A Rushing Wind and Tongues of Fire (Pentecost B)

A Rushing Wind and Tongues of Fire

Pentecost (Year B)
27th May 2012
Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27,16:4b-15 

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:22-27) 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I once had a colleague at the Department of State who was a self-declared “Bible believing” Christian.  When she discovered that I was a regular Church-goer, choir member, and taught the weekly scripture adult Sunday class at my local Episcopal Church, she made it a point of regularly letting me know how her prayer life was going, and how proactive she and her church were in struggling against what she called the “wicked world we live in.”  One Monday, she seemed particularly beaming, and first thing she took me aside to update me on her spiritual life. 

“Tony, I was so blessed today.  I’m too low ranked to merit parking privileges downstairs and can’t afford the regular parking fees at Columbia Plaza across the street so I usually park over near the Lincoln memorial and walk the four blocks here.  But I didn’t have time today, and so I just relied on God.  I prayed for guidance, and Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to me and led me to a side street just a half block away where there are never any parking places.    But just as I turned the corner, a car pulled out and I found a place within 100 yards of the C Street entrance!  And it’s just the regular street meter fares!  I feel so blessed.  God guided me, and sent his Holy Spirit just as he promised!  Just shows what He’ll do when we try to follow his path!” 

I nodded, smiled, and said nothing, allowing her to express her happiness and thankfulness.   It was only on my drive home that evening that I realized what it was that so annoyed me in what she had said.  She was saying that Almighty God had been her personal parking valet, arriving at her beck and call in order to save her the inconvenience of walking a few blocks and possibly being late to a meeting.  I had been working on some particularly troublesome issues involving the Korean peninsula, and the contrast was all too great.  She said God was personally caring for her parking needs because she was so close to God, and this in a world where it seemed that the Almighty couldn’t be bothered to move the hearts of the world’s people to abolish war, eliminate poverty, or end hunger. 

Now I understood that making this contrast was unfair, both to her and to God.  Jesus taught us that if we prayed with faith, God would grant us what we rayed for.  Paul told us to make our desires known to God.  Many, many passages tell us to be thankful in God for all good things in our lives.  Jesus tells us that God is aware of and cares for even individual sparrows in flight or hairs on our head. And everything we read in the Bible about God and how God interacts with us, the created world, and evil tells us that God is love and works through our own human hearts and wills, leans into and becomes apparent through created things in order to make his will gently occur without robbing us of our ability of having a relationship of unconstrained love with him, and that means always having the ability of saying no to the relationship. 

Even knowing this, what she said annoyed me, mainly because it all seemed so self-serving.  Maybe it was God who helped her that day.  Maybe it was the Spirit that “guided” her.   And her thankfulness was right and just.  But making that thankfulness a servant to her own ego and sense of partisan advantage (“only we true Christians can experience such blessings!”) was a prostitution, at best, of what otherwise might have been wholly innocent open-heartedness.

Today’s scriptures tell us just how varied the workings of the Holy Spirit are:  The Acts passage tells us of the Spirit as God’s active and almost overwhelming presence in a shared communal event where the spirit facilitates communication, empowers ministry, and the allows sharing of the Gospel, the John passage tells us of the Spirit as God called to be at our side, a comforter or advocate, who enlivens the memory and vivifies the heart, and the Romans passage sees the spirit as a quiet whispering  intermediary between us personally and God, making God accessible to us and making our own inexpressible and perhaps unformed feelings accessible to God and ourselves. 

In practical terms, often what we experience as guidance by or intervention of the Holy Spirit seems very close to, if not indistinguishable from, conscience, insight, intuition, coming to a firmly held conclusion, or even, like my friend from State Department, dumb luck or synchronicity based on random odds.  But there is a difference. 

