A Little More Pentecostal?

Today, Pentecost, we celebrate the Holy Spirit. Celebrating the Spirit can be a bit awkward for Episcopalians, who are sometimes counted among God’s frozen chosen. Some Episcopalians are happy with the staid kingly images of God on high, thank you very much. We’re alright with the historical Jesus. We don’t need any out of control, holy-rolling, speaking in tongues, experiences. Pentecost hymns give us the collective heebie-jeebies.

You’ve probably heard someone say to you “I’m spiritual, not religious?” A friend in seminary once said, an Episcopalian is what you get when someone does the opposite. When we try to be “religious but not spiritual.”

I am kidding around, of course, but there’s a bit of truth to the biting humor isn’t there? Even at a church with the nickname Holy Commotion, we have to remind ourselves it’s okay to laugh. It’s okay to dance. And so we may be among the Christian’s who are not exactly sure what to do with the Spirit. We’ll put an image of a dove in stained glass, sure. Tongues of flame look nice in silk on an altar, especially if we only have to look at them once a year. But tell us that the Spirit of God is loose in our world, that any moment we might encounter the wild wind of God’s presence…I’m not sure what page of the prayer book we turn to for that.

This Pentecost, I want to suggest to you, we could learn to trust the Spirit just a little bit more.

A few weeks ago, NPR had an interview with the actor Rainn Wilson, the guy who played Dwight on the Office. He talked about one of his teachers. He shared a moment in his young acting years when he told the teacher, “you know, I’m feeling so cynical. I’m feeling pessimistic…the world’s a pile of crap and it’s getting worse.” Wilson said his teacher “grabbed my arm like a vise, and he looked into my eyes and he said, ‘stop it. Don’t do it. Don’t be cynical. Everything wants you to be cynical. Everything out there in the world wants you to be pessimistic. If you’re cynical, they win. You have to keep hope alive.'” YOU have to keep hope alive.

Friends, we live in cynical times, deeply cynical times. It is too easy to become scoffers, like the nameless characters in the reading from Acts today who jeer at Jesus followers and say “these folks are drunk.” It is too easy to become dismissive. We live in a culture addicted to pessimism.

I suspect, deep down, there is hurt at play. All of us have been disappointed, by a parent, a teacher, a pastor, an institution. We’ve all been let down. And when you’ve been let down there is a temptation to avoid getting your hopes up. I want to suggest to you, this protective instinct doesn’t serve us as well as we think.

When we fail to trust, because our trust has been let down, that failure to trust in the long run costs us more than whatever disappointments that may come because we choose to trust. When we fail to hope, because we have known what it is to have our hopes dashed, that lack of hope costs us more in the long run than if time and again we have our hopes disappointed. I understand the hurt, trust me, I do. I’ve been let down. I’ve had my trust violated. It hurts. But you don’t have to let life’s hurts make you smaller. You don’t.

Hope. Faith. Trust. Love. These are gifts of the spirit too precious to let go, simply because humans or human institutions have failed us.

Hallucinating the Spirit?

I once read a theologian who said about Easter, “perhaps the disciples simply had a mass hallucination.” A mass hallucination he said. Maybe the disciples thought they saw the risen Christ…but it was all just in their minds. I venture, this theologian probably thought something similar about the story of Jesus’ baptism.

In Matthew’s Gospel, as Jesus comes out of the water, the Spirit descends like a dove, and the crowd hears a voice from heaven say, “this is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” The cynical side of our culture would dismiss the Spirit’s presence, try and explain it away. The cynical side of us would wonder if Mary accidentally mixed the wrong kind of mushroom in with the disciples eggs that morning. We live in days where our cynicism sometimes plays like science: we hypothesize and psychologize our way out of mystery. But what does that cost us?

Before I go further, a word about hearing voices and mental health. From the earliest texts we have about the Holy Spirit, the Bible tells us it is important that we practice discernment. You can distinguish the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit does not ask you to do anything harmful yourself or to others. The Holy Spirit is not a foreign and invading voice, but a voice from deep within. The Spirit’s call is to be more deeply, more fully yourself, more loving, more justice. For the voice of the Spirit is the voice of the one who called you into being.

Baptism and letting the place go thin

In a few moments (later today at 8am) we are going to baptize a child, an eight year old. Last week this kiddo asked to be baptized and so her parents made some calls. We organized fast. As we watch and witness this baptism, what if, instead of wondering how much longer the service will take, instead of moving immediately into philosophical conversations with ourselves about the meaning of the rites of initiation in today’s culture, what if we as a congregation decided to wait and watch and hold open room for the Holy Spirit?

When I worked at a church in Washington, we had this beautiful historic architectural dome in the center of the nave. The church had just restored the dome to its original eggshell blue, studying scrapings of the original early-American paint to find the right color. But Luis, our rector used to say, he wished they’d done something else entirely. If he’d had an infinite budget, he said, he would’ve asked them to make the dome retractable and paid Hollywood special effects teams to create a holographic dove. That way at each baptism, the congregation would get a vision of the Spirit descending. We could all hear the words over the loudspeaker “this is my child, my beloved, in her I am well pleased.” Luis said he was convinced God said those words every time someone was baptized. We’re just not always awake enough to hear them.

What if we waited, later this morning, to hear those same words that Jesus heard? What if we imagined together that we might see heaven open, hear a voice say, “this is my child, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased?” Could we suspend our natural cynicism enough to allow for this space to grow thin? Could we collectively choose this vision over the cynicism that comes so naturally to us.

Thomas Merton once wrote that our belief in the Holy Spirit tells us that “God is closer to us than we are to our own breath.” St. Paul says something similar. He tells us there are moments when we don’t know what to pray, but that’s okay, because the Spirit is within us praying, “with sighs too deep for words.” What if we learned to quiet down all our doubts, all our scientific worries. What if we learned to trust that God is closer to reality than we can understand. Could Gods wild spirit help tame our cynicism?

What if we believed, just for a moment, that the crowd really saw something on Pentecost?

Maybe tongues of fire descended, and the people heard the Good News in their own languages.

Maybe, just maybe we can let go of our practiced doubts, and make room for the Holy Spirit to surprise us. It would mean letting God be a little bit more wild, a little bit less predictable. Maybe we can listen for our sons and daughters and children to prophesy. Maybe we’ll make time to hear about the visions of young people. Maybe in a church like this one, we can afford to welcome to the old folks who dream dreams.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll have courage enough to listen without letting too much cynicism get in the way. Could we Episcopalians become just a bit more Pentecostal? Could we trust that God’s Spirit is still with us, and not just with us, but with those of every race and language and people and nation?

Happy Pentecost.