I do not know how to do this part
a Pentecost Sermon
This morning I preached. In a church. With actual human beings! I missed this so much. The sermon starts at 22:30 but the whole service is lovely.
St John’s Episcopal Cathedral is one of three communities here in Denver that I have an official connection to. The others are Montview Presbyterian and New Beginnings, the Lutheran worshipping community comprised of incarcerated women inside the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.
A Pentecost Sermon
(to read the Acts and Ezekiel readings I reference in the sermon, go HERE)
I am a big fan of Pentecost Sunday.
I love how weird it is. I love how the Holy Spirit is the like, the mischievous member of the trinity. At House for all Sinners and Saints we would always have red velvet cake on Pentecost. And a couple times we hired fire dancers to perform in the courtyard before liturgy. And once we had people stationed at each corner of the sanctuary with red confetti cannons that they set off as a surprise during the Acts reading. It ends up my parishioners were not as fond of that one as I thought they would be.
All that is to say…Pentecost is just a really fun day in the church year. But as I studied the Pentecost story this week, I couldn’t get past this one line that I have read thousands of times and never once thought was remarkable compared to the more theatrical moments of Pentecost- the flames of fire and speaking in tongues and accusations of disciples boozing it up at 9a on a church day… this carnival of a story is just barely pounding steaks in the ground, it hasn't even opened its fantastical tent to the wonders inside and I kept getting stopped in my tracks by the sentence –
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.
They were all together in one place.
That thing that was taken away from us and that we had no idea we were even going to lose, we did not know to treasure it when we had it. They were all together in one place.
I did not know 15 months ago that just being together in one place would be the thing about Pentecost in 2021 that would feel the most . . . fantastical.
This coming Saturday is the memorial service for a man who died 6 months ago. His name is Mike Myers and he was my youth minister when I was in High School –Let’s just say, I was not the most compliant teenager and I for sure had one purple Doc Martin out the door of my conservative Church of Christ the whole time Mike was my youth minister, but I never once doubted he loved me and we maintained a true affection for one another for all these decades since. He died with and during COVID and so even though he was a beloved man who pastored thousands of people throughout his life, the church could not gather together in one place to grieve and pray and sing hymns until this coming weekend.
It has been a particularly cruel aspect of the pandemic that it has killed our loved ones and then prevented us from gathering together to mourn them.
So I am overwhelmed being here with you. Together in one place. And I look for the day when I can worship again with you women at New Beginnings.
But all of that is to say –I kept reading When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place and just couldn't keep reading the rest of the story, and it made me realize that maybe it is because yes, I am thrilled to be here with you but I am also overwhelmed by the enormity of grief we are carrying with us. And I feel like I should confess that … I don’t know how to do this part. The part where we just survived without being able to be together in one place; the part where we survived when so many died; the part where we look around and see the rubble of an angry, divided country; the part where we emerge from our isolation not knowing who we are now, not knowing how to have faith now, how to have hope now, not knowing how to ever go back or how to possibly move forward - We who have survived the pandemic.
So yeah… I’m not super interested in the Holy Spirit going wild in a chaotic polyglot tent revival in Acts right now, but I did find myself comforted by Ezekiel’s Valley of the Dry Bones ….because there we find the Holy Spirit doing something we really need right now – She was speaking through a prophet who was looking out over his own people’s grief and loss. And I was comforted thinking maybe he, like us, also didn't know how to do that part.
See, the valley of the dry bones text we just heard was written at the end of the Babylonian exile - a time of loss and displacement and hardship…but the bones the Holy Spirit led him out to see were not of the many who had died in exile.
The bones he prophesied to represented the many who had survived the exile.
The bones that the Holy Spirit basically tricked Ezekiel into prophesied to, they were the dry hearts of the survivors, the dry faith of the survivors, the dry hopes of the survivors . . . they who said 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.'
Mortal, can these bones live? You know Oh Lord.
When I say I do not know how to do this part I think what I mean is that I do not know how to fix my own heart – how to soften it after months of anger toward our fellow citizens. I do not know how to make myself hopeful after seeing what we have lost. I do not know how to bring myself together again.
But then I read the words of Isaiah:
Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live”
I am comforted that the Lord God didn't say to the bones “just do more yoga to cause breath to enter you and then you shall live, The Lord God didn't say just apply some of that grit and personal responsibility and open those graves you got yourselves in”
The prophet tells us that God will put GOD’S spirit in us and we shall live.
The culture around us may be calling for us to be brave and forge forward and apply our will to the project of just moving on… and I may occasionally wish that trying hard and winning was the primary belief of the Christian faith, or perseverance and victory, or woke tweeting and righteous indignation was the primary reality of our faith but it is, it was and it will always be Death and Resurrection – that is the primary metaphor, the primary idea, the primary key signature of the Christian faith.
Were the Christian story anything else – were it the spiritual ponzi scheme pawned off by toothy-grinned TV preachers, it would truly offer us nothing in moments like this.
But to the Spirit, it is in moments when the tomb is the darkest, when the night is the longest, when our self-sufficiency is the most useless that she is like “finally…THIS I can do something with”
We cannot make bone come to bone, we cannot animate ourselves with our own breath. We cannot resurrect ourselves…we can just be the ones upon whom The Holy Spirit acts. It is a comfort to me that the bones in Ezekiel’s valley were the object in the story, not the subject.
I wish I had the kind of faith where I easily gave everything over to God but I don’t. Give me even a sliver of light in a tomb I dug myself and I will be like, I got this. So maybe if you are anything like me, and you also do not know how to do this part, that is a good thing. The reason you don’t know how to do whatever comes next is that it’s not yours to do…it’s the Holy Spirit’s. Our advocate and comforter.
We believe in the Holy Spirit around here, by the way.
The Lord the giver of life, the opener of graves
who proceeds from the father and the son,
with the father and the son she is not always understood and you cannot always set your watch by her but she is worshipped and glorified
And she has spoken through the prophets.
Which is why we know to look to the resurrection of the dead,
and to life in the world to come.
Amen.
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"They were all together in one place." Like you, Nadia, coming through the pandemic this also stops me in my tracks. We will be grateful when we can do this again but the magnitude of this statement should always have overwhelmed us. The Day of Pentecost was an enormous event in many ways. One of the most remarkable was that this was a gathering of people from diverse cultures, languages and ethnicities from all around the Mediterranean and beyond Probably the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit was communication between them all. There is celebration of the gift of tongues as a climactic blessing but, however the communication took place, those who received the message of the power of God were even more rewarded than those who expressed it. The Holy Spirit may have blessed the tongues of those who spoke but She also touched the ears of those who heard. However that happened it was the firestorm of an event that gave birth to the one holy and apostolic church in which we believe.
Just before the pandemic hit I was in church, just after my dear wife had died, and was astounded by a beautiful hymn that was new to me: "She comes sailing on the wind, her wings flashing in the sun, on a journey just begun, she flies on. And in the passage of her flight, her song rings out through the night, full of laughter, full of light, she flies on." Through tears I thought of my wife, her journey just begun, then realized that the hymn praises the Holy Spirit in feminine terms. My beloved Margaret still flies along with Her, full of laughter, full of light.
thank you for telling me again that it's not what I do, but rather the Spirit coming, leading, holding me up and believing in me inspite of my humaness.