A New World
Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2021
Acts 2:1-21
Remember
Oh what a glorious day! The Day of Pentecost has long been a favorite of mine. Who can resist the drama, the energy, the rush of the wind, the tongues of fire? And how much more it all means this year. A day of return after over a year of being shuttered in our homes, physically separated from almost everything, our worlds reduced to small screens. Fourteen months of living with fear, anxiety, and grief.
Those disciples have spent the last fifty days between the Passover and Pentecost fearfully and cautiously in Jerusalem. They have largely kept to themselves, keeping beneath the radar of the Jewish leadership. They have been repeatedly visited by the Resurrected Jesus, reminding them of his teachings. Jesus has reassured and comforted them. And on this Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit shows up, not as a peaceful comforting breeze , but as a wild wind filled with flickering flames. Nothing can ever be the same again. As tempting as it might be to return to their previous lives and forget that any of this ever happened, this is no longer a possibility. And while we don’t know how the disciples themselves felt about the experience, we do know that the bystanders were ‘amazed and perplexed’. Some just assumed the disciples must be drunk! There is that curious detail about everyone being able to understand what they were saying in their own language.
In the history of the Christian Church, Pentecost is considered to be the day when it all began. The disciples still consider themselves to be Jewish, but increasingly Gentiles are going to hear the message of Jesus Christ and want to be baptized and join these Jesus-followers. The wind and the tongues of fire so fill the disciples with passion that they lose caution and are out in the streets of Jerusalem, even the temple, teaching, healing and baptizing in the name of Jesus. There is the inevitable confrontation with the Jewish hierarchy, and most of the disciples will leave the city, spreading the Gospel, the Good News, throughout their Mediterranean world, to anyone who will listen: Jew and Gentile alike.
At the beginning of April last year, the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy published a piece in the Financial Times entitled ‘The Pandemic is a Portal.’ In it she acknowledges our communal longing to be able to return to the way things were. But she also raises up the possibility of using this rupture for positive change. Do we just go back, or might we be courageous enough to go forward? She writes:
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists and.... it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
It is so tempting to yearn for things to be the way they were pre-pandemic. The memories of the strictest phase of our ‘sheltering in place’ are fading. We eagerly reach for those socially engaged activities that are only newly becoming possible. Our children are being allowed to meet, play and learn together. Gathering inside in limited ways is conceivable. Most of us are living with the reassurance of the vaccines.
Not all has been bad about the long pandemic months: there have been silver-linings to be found. In the enforced deprivation of external diversion and entertainment, we have had to find new ways to amuse and nourish ourselves. Many of us have taken advantage of digital technologies to maintain, even develop new ways of being connected to the world through our screens. I don’t think I’m alone in delighting in regular conversations with far distant friends and family. Throughout our live-streaming here at Holy Innocents, as you know, family and friends from around the country have been regularly joining us. Recently, a Holy Innocents congregation from Canada dropped in. We’ve also had greetings from a London mosque.
We have had to learn that church is more than the building. And it hasn’t been easy, but we have done it. Connecting through a screen is not the same, but it was the best we could do. I have been reassured by how the Holy Innocents community has largely stayed connected: finding ways that have sustained us, whether through the live-streams, small groups or one on one conversations. Morning Prayer a couple of mornings a week, complete with cups of tea and slippers has been a delight and will continue.
As a church, we have had to come up with new ways of worshiping together. We’ve had to pick apart our theology to find out what has meaning so that we can create a vessel in which we can still know and be nourished by the presence of the living God at a distance from each other. These have been exciting questions at a time when church attendance across the country has been sliding. If worship is not tied to large and increasingly empty buildings that are now no longer in the right place, what might it look like instead? Let me also take the opportunity to slip in that in my opinion Holy Innocents is a perfect size, in exactly the right place!
But what might happen if the whole world took this opportunity to examine its practices to discover better ways of living together for us all? Arundhati Roy writes in the previously mentioned article of the ‘doomsday machine that we have built for ourselves.’ I immediately think of the global climate crisis that puts us all in jeopardy. And as we know there are many other issues. So many areas of the world are roiled in conflict: with one group trying to dominate, even eliminate another. Populations are being targeted, abused, oppressed, even killed: I think of the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Palestinians, the systemic racism in this country, just to mention a few.
Let me close with Arundhati Roy. She writes:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
This Pentecost, I invite us to see the opportunity that has been forced upon us. I invite us to pray for all those in positions of power that they may consider how they can wield it justly and mercifully. I invite us to pray for ourselves and all people that we may have the courage to imagine another world: a just and peaceful world where all life is equally treasured and all may heal and flourish. And having imagined it, find ways to play our part in its recreation.
We can, with God’s help.