This is an enormously important feast in the Church year. Some of us might remember, that is, those of us who are old enough, that in the past Pentecost was celebrated as the birthday of the Church. I would like to propose that this understanding is far too parochial and that this feast is not just the birthday of the Church. If we interpret it in this manner then we seriously misconstrue it because, as I have said, the Church is not a permanent institution in the mind of God. It is simply one of many, even if a principle one, instruments that God uses to bring forgiveness and salvation to the world.

So, we might ask, what does Pentecost represent? Well, Pentecost, like all the great feasts, is a variety of things. I would like to propose, however, what seems to me the most obvious way to understand Pentecost: it is the climax of the drama of Jesus’ existence. Pentecost is part of a story, an element in a narrative. It is not an event, a rule, or a proposition. It is the climax of a story. This climax is fairly easy to understand. For example, if, as I proposed last Sunday, the Ascension signifies Jesus’ breaching of the constraints of living in time and space with the subsequent universality of his availability to everybody, then the question becomes: How does Jesus become present? That is, how is the word of God announced, and not only announced, but enlivened and embodied in our world? This is what Pentecost entails.

Pentecost is the celebration of the power of God which follows in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection. Put simply, God finally found a human being that "worked" in this man Jesus and this opens the mercy of God to all of humanity. And this is what is adverted to in these readings in a variety of ways. For example, in the Letter to the Romans, Paul makes a very important kind of distinction (one that he writes of consistently) between the Spirit and the flesh. Now, those of us who were raised in the context of the Church forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, understand very clearly what the flesh represented: everything beneath one’s belt. But this is not what the flesh means in Paul’s writings. In his texts, the flesh is simply the full human being as resistant to the energizing power of God, this opening power of God. Thus, to live a spiritual life does not mean to deny one’s own physicality, or more specifically, genitality, but to live under the impulse of that enlivening power in all dimensions of one’s existence, including the sexual dimension. And if we are available to this kind of transformation then this is supposed to be occurring now, in the present. The result is that sex, for example, does not become a means of oppression, terror, or blackmail, as it so often does. But, in the spirit, it is another means to achieve what all of God’s efforts aim at greater life, and I am not just talking about having babies either.

I think that this scene from the Acts is more familiar to us in that it gives us a larger understanding of what the Spirit does. If the Spirit is the power of God transforming us in the history of our own lives as we participate in the history of Jesus’ life, then what does it do? In the Acts, we observe these men who are talking to strangers and the strangers in turn are listening. In order to locate the Spirit of God in this instance, let me take my cue (as I always do when I think about this issue), from the great Karl Rahner. In one of his many essays he asked, "How can we tell where the Spirit of God is?". And Rahner answers in this wonderful lapidary phrase: "The Spirit of God is present when any human being takes another human being seriously". This is an extraordinary statement because it compacts so much of human life and good theology. Thus, in the aforementioned passage from the Acts, we observe all of these strangers who both listen to each other and speak to each other. That is, they all take each other seriously. In other words, this instance is not just a kind of C.W.L. meeting to plan the next bingo party or the regular intramural concerns of a given congregation; Pentecost is a cosmic event. It is not just local, it is cosmic, universal, worldwide. The Spirit of God is present wherever one human being can attend to another human being and listen and speak to that other person. And this is where the story of real life is lived. Hence, according to this view of things, to live is to become better at listening to the truth of each other and speaking the truth to each other. And here too we have gone far beyond the borders of the Church, although the Church ought to be the paradigmatic place where people can, as Paul will constantly say, "speak freely and listen well, regardless of where they are". But wherever real communication happens between the Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, the Spirit of God is present. And the Church is to function as a kind of signpost so that people can identify that this is what God is about when real communication happens.

Pentecost is a terrific feast. It illuminates the way the stories of our lives are played out in this feast. In the light of this feast, as Martin Luther put it, the painful question arises: "How can I, as a self-encapsulated human being whose primary goal in life is to cover my backside, move from who I am and where I am to this universal availability which exists in Jesus?". The story that entails the occurrence of this is of course Jesus’ story and our story is answered by this feast; namely, that God empowers and enlivens us.

Finally, it may be helpful to recall that at this point in the Jesus movement there was no Trinitarian doctrine. This would come in time as Christians thought more deeply and clarified their understanding of the Spirit. And in a weird kind of way I think that it is useful to think of the Spirit in a pre-Trinitarian manner so that we can retrieve the Trinitarian understanding of the Spirit in a more meaningful fashion. In other words, the Spirit of God is God dynamizing us at the deepest places of our humanity to be attentive to each other, to all others. Put simply, to listen and to speak.

To other sermons

Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com