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Pentecost 2021

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Pentecost 2021 1 Pentecost 2021 The feast of Pentecost is one of the seven principle feasts of the church. The name of the feast comes from the Greek, Πεντηκοστή, which means fiftieth, because Pentecost occurs on the fiftieth day after Easter. It is therefore a moveable feast, one determined by the moon rather than the sun, by the Hebrew rather than the Roman calendar. In today’s reading from Acts, the Jewish people are gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of the Weeks (Shavuos), which occurs fifty days after the first day of Passover. Shavuos is a festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest. It simultaneously commemorates God’s giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and the counting of the fifty days recalls waiting for the Torah. As the Jews are gathered for Shavuos, the Holy Spirit, or the Advocate, settles upon the disciples. These former students are now leaders in the God movement. The event is therefore often referred to as the birth of the church as it was on this day that the disciples were empowered to be full ministers in the God movement, just as we are empowered to be ministers by baptism. (Baptism is primarily about preparing us to give something, in other words, not about getting something. 2 Twenty-first century people have a difficult time grasping this distinction.) The Book of Common Prayer defines baptism as “full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s body the church,” that is, baptism initiates one fully as a minister. In baptism we are joining a community of people whose purpose is ministry. Because Pentecost is associated with receiving the Holy Spirit, it is one of the four days of the liturgical year preferred for baptisms, along with All Saints, The Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, and the Easter Vigil. Pentecost is also called Whitsunday, which many think comes from White Sunday, because of the white vestments worn by the baptized. We call those white vestments albs, and any baptized Christian is entitled to wear one. People have asked me whether they could be buried in their albs, and the answer is an unqualified yes. Various traditions exist for celebrating Pentecost, including such things as sprinkling rose petals from the ceiling to recall the flames and blowing trumpets to recall the mighty winds. On the first day of Pentecost, each person gathered in Jerusalem for the festival heard the disciples speaking in their own tongue. 3 That is, we are all united by the Spirit, and, if we listen—a practice as rare among Christians today as it was among the Jews gathered in that day—we are better able to understand one another, better able to follow the Spirit’s lead. Often, we are too blinded by our own needs and our own fears truly to hear or understand others. Many of those present, rather than delight in the miracle, simply rejected the words of the disciples outright as the ramblings of drunks. Peter does what he can to bring them some awareness, but we can only witness and invite and must leave the rest to God. Listening to the Spirit requires that we learn how not to respond too quickly in those instances that are not life threatening. We must learn how to step back from our first responses that may come out of a sense of threat, in order to listen to others and to God. In each instance, it is up to us either to listen or to ignore. We might succeed in listening about one issue, yet be very ego-driven and deaf to the Spirit about something else. Being an active part of a spiritual community helps us to achieve the goal of listening through exhortation, mystery, learning, prayer, and community. Without those things, it is easy to fall back into a purely ego-driven, knee jerk existence. 4 It is not that our egos are evil. They serve a purpose. They guide us towards self-preservation, for example. If we did not think of ourselves at all, we would not even eat. Our egos rise up when our existences are threatened. The problem is that we start thinking that our existence is threatened in every instance, and then think only of ourselves. We turn everything into survival. On an emotional level, we convince ourselves that, if I get this, I will not die. This may seem strange, but it is the game we play. We acknowledge intellectually that we will die, but we deny it emotionally and turn everything into life and death. If we are not proved correct, we think, we will die. If we do not get our way, we will die. We then tell ourselves, if I dismiss these truth-telling, death-acknowledging followers of Jesus as drunks, I will not die. It is a sign of emotional and spiritual maturity to accept our mortality, not just as a mental fact, but as emotional and spiritual reality. This is why we say that we are baptized into the death of Jesus. 5 It is why Jesus says that if we lose our lives, we will gain them, but if we try to keep our lives, we will lose them. Only when we accept our own deaths can we see that we are part of something much larger and beautiful, that we all contain the Spirit of the one who created us. If a red blood cell thinks, oxygen is life, therefore I need all the oxygen and sets about monopolizing all the oxygen in a body, the body will suffer, and the red blood cell with it. I have used this metaphor before, but was delighted to find something similar on the website of the Department of Geobiology of James Madison University. There, they actually start with the fact that the cell changes continually and eventually decays. As they put it, it is a dissipative structure. It dissipates, but remains recognizable through many changes. In other words, it has a death. A call cannot survive when separated from its environment—its death comes even sooner—although the existence of a cell wall makes it seem separable. Humans are the same, they argue. We change continually, but remain recognizable even as we dissipate. 6 We cannot be separated from our environment and live.1 We seem separable, but are not able to be separate. What happens, however, is that our desire to ignore our own death gets in the way. When we like to live in the illusion that, given the right circumstances, we could live forever (even though we mentally acknowledge that we cannot), we treat everything as a threat to that potential immortality. We become like a red blood cell that monopolizes the oxygen; we spread hurt. We justify saying things to others that in no way seeks the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in no way listens to them or considers their needs, though we almost always couch it in terms of righteousness. Growing, listening, feeling our connectedness to the world requires that we acknowledge our dissipative nature, our eventual death. Until we can do that, our righteousness is just posturing. In order to succeed at being comfortable with our own dissipation, our own deaths, we need the support of others, which is why we join an institution like the church. A church should always be a safe space for everyone, where people do not treat people as threats to their own existence. 1 http://csmgeo.csm.jmu.edu/geollab/fichter/geobio350/parable.pdf 7 If we continue to dwell in life-defense mode when unnecessary, we cut ourselves off from the Holy Spirit. When we do so, rather than the Holy Spirit, we invite in the Spirit of Destruction. The lie of immortality holds the door open for it. We feel our imagined immortality to be threatened and can no longer discern the nudges of the Holy Spirit. We make excuses—those Galileans are just drunk! We must ask ourselves, am I listening to others, or am I defending an imaginary immortality? .
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