“Living Water, Fiery Rose”
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year A
4 June 2017
Homily
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year A
4 June 2017
Homily
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today
we celebrate and commemorate what happened on the Feast of Pentecost in
Jerusalem 50 days after the Passover when Jesus was killed and then bodily
reappeared to his disciples. Wearing
white, a symbol of purity and of the baptisms that are often performed on this
holy day, called Whitsunday, we held aloft roses as if they were candles during
the reading of the Pentecost story. At
the end of today’s Eucharist, as we process out, we will act out the story once
again, with the sound of the wind, and the falling of the tongues of flame, in
the form of rose petals, to empower us to go out into the world and live the
kingdom that Jesus preached.
Interestingly,
the Gospel we read today, though about the coming of the Spirit, is not about
the feast of Pentecost. As in so many
ways, the Gospel of John takes familiar themes, mixes them around, and plays
them in new keys. It begins, “On the
last day of the great festival.” The
feast at issue is not Pentecost, but Succoth.
In
ancient Judaism, there were three great pilgrim feasts each year, when
believers were commanded to go to the Temple in Jerusalem: Passover, the
festival celebrating liberation, was in the spring. About 50 days later came Shavuot, the Feast
of Weeks, at the time of the first harvesting of the early wheat. Its name in Greek is Pentecost, the Feast of the 50th Day. In the fall came Succoth, or Booths, the
festival celebrating the main harvest and remembering God’s blessings by
reenacting the children of Israel’s living in temporary shelters during the 40
years in the desert.
All
of these are about God’s care and abundance.
But they occur in different times and seasons, and like in our own life,
God’s grace is poured out on us in different ways in differing settings.
Succoth
occurred in the fall, after the harvest was in, when the dry summer had already
dried up all the intermittent brooks.
The hills around Jerusalem are like our own hills here and in Northern
California: brilliant green during the
rainy season, but golden when it gets dry.
Succoth happened when the hills were hot, brown, and dry. In the
heat of late autumn, the people gathered leafy branches and wove them together
to make shelter from the blistering sun. These booths stood for the tents of the
children of Israel wandering in the desert.
Succoth
was a great public party, marked by two great public ceremonies in addition to
the normal worship of the Temple. They assembled huge candelabra, 85 feet tall
with immense torches instead of candles, in the Courtyard of the Temple giving
flame and light throughout the city like the pillar of fire in the desert. And
each of the seven days of the festival, a large procession accompanied by
singing, chanting, and musical instruments went down to the pool of Siloam to
fetch water. King Hezekiah at the end of
the 8th century BCE had made a secure water supply for Jerusalem
under siege by building an underground aqueduct that brought in running
(“living”) water from the Gihon spring in the nearby Kidron valley. Priests and Levites would go down to the Pool
of Siloam and fill immense golden water urns and then bring them up to the
Temple Mount. There, in the midst of
the dry season before the winter rains began, they poured out the water onto
the altar of sacrifice, along with wine.
The
joy of the harvest and the hope for the coming winter’s rains were manifest in
this simple act of joyful faith: in the
midst of dryness and heat, walking down and then back up from the pool, and
pouring the water out in abundance on the altar, for it to run out onto to the
paving stones and seep into the earth.
It
is on this festival that Jesus says: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who
believes in me drink.” In the midst of
thirst, Jesus is the water that quenches.
In the midst of dryness and shortage, Jesus is running water, water that
gives life.
The he adds: “As the scripture has
said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” The spring that Jesus offers, the water that
Jesus is, these do not run out. The
Gospel writer adds, “Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him
were to receive.” That’s why the Revised
Common Lectionary gives us this fall harvest festival reading on the occasion
of this first fruits festival in the spring.
T.S.
Eliot in Four Quartets writes:
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow? (East Coker II)
In the mystery of God’s economy,
grace happens out of time, and we get glimpses of grace whenever it occurs.
That’s why we speak at Christmas of
suddenly smelling the flowers of May and fresh mown grass in the stable where
Jesus is born. It’s why we speak of the
incarnation at Easter as well as Christmas, and one of our great Easter anthems
in daily prayer is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin: “O Queen of Heaven, be
joyful! Alleluia! For he who was born of your body,
Alleluia!. Has arisen, as he promised!
Alleluia! Pray for us to the Father,
Alleluia!” It’s why it doesn’t really
matter to us Christians whether the Spirit came 50 days after Easter as Luke
describes, or on Easter Evening when the risen Jesus breathes on his disciples
as John describes. The spirit comes when it comes. And it’s why we read a Succoth story at
Pentecost.
The story from Acts tells it in a
strange way: so many people from so many
different places all hear the word of the apostles “in their native language.” Literally, it means the “tongue they were
born into”, what we would call their “Mother tongue.” And this, just after “tongues (it’s the same
word) of flame” have fallen on them.
There’s something special about the language you learned first as a
baby, the one your mother sang to you in.
If you speak several languages, you know your mother tongue is the one
we revert to when in stress or in great need.
The coming of the spirit for these people meant that strange things were
understandable, and all felt like it was home, affectionately familiar. And that, in the midst of the sound of a
great windstorm.
The spirit can be disruptive. But it makes all things intimately familiar. Jesus in our hearts can burn on occasion to
the point of pain. I think that’s what
he is talking about when he says we must shoulder up our cross. But Jesus in our hearts also warms us gently. Most importantly, he quenches us when
thirsty, and makes us generous in the midst of shortage. Living water in the dry desert! The barren, hard wood of the cross
flowers. In Pentecost we smell
roses.
Again, Eliot writes in the Four Quartets:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (Little Gidding V).
Thanks be to God.
A wonderful and wise sermon!
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