One Saturday morning, nearly a year ago, I’m pretty sure I saw the Holy Spirit crossing Route 11 somewhere south of Staunton and north of Lexington.
I was on my way to Grace Episcopal Church in Lexington, to be ordained, along with two friends and fellow seminarians, as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, wearing my collar officially, or almost officially, for the first time, about to step into a new calling, new work in a new church in a new city, following so many over the years who have followed this same call. And as I was driving, I saw a dark shape emerge from the trees and step into the road. The shape didn’t move too quickly, but I was far enough back that I could slow down safely and look closely at this creature, up early on a Saturday along with a bunch of Episcopalians.
It wasn’t the right shape or height to be a deer, and then I thought perhaps it might be a large dog – until it came a little closer, and I realized it wasn’t a deer or a dog, but a bear – not a cub, but not full-grown. He wasn’t in a hurry, and I don’t think he even saw me, but he lumbered across the highway with a sort of heavy grace, silently, without a sideways glance, and then he disappeared into the trees on the other side of the road, and that was it.
For all my years living in the Shenandoah Valley, I’ve never seen a bear that close[1], and it felt significant, like an unexpected quiet blessing, this bear making his way through his morning as we made our way through ours. A day or two later, I told a priest friend of mine in Tennessee that I thought it was a visit by the Holy Spirit. “Cara,” he said, “the Holy Spirit is usually thought of as a bird.” And yes, I would agree usually – but maybe not on that particular Saturday morning and on that stretch of Route 11 in this part of Virginia.
Because the Holy Spirit doesn’t always show up the way we expect it to, and today’s passage from Acts, the miracle of Pentecost, the birthday of the Christian Church, the day when the companion Jesus told his followers would come, does come to be with those men and women who will carry on Christ’s work in the world. Today’s story from Acts reminds us that the Holy Spirit tends to show up in ways that are startling, that throw us off balance, that may feel at first chaotic until we start to listen.
The catechism in our Book of Common Prayer tells us that the Holy Spirit is the “Third Person of the Trinity, God at work in the world and in the Church even now”; that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life, who spoke through the prophets and “enables us to grow in the likeness of Christ.”
I also find myself turning to the poets to find images, ways of thinking of the Holy Spirit, perhaps because the language of the poets is, like the work of the Holy Spirit, often startling and illuminates truths that may not otherwise be visible. Composer and saint Hildegard von Bingen describes the Holy Spirit as “all awakening, / all resurrecting” – “a life that bestows life, the root of the tree” and the “wind in its boughs.” Poet John Dryden calls the Holy Spirit the “source of uncreated light,” an ancient divine presence “by whose aid / The world’s foundations first were laid.”
The Holy Spirit affirms and inspires. Yes, it may come on the gentle wings of a dove, but it also comes with the suddenness of a bear. The Holy Spirit can be beautiful and frightening, comforting and challenging.
The Holy Spirit may breathe on us, breath of God, but it may also come as a rushing wind, a hurricane. The Holy Spirit may speak as a still, small voice, but it may also speak through a cacophony of voices, all speaking the language of their hearts, loud and overwhelming, bewildering, until we start to listen. The Holy Spirit kindles fire.
And today on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit brings the fire. The Holy Spirit comes without explanation, without warning. It is unexpected, stormy, loud.
“Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
No one understands what is happening, and why.
“All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’”
Over the years, theologians have tried to answer that question. At times, we’ve done it badly. Preachers in South Africa used this passage from Acts to justify segregation and apartheid, claiming that its message is that the division and separation of people by race and ethnicity is a good thing.
Theologian and Baptist minister Willie James Jennings argues that that is the absolute opposite of the message of Pentecost. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he writes, is “something different, something startling.” The Holy Spirit, in opening everyone’s ears to each other’s languages, creates something new, Jennings says: It creates Joining. The Holy Spirit, 2000 years ago and now, brings people together, through the diversity of their languages, through confusion that leads to clarity. At Pentecost, what was strange becomes familiar – the languages we can’t understand or speak suddenly have meaning. “Today the gospel crosses every border,” writes poet Malcolm Guite; “All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace.”
The Holy Spirit challenged Christ’s followers, then and now, to step outside of the languages we know and listen to the voices we don’t know, to be in conversation with voices we have never listened to before. Learning another language is not an easy task – understanding its grammar, its structure, absorbing its vocabulary. When we learn another language, we learn another perspective, another view on the world. “To speak a language is to speak a people,” Jennings says. “God,” he writes, “speaks people, fluently.”
What if the Holy Spirit loosened our tongues again? What would we hear if we were to take some time to learn another language – maybe it’s Spanish or Arabic or Ukrainian – or perhaps it is learning a deeper language, learning to speak people, to hear people, to open our ears to what seems like cacophony, to listen for the voice that might be lost in the beautiful diversity of experiences that makes us who we are as a people, and as a people of God. How might that listening be connected to the way we follow Christ, the way we share the love of Christ in the world?
In the fire and wind of Pentecost that calls us to be a community of faith, in the water and the anointing of the sacrament of baptism that names us and draws us into that community over and over; in breaths and windstorms, doves and bears, and in the voices of the people around us, the Holy Spirit speaks to us, shows up unexpectedly and blesses us with a beautiful cacophony.
I’ll close with the words of one more poet, Methodist pastor Jan Richardson, a blessing she wrote for Pentecost:
This is the blessing
we cannot summon
by our own devices,
cannot shape
to our own purposes,
cannot bend
to our own will.
This is the blessing
that comes
when we leave behind
our aloneness,
when we gather
together,
when we turn
toward one another.
Let us pray.
God, help us to turn toward each other, to hear and speak people, to listen for the Holy Spirit in all that surrounds us, that we might love the world in return. In the name of your son Jesus Christ, who did not leave us alone when he returned to you, but sent the Holy Spirit to inspire and challenge and strengthen us for your work. Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Day of Pentecost, May 28, 2023
Reading: Acts 2:1-21
[1] Clarification: I’ve not seen a bear that close running loose – after preaching this sermon, I remembered that I did in fact meet a bear that was trapped and re-released in the mountains of North Carolina while I was at The Swag on a story trip for Blue Ridge Country magazine.
(Photo: AA Roads)
