Pentecost Sunday 1997

Something worth dying for

It is maybe because the birthday of Martin Luther King was so near the beginning of Lent that a phrase that King used regularly has been coming back to me all through Lent and I find that it bears even more fruit during the Easter Season, so I would like to suggest it to you and you can test it for yourself to see how useful it will be.

King said: "Unless you have something worth dying for, you have nothing worth living for." It is really ominous sounding. During Lent, of course, it "works" because the whole notion of mortification, of dying, sounds very plausible in the light of that almost melodramatic kind of statement. But, and this is one of the fruits of Easter, and particularly apt for the Feast of the Holy Spirit of God, the whole point is not the dying; the point is the living. It is not to focus on the dying, what mortifies me, what brings death to me. Rather, the upshot of dying is to lead an authentic and rich human life. And that’s why it makes sense to bring this up on the Feast of Pentecost.

The Spirit of God is what? It is the Jews’ normal way to talk of God’s power to make us alive. Through the whole Hebrew Bible you get the Spirit of God as this metaphor, when talking about shaping the chaos in the account of Creation, and you get the Spirit of God enabling the prophets to see the world as God saw the world and animating them to talk about the world as God saw the world. Of course in the New Testament you get the same thing: it is the Spirit of God that enables Jesus. So the texts are full of references to the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God comes to Jesus at his baptism enabling him to see how he is going to run his life in the greatest and fullest way... to be most alive. It is only in terms of that notion of being absolutely alive that this business of having something to die for begins to make any sense because it is precisely that, that shapes human existence. Otherwise life is a literally pointless meandering from here to there, from this possibility to that possibility, a kind of dilettantish aestheticizing of life where nothing is taken seriously and nothing has any consistency, or vigour, or meaning...

To be made alive, in Jesus’ own Jewish view of things, is to withstand all of those things which break us apart from each other. To be alive in that way, therefore, is the effort to exterminate in us everything that is self-defensive, and that causes us to hide and withhold ourselves from each other so that we can withstand each other. That is all over the Pentecost narrative. Clearly the author of the Book of Acts, when he or she describes the first Pentecost, with that great thunderous wind and the tongues of flame has at the point of that narrative all these strangers who can now communicate with each other. The so-called "gift of tongues" is not some kind of Hollywood-religious glitz. It is rather the reconstitution of us human beings who, until we begin to see life as Jesus understood life, are more profoundly alienated from ourselves and from each other than we can imagine. What is it to be truly alive? The death is, as I said, the extermination in ourselves of everything that stifles that life, even if paradoxically, as in the life of Jesus, and King himself, the very being alive invited death. As was King, Jesus was killed because he took seriously garbage-collectors, and prostitutes, and cripples, and the poor...

So that is what we are celebrating today. It is truly a celebration of life. It is not some kind of cheap and tawdry animal vitality that we are talking about here. It is not the kind of shapeless exuberance for which I think all of us have a great desire because life is onerous for most of us a good part of the time. And relaxation, or escapism, whether it’s through films or alcohol or any other kind of dissipation, deadens the pain. Today we get to ask, "Okay, where are we going? What do we really want to do? Whom do we really want to be?" So then the ominous edge of that statement from King disappears because it becomes self-evident that unless I have something worth dying for, I am not alive. There is really nothing else... It is the Spirit of Truth that we celebrate today, which means that it is this Spirit that convinces us that that’s what it is to be alive. And we believe that Spirit will lead us through the darkness that is characteristic of so much of our living to discern and to choose life at all and any costs.

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RT 8/5/97