Pentecost or Hold onto Your Hat Sunday

May 20, 2018

Cate Thorn

The Day of Pentecost     Acts 2:1-21    John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

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I wonder if today, Pentecost Sunday might more aptly be named Hold onto Your Hat Sunday. I mentioned this idea at a staff meeting and was met with slightly puzzled stares, “You mean we should wear hat on that Sunday?” What I meant was, this is the Sunday we proclaim that the spirit of the Living God is let loose in the world so watch out, who knows what is going to happen, who knows what we might be filled with power to enact in the world, so hold onto your hat!!!

Pentecost is sometimes described as the birthday of the church, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the gathered early Jewish Jesus followers. I understand how such idea has come about, even as it could presume the Holy Spirit that breathes creation into life were somehow holding back until this special bunch of human beings came along. Tempt us to inward focused complacency, as one of the special ones included in the outpouring Spirit that’s sufficient, as if such outpouring is for the benefit of the church, it’s purpose for church’s perpetuation.

What we hear however is that the followers of Jesus, faithful Jews gathered in Jerusalem for a Jewish festival experience a spirit descending on them tongues as of fire divide and rest upon the head of each of them. Strong winds and speaking each in languages known to those who are present. This isn’t a secret for a special sect, this Spirit of the living God is comprehensibly familiar, able to be heard and understood no matter where those present are from or the language they speak.

As if those who’ve gathered in this one place from far flung places to which they’ll return are made able to speak of this in their first language, in words sign and symbol of their culture and knowing. As if the purpose of this spirit coming is not to dwell, stay in that place rejoicing at the experience, the special, chosen miracle of the moment but in order to propel them from that place, to act and take that which is revealed with them. For each to become a spirit indwelt person wherever they are whatever they do, whoever they happen to be.

It is from Acts we hear the account of Pentecost, a book that tells of the Acts of those who followed, what experiencing Jesus propelled them to do, the what next making real in act and deed.

Something appeared to those who witnessed the event that seemed like tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on the head of each one of those who would come to be leader of this Jesus way movement. Tongues of fire, yet fire that doesn’t consume, it reminded me of an image in another story from this faith narrative, one from way back when, a young man called Moses and an encounter in a wild and deserted place.

In course of a two day workshop I recently attended, on building power in community, led by Sister Maribeth Larkin, a member of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Social Service of Los Angeles, thetopic of leadership was raised. We were asked to note qualities of leadership we appreciated and admired which we then shared and Maribeth wrote them up. We were then asked whether we thought any qualities were missing. After a pause Sister Maribeth wrote three words on the board, ego, anger and humour. Three qualities of leadership she saw that were missing. Ego, not as in being egotistical but as in knowing deeply who you are and who you are in response to others and situations, being self-differentiated. Humour, well it’s really important not to take yourself too seriously.

Anger, now this was an interesting one. Sister Maribeth illustrated it this way, as best I can remember it. It seemed pertinent in light of this day of Holy Spirit breathing and tongues like fire. Moses, she said, is known as the most meek of God’s people. Meek, as understood through the nuance of Hebrew language lens. Not as we might imagine of submissive, self-deprecating, servitude but of obedient transparency to God. One, Maribeth proposed, who enacts anger, not uncontrolled anger of rage, but focused controlled anger that moves one to act for justice.

The story we have of Moses, Maribeth sketched, is that he’s a Hebrew, adopted and raised as an Egyptian prince under the protection of Pharoah’s daughter. As a young man he one day witnesses a fellow Hebrew countrymen being beaten by an Egyptian overlord. Enraged Moses checks to see no one’s looking, then murders the Egyptian and buries the body in the sand. As it turns out Moses was seen by a fellow Hebrew who rats on Moses. So what does Moses do? He flees, runs from the consequences of his act of rage against injustice. He comes to marry Jethro’s daughter, prince of Midian and settles into a quiet life. But one day, while wandering in the wilderness keeping his father-in-law’s flocks he’s confronted by a bush that burns yet isn’t consumed. Moses knows this as divine presence. Maribeth proposes, this flame that burns without consuming is the anger of God that burns against injustice. This anger against injustice Moses knew, for it had incited his younger self to react in rage and kill. However this anger of God he meets burns but doesn’t consume the one who enacts it. Unlike rage this powerful anger impels Moses to act with focus and clear headed intent for justice that transforms.

