June 5, 2022
“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”
Those words mean something different to us now than they did two or three years ago. It used to be that I would skim over this beginning line of the story of Pentecost without a second thought. Yes, people come together in one place to celebrate a religious festival. Duh. Now, let’s get to the important stuff—the wind, the fire, the speaking in multiple languages!
It took a little thing like a global pandemic to get me to think twice about taking this line for granted. Today those words feel loaded with meaning, or with possible different meanings, depending on your context. The idea of being all together in one place might fill you with sadness, or worry, or it might be a cause for joy and gratitude. It isn’t something we’ll ever take for granted again, though.
“They were all together in one place.” Maybe this isn’t just a stage direction, just a necessary bit of exposition before the fun part of the story begins. Maybe this statement is making a theological claim about the way the Holy Spirit works, and about what it means to be the church.
Being a good Anglican/Episcopal Christian, my primary understanding of God is incarnational. I believe that God made the world out of love and came into the world out of love, and that God’s becoming one with us serves to remind us how beloved and beautiful a thing it is to be human. God’s infinite solidarity and compassion means that God does not shun the hard parts of the human experience, including poverty, exile, suffering, and even death. You can see this expressed in different ways throughout the liturgical year. It is at the heart of the story of Christmas—God will always love us and God will never leave us. Incarnation, in a way, is also at the heart of Easter: the body of the risen Christ is still the very same body of the man Jesus, the body that bears the scars of his suffering and that, by being shared with us, heals our own wounds and brokenness. One of the things I always say during the Easter season is that bodies matter, and that matter matters. The salvation enacted by God through Jesus is for all creation and the Resurrection begins the work of making all things new.
But, it is fair to ask, how can Pentecost also be about incarnation? Pentecost is a feast day that focuses on the Holy Spirit, the one arguably un-incarnate aspect of the Trinity. Even our cherished depictions of the Holy Spirit as a dove, or a flame, or a gust of wind, are depictions of metaphors. In today’s reading from Acts we are told that there is a sound “like the rush of a violent wind” and that there are tongues of something “as of fire.” Even at the baptism of Jesus, the Gospels say that the Spirit descends “like a dove.” The Spirit can be temporarily embodied, apparently, but it is never in a body like ours, or maybe even in the same body twice.
A spirit, by definition, is not a body. And yet, the incarnational theology that animates our understanding of Christmas and Easter does not suddenly disappear at Pentecost. The phrase “they were all together in one place” offers us a clue about how to make sense of this. The Spirit, you might say, does its work through bodies—and it is through bodies gathered together that the Spirit creates the Church. The Church is not an abstract concept, it is an incarnate, embodied reality: embodied in you and in me and in the great cloud of witnesses that came before us, as well as in the many followers of Jesus who will come after us.
The embodied community of the Church is itself a gift made possible by the Holy Spirit and it is when we gather together as one body that we most reliably encounter the Spirit. This is a bold claim, and I want to be clear what I am not saying here. I am not in any way trying to limit the work of the Holy Spirit. If there is one thing Scripture and our tradition clearly say it is that the Spirit blows where it will and it absolutely cannot be contained, controlled, or coopted by any human building, institution, or community. I would certainly hope that more than two years of learning new ways of being the Church have at least taught us the truth of this—and thanks be to God that even after two thousand years we are able to learn new things.
And yet, all of that being said, there is still something about being gathered together in one place that seems to ignite the Spirit, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that being together in one place awakens something in us that makes us more aware of its presence. This mysterious “something” is at the heart of our understanding of what it means for the Church to be the Body of Christ, a theological reality that encompasses, but is much more than, the human institution.
To give a concrete example, it is in the coming together of bodies and the Holy Spirit that our sacraments occur. During every baptism we call upon the Spirit to bless the water, and we proclaim that the baptized person is sealed with the Holy Spirit as we trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads. At the Eucharist, we invoke the Spirit, asking for the gifts of bread and wine to become the Body and Blood of Christ, and we physically touch the elements that are being consecrated. At a priest’s ordination, the Bishop cries out, “Come, Holy Spirit,” before the gathered priests lay their hands upon the person being ordained. This interplay of Spirit and body is sacramental and as such it epitomizes what it means to be fully human, fully awake and engaged, fully alive.
That is probably about as much pneumatology—a word that means the study of the Holy Spirit, and that I threw in mostly to make Casey happy—as any of us can stand on a morning when we have cupcakes and face painting waiting for us. However, I need to point out one other feature of today’s readings: community, especially embodied community, does not mean sameness or uniformity. The reading from Acts as well as the Psalm for today make it clear that diversity is a very, very good thing. It is part and parcel of the way that God made the world! We only get a little of Psalm 104 today, but it is one of the great hymns to Creation in the whole canon. It talks about wind and fire, moon and stars and clouds, mountains and valleys, streams and springs, wild asses and lions and goats (yes, goats, I didn’t make that up), birds of the air, trees and grasses, and so much more, somehow all culminating in that great leviathan that God made for fun. For fun! Diversity is fun and empowering and beautiful and beloved by God, not a problem to be overcome or a situation to be tolerated.
In short, the Holy Spirit does not erase difference—it sanctifies it. The Holy Spirit sustains us in our diversity and blesses and supports that diversity itself, making understanding across difference possible. All those people gathered together at Pentecost are speaking their own languages, not suddenly speaking all speaking Greek or Aramaic or the language of the King James Bible. They understand each other across difference. What a glorious vision of the Church universal: all people—all ages, all genders, all races, all languages, all ability levels, indeed, all creation—all are emboldened to see visions and dream dreams and do God’s holy work of love…together. Amen.
