When I was growing up in the Episcopal Church of the 1950s and ‘60s, I can’t remember ever hearing the word Pentecost except in the reading we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles…if I was even listening to that. What I do remember is a Sunday called Whitsunday. Whitsunday, I learned, was the birthday of the church which I vaguely understood to involve a lot of people gathered in some place called the “upper room,” a bird…a dove to be precise, a strong wind and flames of fire. What I remember vividly is that there was a gigantic cake from time to time to help us celebrate this birthday which thrilled all my sugarholic friends and me. But for the most part, Whitsunday was just another of those days with strange sounding names…like the Sundays immediately preceding Lent: Septuagesima, Sexagesima and, my favorite, Quinquagesima. I was such a little snob back then that I accepted these terms as elegant oddities which set my Episcopal ethos apart from the ordinariness of the Southern Baptists and Methodists who far outnumbered us in that time and place.
I’m sure at some point I began to have a more mature understanding about this day and what happened on it over two thousand years ago, but I have no specific memory of when or how. It was not until I was a young adult and the services for trial use which eventually became the prayer book we use today were introduced that I learned that Pentecost is the more biblically accurate name for this day. And it was not until several years after that, when I personally experienced the reality of the Holy Spirit, that the whole thing became more than an intellectual exercise in church history and theology.
But isn’t that the way it is with us human beings? Of all creatures on the earth, we are the most adept at taking in, processing and organizing abstract information. We can even be inspired by concepts and ideas, but in the end the most powerful learning tool for us is usually experience. Touching an iron that is hot enough to sear our skin teaches us in a split second what countless admonitions from our mother can fail to communicate. The same is true of more positive things. For example, I’m thinking we never really understand what friendship is about until we have a friend of our own.
So it was with those first followers of Jesus. He told them he would send the Spirit to comfort them in his absence. He told them he would send them power from on high to accomplish all those things he was commissioning them to do once he was good and gone. They believed him because they loved him and trusted him, and they knew about the Spirit of the Lord that had rested on the prophets in times past. But there was no way they could understand the magnitude of what was about to happen to them until it happened. There was no way they could understand, before the fact, that they would suddenly be released from that fear for their own safety which had haunted them all those weeks since the crucifixion, much less that they would find themselves in the middle of the city preaching to hoards of people. These were people from all over the known world, each of them hearing the message of Jesus crucified and risen from the dead in their own language. There was no way those followers of Jesus could imagine the chaotic wondrousness of it all…until it happened.
So what about you and me? As Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit enters each of us in the act of baptism, just as it did with Jesus, which is one of the reasons we will have two baptisms this morning. We teach that the Spirit is God’s gift to us, a gift freely given. We trust that the giving of it is not dependent on any worthiness on our part, but on God’s endless generosity. You know, I sometimes fear that the readiness with which it’s given and the unfailing bounteousness of the Giver may cheapen the gift for you and me, may make it seem not all that precious and desirable…simply because it is so readily available. The church teaches that Pentecost is the second most important day of the Christian year, second only to Easter, the Day of Resurrection. But the sacredness of this day is continually trumped by other things; things like graduations and their attendant festivities, or the need to open the house at the shore, or some years by Memorial Day weekend, or by any other “fun” thing that might happen on early summer Sundays. I gotta tell you, sometimes I wonder if the real problem with paying attention to Pentecost is the fact that no one’s thought of a way to “market” it the way they have Christmas and Easter.
I said earlier that it was not until I personally experienced the reality of the Holy Spirit that all the stuff I’d been taught about it began to mean something to me. We were living in a little town in northeast Alabama, and the parish was going through a period of intense spiritual renewal. As the wife of the rector, I was deeply involved in the prayer and praise groups that were a part of that renewal. But exhilarating as it was, there was something missing for me. There were experiences other people talked about having and gifts of the Spirit they exhibited that I couldn’t quite embrace for myself. It was in the midst of a sleepless night a week or two after the birth of our younger son Adam who will be 41 years old this coming Saturday…it was in the midst of a sleepless night that I found myself lying on the sofa in the den, praying. I’m not quite certain what happened that night except that my hunger for God finally overcame my caution. I firmly believe that God does not coerce anyone into a place that we do not wish to be. But I also believe that God is persistent, waiting patiently until our hunger overcomes our caution.
On this day of Pentecost 2014, we remember that day so many centuries ago when the Spirit of God came to dwell in humankind in a new way, and we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to McFredlin Jane Turay and Benjamin George Price in the sacrament of baptism. But let’s don’t make the mistake of thinking this is simply a day of remembrance for some event long past or simply the celebration of a marvelous event in the lives of two young children and their families today.
The reality is that every day is Pentecost.
Every day there are people around the globe who finally allow their hunger for God to overcome their caution…
Every day!