PENTECOST!!!!!

PENTECOST!!!!!!

            As we enter the liturgical season of Pentecost, we must note that the modern Western church has always felt uneasy about this church holiday.  Those of us who are Presbyterians are especially uncomfortable with Pentecost, especially the idea of the Holy Spirit who might not be so decent and orderly, as we see in the Acts account of Pentecost in Chapter 2.  One of our major founding documents, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1648, did not even have a chapter on the Holy Spirit.  We didn’t add one until 1942, almost 300 years later.  Yet, it’s not just us Presbys who feel uneasy.   A few years back, the common liturgical calendar dropped the long season of Pentecost and replaced it with “Ordinary Time.”  After many protests, we all now have the option of keeping the season of Pentecost.

            Why such dis-ease with such an important church holiday (perhaps the most important)?  There at least three reasons for our uneasiness:  the messiness of the Holy Spirit (God is beyond our control), the birth of the church in a multicultural and equitable way, and the church itself being cast as a boundary-breaking, many-cultured, possession-sharing, joy-filled locus of God.  The first reason for our discomfort is that in our age-of-reason church, we are quite uncomfortable with the idea that God might break some of the laws of physics or at least of psychology.  In my modern mind, I’m finding myself feeling uneasy with the idea that God might break the laws of physics – how could God be so unreasonable!  I do not want to align myself with the anti-science, climate-change-denying folk, but I do understand the underbelly of the opposition – is this all there is?  Is God at work in the world or not?  Pentecost answers with a resounding “Yes, She is!!!”  In our quantum physics, cybernetic, brain as computer world, this is difficult to accept. 

            Second, we often forget that the church is born in a multicultural setting, far beyond the imagination of those first disciples – those who hear the Good News will not be stopped by the boundaries of culture or language.  This is not to obliterate cultural norms and differences – many of them are specifically named in the Acts 2 text.  It is to affirm that there is a deeper connection, a broader boundary that does not end cultures but rather encourages us to seek to hear our common humanity across cultural and economic lines.  In America today, we elected a president who wants to take us back to cultural hegemony, to a “Mad Men” world where white men ruled the world, and everybody accepted it.   Pentecost tells a different story, and even those who told it on that day had no idea that God would still be moving – Gentiles would soon be welcomed!  How could that be?  Surely God does not understand how the world works!

            Third, the church is supposed to be a place where we can work out our salvation and our spiritual issues, work out our relation to the world, and get ready for life after death.  Pentecost, though, brings an explosion of the spiritual issues, challenges us to confront our worship of materialism, and reminds us that God is interested in us finding life in this life.  No staid liturgy here, standing forever, people knowing their places, women stepping back, money giving us status.  The story that we see in the first 4 chapters of Acts, the Pentecost church, is a stunning reversal of the world’s order.  This small group of women and men disciples, afraid and confused, waiting to be arrested by Rome, this small group stuns the world – the immediate world and the larger world.  In our rambunctious, depressing, dangerous days, let us remember the first Pentecost and the Spirit of God who drove them out of themselves and their categories, who drove them out into a world that they knew could not and would not understand the message. 

            For these three reasons and more, the modern church is uneasy with Pentecost.  We don’t understand it, and we don’t seem to want it.  We prefer that God stay within our boundaries and within our understanding.  Multicultural and intercultural?  No, too much white domination!  Sharing possessions?  No, too naïve, no pension plan.  Breaking down barriers?  No, that’s for poor people and those at the margins – let us keep our worship liturgy and ways of doing things intact! 

            Yet, in many ways, we are like those first group of followers of Jesus of Nazareth.  We are fearful and shrinking and wondering.  In these days, maybe Pentecost is a way to life.  In our waiting and wondering, in these fearful days, may we seek that Pentecost Spirit also.