to feel, so life is not so flat and empty, not so cruelly individualistic and capitalistic. Acts 2 off
Transition
- There are several ways I personally feel like I see the effects of God’s Spirit in our community right now, things that feel like they have some wind behind them.
- For the rest of this morning, I’m going to invite up some people in our community to tell you about them, and how you can join in if you’d like…