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REFLECTIONS FROM A DECK

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DAY OF PENTECOST (May 31st) 2020

Okay … it is my normal practice when preaching … and since Covid-19 lockdown, now partially over thank God in my country, when floating ideas a cross an internet … to address the lectionary readings and meander around them.

Let’s not today, huh? Let’s find my inner free-spirit that a shrink told me a few years back I should release from the constraints of a restrictive church. Let’s live dangerously, think outside the triangle or whatever it, momentarily. Er … if you don’t mind?

A shrink? I’ll tell you more about that later. Or another time. Or never. But there’s been a couple of them over the years, and what angels they were. Messengers from God. That’s what “angels” means: messengers.

So what to do with Pentecost? 

For a start I’ll largely, and apologetically, ignore its Hebrew, Jewish origins in Shavuot. Shavuot too is a feast of joy, but for now I’ll avoid cultural appropriation, beyond wishing our Jewish cousins God’s every blessing at this time of sacred harvest, sacred law, sacred belonging. May we one day feast together.

Pentecost borrows heavily from Luke’s telling of the Jesus-story. An Upper Room, tongues of fire, glossolalia, that strange phenomenon that I first encountered as a young adult and am much less impressed by now, except perhaps it is a useful way to sidestep the complexities of the cerebral cortex and utter ecstasy or angst – and maybe that’s not a bad thing.

For Luke the first Pentecost was a powerful, two-fold symbolic moment. It was a reversal of the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel. There, human beings sought to build a tower to the heavens, God got grumpy, knocked the tower down, and confused human languages into the myriad mishmash that now covers the face of the earth. We might at this moment acknowledge with sorrow how many of those languages have since been eradicated in the name of colonialization: forcing indigenous persons to speak English or Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese was never going to be the way to recreate Eden on earth, and we can only lament the deep destruction that has been wrought in the name of “progress,” so-called.  

For Luke this highly symbolic moment – and I have no idea what really happened in that upper room beyond his skeletal outline – was a reversal of babel, and the beginning of the outreach of the gospel-community from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. John tells a different story: Jesus breathing on the bewildered disciples, filling them with that breath of eternity, that breath of the Creator God that filled the lungs of Adam (Gen. 2:8).  For John a new creation begins in that moment, the Spirit called close to and into us, as we let her, to enable us to be what we tend not to be, a people of love. For John, where there is love, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ is at work.

What Pentecost is not,  says I in opposition to two thousand years of tradition, is the birth of the church. If the church is the people of God, if the church is the body, the hands and the feet of Christ on earth then that preceded those first explosive, seemingly exponential outreaches from Jerusalem. And while I don’t want to be dogmatic about this, or maybe I do, we run the risk of deifying the church if we use this image with too carefree an abandon. 

You may be aware of the traditional doctrine coined by Cyprian of Carthage, “extra ecclesiam nulla salus”: outside the church there is no salvation. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an accurate assessment of the matter even at the time of Cyprian, the third century, but it became downright dangerous once the Church and the State got into bed together. “Woe,” the beatitudes might have added, “to those churches with national flags in their sanctuaries.” It is bad enough turning the machinery of the church into a dispenser of eternal salvation, but from the time of the ironically named Holy Roman Empire, and its successors in non-Roman Catholic traditions, the message of Christendom became one of Europeanization, and later Americanization, rather than transformation into the likeness of the humble teacher-Christ.

So no, Pentecost is not the birth of the Church, at least in the sense of the Church becoming an instrument of oppression. Across the histories of Christianity there are too many damaged persons and cultures for that interpretation to have gospel-credibility. Abuse in many forms, oppression, exploitation: these are not the work of the gospel, the empowerment in love and justice that descended on the disciples. The oppressions and exploitations by the church in its many forms and many faux-forms is not the continuation of John’s locked room or Luke’s upper room or of Mark’s frightened women at the tomb or Matthew’s sky-staring disciples on a mountain near Galilee.  There are incalculable numbers of those who remain extra ecclesiam for very good reason, for whom the scar tissue of exploitation and abuse is impenetrable.

And yet … and yet …

I for one am one who needs this great unwieldy beast – and I use the word with full awareness of Yeats’ and the Book of Revelation’s warnings. I for one need the disciplines of the visible church. I need the disciplines, even if Covid-19 has reminded me that the church and its gatherings and even its rites are not in themselves the gospel. Outside of these there is still the God who I would find, the psalmist reminds me, even if I descend to the depths of hell. If I am to be honest Terry Waite’s and others’ experiences warned me of this, years before. I have seen liars and manipulators rewarded by the church, abusers ignored by the church, predators protected by the church.

But that is not the end of the story. If it were, I would not be stumbling on, hoping that, even from within the structures of the church, something called “salvation” can be found. If darkness were the end of the story, not specifically within the church but certainly there as well, I would not still be in its embrace. Yet at its best I do see this stumbling array of individuals and institutions mumbling something that is love, justice, and a hope that reaches even beyond mortality. I do see lives, not least my own, transformed by this breath of God that infiltrates locked rooms and locked hearts. 

I have seen silliness proclaimed in the name of the Spirit of Pentecost – I have referred before to those who I once discovered who felt it was their gift to crawl and bark in the name of Jesus. I’m sure it was cartharsis – and that in itself is no bad thing. But if our Spirit-experiences, real or imagined, do not lead us on to be hands and feet of Jesus in the world around us, do not lead us to proclaim and enact love, justice, and a hope that reaches even beyond mortality, then they are so much dross. And some of you will know that the Greek word translated as “dross” in the New Testament, is not a polite word.

It's Pentecost, and forgive me for taking an extra few minutes and pixels. There is much chicanery and charlatanism in the name of the Spirit, as there is the name of the Father and of the Son. That, though, is not the final word. John and Paul, two great servants of God, saw that the final word is: “love.” May the Pentecostal Spirit infuse and enthuse you anew with the power to love in word and action.