Feast of Pentecost                          Rev'd Deacon Kathryn Reinhard

Acts 2:1-11                                     Procession, Holy Baptism       John 20:19-23                                  & Solemn High Mass

                                                      May 11, 2008

 

Heavenly Father, you have called us in the Body of your Son Jesus Christ to
continue his work of reconciliation and reveal you to the world: forgive us the
sins which tear us apart; give us the courage to overcome our fears and to seek
that unity which is your gift and your will; through Jesus Christ your Son our
Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one
God, now and forever. Amen. (Common Worship)

 

I don't know how many of you realize this but today, Pentecost, marks the end of a special cycle of prayer for our Church. This year, it has been suggested in the Anglican Cycle of Prayer that the nine days between Ascension Day and the Feast of Pentecost be set aside as a special time of prayer for the 2008 Lambeth Conference and for the Anglican Communion. The prayer that I just read is the prayer suggested for this period of special intention for the future of our Church.

 

Frankly, I think we could use prayers for more than just nine days.

 

However, I do think there is something theologically significant about holding up this particular period between Ascension and Pentecost as a special time of prayer for the current situation in our global communion. The space between these dates has often troubled me. It is an odd time, a disturbing, liminal, in-between time. In his final gathering with his disciples, Jesus promises that they will soon receive the power of the Holy Spirit who will make them witnesses of Christ in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth -- who will, in effect, make them a church. And then dramatically, triumphantly, Christ ascends …leaving them… alone….for ten days.

 

Ten days! This is an incredibly long time to wait for gifts of power and peace, particularly for rather skittish group of people who have recently witnessed the brutal execution and spectacular return of their beloved leader. Jesus leaves them! With no proxy, no game plan, no Holy Spirit! Nothing to do but huddle together in upper rooms praying for guidance and help while they wait (and wait and wait) -- ten days they wait for the Spirit, this promised gift which will supposedly make it all better, and show them the way forward.

 

If any of you have ever done much waiting on God you will know that this can be an excruciating time. One chapter of your life is ending, that is certain, but the next has not yet begun. The way has not yet become clear, and so you wait, and wait, and wait, skittish -- huddled in upper rooms -- praying for guidance and help until the Spirit arrives.

 

I'm suggesting that this troubling, liminal space is exactly the space out of which we pray for our Anglican Communion because it is very much the space our Church finds herself in at the moment. But then, what now? Now, that it is Pentecost? Where is our knight in shining armor, racing down like flames from the sky, to save us from ourselves, to give us gifts of peace and power, to show us the way forward and set all things aright?

 

As I have thought and prayed and wrestled internally about the struggles and divisions within our Church over how we understand authority within Scripture, tradition and reason, and about what constitutes a faithful life and witness to the power of God in Christ, again and again I have thought, frankly, with some hopelessness, that its like we're all just speaking different languages.

 

And then this week I read again the story of Pentecost. And after their long, ten days of waiting, what does the Spirit do? How does the Spirit work among this rag-tag group of folks who want nothing better than some consensus, and a strong unifying vision of a way forward?

 

The Spirit causes them to speak in different languages.

 

This was a revelation to me. God does this! God causes us to speak in different languages! Not because God is sadistic, spreading confusion amongst a group of already confused people, but because at the end of the day God really doesn't want us all to be the same. God sees our particularities, our differences, our divisions, and rather than working to erase them and turn us into a homogonous glob of undifferentiated people, on Pentecost the Spirit uses our particularities, the Spirit exploits them, so that all people can hear God speaking in their own language.

 

What the story of the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost tells us is that there is no “language” of God. God speaks in all languages. There is no “people” of God. God calls all people: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia , Pontus and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia , Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene , visitors from Rome , both Jews and proselytes, Cretan and Arabs.

 

This is at once good news and terrifying news. Because it means that you and me, Fr. Cobb and Katharine Jefferts Schori, Gene Robinson, Rowan Williams, Drexel Gomez and Peter Akinola -- all of us are called by God to speak the Gospel, not in some neutral, nebulous divine language, but in our own languages, in our own cultures and contexts. And this can cause some misunderstandings.

 

Now, I don't want to suggest that the current problems in the Anglican Communion are merely problems of mistranslation. This would be a dangerous over-simplification. There is true and deep concern from faithful Christians on all sides of these issues that not only are we no longer speaking the same language, but that we no longer hear Gospel content in one another's speech in a way that is recognizable to us. Whether it is a concern that all sacredness of Scripture and traditional patterns of living are being lost; or a concern that what has gone missing is Jesus as the Gospels know him, the liberator, who befriended the marginalized and oppressed and who loved them all; there is deep anxiety not just that our languages differ, but over whether these differing languages are indeed describing Christ as we understand Him.

 

There is a distinction, I think, between unity and just being the same. And this is one of the primary things our communion is struggling with: can we be united if we're not the same? Or what degree sameness do we need to be unified? If you remember, the prayer for the Communion which I read at the beginning asks God to help us overcome

not our differences, but our fears , to seek unity based not on our sameness or agreement, but in our shared love of and commitment to Jesus Christ.

 

This kind of reconciliation is difficult work. And we are fearful. Because frankly, many of us don't trust one another anymore. The work of our interdependence, discovering our unity within, not despite, our differences, can feel like a threat because it means seeing Christ, hearing Christ, trying to recognize Christ in someone who has profoundly wounded us; in people whose speech has deeply troubled hard-fought convictions which we ourselves have struggled with in our prayers, our tears, our lives and relationships. It means seeking Christ in someone who has discounted and belittled us, with the expectation both that there is Christ there, somewhere, in such a person to see, but also that we are owed the same right to have the image of Christ sought out in ourselves.

 

Ten years ago, at the previous Lambeth Conference, Rowan Williams presented a paper entitled “On Making Moral Decisions” in which he talked about the profoundly difficult work of looking and listening for Christ in others with whom we disagree and in whose speech we struggle to hear a Gospel that we recognize. Williams suggests that this kind of reconciling work is actually not best done face to face, confronting one another out of our mistrust, hurt and anger, but rather side by side, turning our attentions instead upon the Christ we are all trying to describe. It would be as if all of us here today were to line up here, just along the floor under the Rood Screen and gaze up at Him, just as He hangs there on the cross -- our savior, redeemer and friend. Williams envisions that from time to time we would turn to one another and gently and hopefully ask, “Do you see that? This is how I see him; can you see that too?”

 

Because this is where our unity lies. The ultimate ground of the unity of the Church lies not in our sameness or agreement but in Jesus, our crucified and risen savior. We can only find our unity here at the foot of the cross. When we turn our eyes away from the cross to scrutinize one another our differences start becoming obstacles, and so we start turning toward those with whom we agree, those who speak our language, those in whom it is easy for us to see Jesus. Doing this is no more than hiding ourselves away in an upper room with our friends out of fear of those who are other.

 

But you see this is when Jesus comes looking for us. This is when Jesus seeks us out and finds us and gives us his peace. But Jesus also seeks us out to give us the Holy Spirit -- that powerful, unpredictable, Spirit of transformation and change, the Spirit that causes us to speak in different languages and still be understood. Jesus breathes the Spirit into us just as if it were the day of our first creation, and he empowers us to go back out into the world and stand at the foot the cross with our brothers and sisters as a new people of God, proudly proclaiming the Gospel in a cacophony of different tongues.

 

AMEN.