Theological Truth: The Holy Spirit brings the power and presence of God’s love to light and life in the present of our lives.
Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
My brother-in-law Jules is not your stereotypical Cajun. Having spent a career in the Trust department of a bank, he’s as comfortable at a conference table as he is at the wheel of his boat. He knows the tax code as well as the spidery waterways surrounding Lake D’Caid. He can talk estate planning as easily as the feeding habits of speckled trout. But when it comes to cooking, mon cher, he’s exactly what you’d expect from a bona fide Cajun.
When we lived around the corner from them, we were frequent visitors to their “Green Egg Pavilion,” a covered outdoor area ideal for boiling crawfish, frying fish, or whatever Jules may want to grill on his Green Egg. Like most committed Cajuns, Jules enthusiastically invests in his passions. That’s why he possessed what I have come to think of as Pentecost on the patio … the Holy Spirit of charcoal. It’s a device that combines fire and fan — think of a blow dryer mixed with a blow torch. Just point and pull the trigger and in seconds, lumps of coal are transformed into glowing embers. From zero to searing like that! Welcome to Pentecost Sunday!
The holy combination of fire and wind inspired the disciples! Acts tells us, “When the Jewish feast of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all in one place, waiting, with all the potential of a bag of charcoal, but in desperate need of a Divine push: oxygen and a spark. Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind. Divided tongues of fire rested on each of them.” And with that combination of fire and wind, presto, things start happening. The disciples get cooking. Crowds begin gathering. Language barriers crumble. Cultural differences dissolve. And all who upon the name of the Lord are saved. Glory!
Today, we celebrate the Holy Spirit, perhaps the most misunderstood, hardest to understand, and least talked about member of the Holy Trinity. We witness how God the Spirit brings life out of death, unity out of estrangement, and the eternal purposes of God into the present realities of our lives. And we remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit continues in the ongoing shared purpose of the Trinitarian God: the reconciliation of Creation with God and one another. And to bring that about, the Spirit continues to work in us and through us and for us. All of us.
The Spirit’s first gift, the rapid resolution of our linguistic differences, is no accident. The newborn Church, enflamed by the Holy Spirit, immediately reverses the story of the tower of Babel. Back in Babel-days, Chapter 11 of Genesis tells us blood-thirsty, power-hungry, greedy human beings conspired to make a name for themselves. Which is to say, they rejected relationship with God. So, God thwarted their misguided conspiracy by confusing their languages. It’s significant to notice, however, that the story then immediately pivots to the beginning of the Abraham saga, whereby God sets about the purpose of blessing humanity through the family of Abraham, and providing a light for all the nations. The story arc of God’s redemption is long, but it’s never lost and continues unabated.
In the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and in the sending of the Holy Spirit, God’s purpose of salvation for all has taken a giant, dramatic leap forward, by indwelling in each of us. Richard Rohr explains, “…to span the infinite gap between the divine and the human, God’s agenda is to plant a little bit of God, the Holy Spirit, right inside of us (John 14:16–17; Romans 8:9, 11; 1 Corinthians 3:16)” (Daily Meditation, 8/8/2021). This is the power we’ve been given. Just like those early disciples, we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever. Now it’s our turn to tell the good news of God’s great deeds of power in the language and story of our day.
At Easter, I reminded us that punctuation matters. The Resurrection puts a comma where and when we are tempted to put a period, even at death. Here, at Pentecost, we are empowered to not only punctuate, but to take our place in writing and sharing God’s narrative of life over death; to bring the Gospel to the streets of Staunton so that all may hear and receive the good news of God’s purpose of restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
The Holy Spirit empowers us to move past the comma to ask what Rachel Held Evans calls the “and then” question. She explains how her sister-in-law, by asking someone the simple question, “And then?” (over and over again) coaxes even the most introverted, shy, self-conscious person into a transformative story-teller. “What did you today? Ok, you went to work. And then? You got stuck in traffic … and then? You noticed the guy next to you singing to Beyonce … and then? And then?! ….
“Christians … live in the ‘and then’ after Jesus’ resurrection and before his return,” she writes, “We live an unfinished story, a story that began with the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters at the beginning of time and which took a dramatic, climactic turn two thousand years ago when that same God became human, lived among us, and beat death once for all.” (Inspired, p. 217).
The fire and wind of the Spirit forges a link in us to this unimaginably wonderful story. It allows the epic narrative of God’s redeeming love for the world to shape our lives. It empowers us to ask faithfully in Spirit-kindled real-time, “And now? And now?” Embodying the risen Christ in our own unique ways, we reveal the good news that the saving work of God in Christ Jesus is true, real, ongoing, and available. Indeed, all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.
Don’t worry. We don’t do this alone. We don’t write the whole story, we only write our part. The wind and the flame empower us and motivate us. Some days we may feel like lumps of coal, but inspired by God the Spirit, we are transformed into agents of change, authors of hope, ambassadors of Love. We are “fired up” to both enthusiastically ask and joyfully answer the Pentecost question: And now? Time to get cooking.
Come Holy Spirit, and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Sermon preached by The Rev. AJ Heine on May 19, 2024, Day of Pentecost, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton.
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