How many of you have experienced the kind of anger that flares in your belly when you witness injustice. Belly anger when confronted by injustice, at the diminishment of another, to situations and scenarios you know destroy people, relationships, creation, life itself. Belly anger that people, families in this country are hungry, no matter how hard they work not for lack of food but because rents are high and distribution is unjust. Belly anger that our planet’s in peril because of the rapacious greed of fossil fuel cartels, we who’d protest against an atomic bomb let every day the equivalent effect of 400 Hiroshima bombs be unleashed on our world by the burning of fossil fuels. Belly anger that decisions of self-interest made by the current leadership of the US is undoing decades of relational trust, teetering Europe and the Middle East on brink of critical conflict. Belly anger at small injustices you witness each or any day that thrust you toward, to name, to act to redress injustice.

Observing injustice first hand can enrage us, cause us to act impulsively. Rage consumes and is short lived, a passion that flares and saps. It can leave us wondering at our action, perhaps frightened by our capacity for harm. Questioning whether we’re much different from those we’ve reacted against? Afraid we’re complicit for we know we participate in and so perpetuate the systems that cause such injustices. Perhaps overwhelmed, helpless to know what to do, hopeless as to whether it will make any difference, it can be easier to flee. Evade the discomfort of such possibility and decide to just get on, to live a regular perhaps unremarkable but as expected life. Caught in disjunction, we discover we’re victims also oppressed by the injustice against which we rail.

Then one day, walking by the same injustice we’ve witnessed and numbed ourselves to walk by for too many days, something shifts. This injustice continues we realise because we don’t take our place against it. We don’t take a stand, don’t act my “No, this isn’t how things have to be.” This injustice continues because we don’t do anything, don’t choose to act differently. Injustice isn’t inevitable it isbecause we take our part in allowing it to be. The belly anger rises, we recognise, just as Moses did before the burning bush that was not consumed. But this time rather than reactive rage, this anger is steady and determined. It insists a world of just outcomes can be made real. It’s fearless in speaking truth to power – naming, uncovering, making plain the unjust share of resources, of decisions that for economic advantage, conceal truth of harm to people and place and planet. With focus and clear headed intent it impels us to act, not to impose our sense of what is just, but to free the bonds, the bindings of injustice, to allow the oppressed go free. There is potential here for us to be frightened by the potency of what might then be enacted. We run serious risk of having to change and that’s likely to be mighty inconvenient.

On Pentecost we say the Holy Spirit, flame, divided tongues as of fire that burned yet did not consume came to rest on the heads of those who were to be leaders in the early Jesus followers. It rather suggests the dangerous potential for the breaking out Spirit of the Living God mantle of leadership is placed upon you and I, people who linger in such dangerous, potential for empowering place like this. This Holy Spirit dancing like tongue of flame rests upon us, known to us – to impel us from this place. To impel us to act, to look and notice, to listen and do, for that belly filling anger to cause us together to do something about the state of the world. For human choices have got us to this out of balance, unjust state of being and human choices that can change it.

Pentecost, hold onto your hat Sunday, we’re the leaders who are to live this way in our world, to make real that justly sharing resources and power is sustainable, a viable and life flourishing way to live. That is the mandate given us by such out pouring Spirit. Look around, look who is with you in this, look who you can join yourself to, go from this place, step into your vocation and act for through who else is God’s justice to be made real?

I want to leave you with Annie Dillard’s words of warning to those of us who gather together and dare to invoke the living God:

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” [1]

[1] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Perennial Library/Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), 40-41.