One of the keys in understanding the story of the outpouring of the spirit on the Day of Pentecost, and, indeed, understanding an appropriate distinction between insight, dumb luck, street smarts, and the presence of the Holy Spirit is knowing what occasion the day was:  the feast of Shavuot, or Weeks, fifty days after the Feast of Passover.  Shavuot was a festival of the first fruits, where the very earliest produce of the agricultural year was becoming available.  You have to remember the hardship of winter in a pre-industrial society without modern means of food preservation or transportation.  You stored food by drying it, salting it, perhaps smoking it, and saving roots in cool cellars.  By the early months of Spring, your larder was pretty low, and the memory of fresh fruits and vegetables very vague at best, but tantalizing.   So the earliest produce of the new year was an important sign that the hardship was over, that more and better was on its way.  On Shavuot, the first produce was given back to God in thanks as a sacrifice, and then you held a big party with fresh and not dried and stored food.  

It is this very image—first fruits—that Paul uses in today’s epistle reading to describe the Spirit.  Mixing metaphors, Paul describes the world in which we live both as an early spring on the verge of new produce, or a woman in labor, suffering great pain in hope of a new life being delivered.  The spirit is a sign that the baby will be born, and we will be over the current pain.  Likewise, the Spirit is like the first fruits, the earliest of agricultural produce in the spare and barren early spring, after our larders have run bare:  it is a sign of better things to come, and more and more life and abundance.
Paul says that because the spirit is present in our hearts, it makes God available to us, and makes us, despite our inability sometimes to even know or express what we desire or feel, available to God.  “The spirit intercedes for us,” he says.  But it also touches us where we are most vulnerable, in the place in our hearts where we hope against hope for better things to come. (Romans 8:22-27)


There is another great passage in  Second Corinthians where Paul also talks about doubt and the role of the Holy Spirit.  He talks about conflicting truth claims—he says these are questions of “yes” and “no”—and affirms that our Christian faith resolves such uncertainty: 

 “For in [Christ] every one of God's promises is a "Yes." For this reason it is through him that we say the "Amen," to the glory of God.  But it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” (2 Cor 1: 20-22). 

Paul says that God’s Spirit in us is a seal, that is, a symbol and authenticating sign of the genuineness of our faith and the reliability of God’s promises.   He uses other images to describe the Spirit here too:  it is an anointing and a first installment.  “Anointing” in its most basic sense simply means being smeared with oil.  A person was made a king or a priest in ancient Israel by a ritual of putting olive oil on the head or body.  The act set the person aside for a special role and work.  “First installment” is an image from finances and loans—it is the first payment of a much greater sum to come later. 

So Paul says that the Spirit is like first fruits, like the assurance given a woman in labor, like a seal authenticating a document or product, or a down payment in an installment plan.

Elsewhere in 2 Corinthians, Paul says that the presence of the Spirit in our lives is a guarantee of greater things to come.  Again reflecting on the uncertainty and confusion of claims that we meet in daily life, he writes, 

“For in this tent [our body] we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling--if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked.   For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.  So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord--for we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor 5:4-7)."

If God’s spirit is a seal, a sign of genuineness, then how do we know God’s Spirit is with us?  

In Galatians, we read this: 

“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the you that resists God (lit., “flesh”).   For what your God-resisting self desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to your God-resisting self.  These are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of a self that resists God are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.  By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”  (Gal 5: 16-23) 

So “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” are fruits of the Spirit, and the spirit is a seal of the sureness of God’s promises.  The spirit is a down payment on the whole of God’s promises, as well as first fruits of an abundant and rich summer-long harvest. 

Sisters and brothers at Trinity:  Our hearts need hope for the future, and grounds for full and conditionless trust in God.  The Holy Spirit, poured out upon the Church on the Feast of First Fruits, is our greatest builder of hope and trust.  It is God active and working in our hearts, our lives, and our community the Church. 

May we learn to hear its whispers, and recognize its thunderings, be warmed at its gently burning hearth, and also be purified in its raging fire.   If we let our lives be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, this fire will burn through all the world. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.