Pentecost, Year B, May 24, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O Holy Source of inspiration, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Happy Pentecost everyone! I am very glad that you’re here – amazed and delighted, really. I expect people on the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) and the Feast of the Resurrection (Easter), but when the Feast of Pentecost falls on a beautiful Memorial Day weekend, well, I just never know. Pentecost is my favorite church holiday. I love our parades of puppets in procession at Emmanuel, bracketing the Great Fifty days of Easter. I love the Pentecost scripture readings: the rattling dry bones re-animated by the spirit of holiness, the breath of God. I love the sound like the rush of a violent wind of the Acts story – not a gentle breeze, not a still small voice, but a complete cacophony of the Good News of the powerful Love of God being told in at least 17 languages (we managed 10 languages this morning –wasn’t it perplexing and thrilling?) And I love the promise of the “one called alongside to help” – parakletos is the Greek word, champion, [1] here translated advocate. Perhaps, more than anything, I love baptisms and Pentecost is one of four days specially designated for baptisms.

You know, there’s something about the communal Pentecost reading from Acts that surprises me every year, even when I’m part of the planning. There’s something shocking and dramatic and wild about a bunch of people reading in different languages at once. It’s exciting and a little crazy – just the opposite of our customary buttoned down and solemn presentations of scripture readings. Holy Scripture is wild and the Church domesticates it at our own peril. I feel hopeful for the worship of the Church whenever when we can experience something of the Spirit and not just talk about the Spirit.

You might know that the Feast of Pentecost in Judaism (in Hebrew, Shavuot), comes fifty days after Passover. Passover celebrates freedom from enslavement and oppression. Shavuot celebrates the giving of Torah to a people committed to serving God. It is the birthday of Judaism. Easter celebrates freedom from enslavement and oppression. Pentecost celebrates the giving of the Spirit and a people committed to serving God. It is the birthday of Christianity. Jews and Christians celebrate the same birthday. The spirit of Truth is the very same spirit of Torah. As I like to say, the new commandment that Jesus gave was new the way a new moon is new. It’s always been there. People’s commitment to an ethical and moral order in service to the Holy One is always in need of renewal and refreshment.

Our Gospel lesson for today is another passage from the extensive farewell discourse in the Gospel of John, delivered by Jesus in a scene where he gathered with his followers for the last time just before he was arrested. We’ve been hearing various parts of it throughout Eastertide because it speaks to the experience of Jesus’ followers in need of consolation and encouragement in the face of scandalous ideological crisis and physical danger. It speaks most clearly to folks who are embarrassed or downright frightened about being Jesus followers. Lives were at stake. It seems to me that lives are still and always at stake when it comes to deep truth telling.

Jesus is assuring the ones who love him that they’re going to have help available to them. Jesus knows that they’re going to need help. In fact, we know that by the time this Gospel was written, Jesus’ followers were getting thrown out of communities that had been sanctuaries (synagogue literally means gathering the way church means a gathering of people). We know that being thrown out of a community could be a matter of life and death. Nevertheless, Jesus is saying in this Gospel of John, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” It can also be translated, when you love me or, whenever you love me, you will hold my instructions dear – you will consider them important. [2] And what are Jesus’ instructions in the Gospel of John? Love one another. Love one another. Love one another.

Jesus is talking about love as action: love as compassionate action when it’s not that convenient; love as compassionate action when you are the one who has been hurt or you are the one who is vulnerable; love as compassionate action when you disagree; love as compassionate action when you do not believe that it’s your job or your turn; love as compassionate action when it’s expensive – when the financial or physical or spiritual price is high. Love as compassionate action is about extending actions of concern for the world – the world beyond yourself, the world beyond your own community, which requires being a person of compassion and participating in a community of compassion because it is way too hard to sustain if you’re going it alone. That’s what this Gospel is about. Whenever you engage in love as compassionate action, Jesus is saying, the spirit of the Holy One will be your champion, cheering you on all the way, helping to support and encourage you. That champion spirit of the Holy One will be inside you and all around you – like air, like wind, like breath. You can’t see it but you can feel the effects when you breathe in and breathe out!

It’s not a coincidence that in Greek and Hebrew the words for spirit and breath and wind and inspiration and breeze and influence and soul and life itself are all related. It is also not a coincidence that, when we find it most challenging to engage in love as compassionate action, remembering to breathe deeply is the best place to begin. It seems to me that the message of Pentecost is the shift from “look out!” (that is, duck and cover, or run and hide) to “look out” (that is, outside yourself, look out to your wider community).

Speaking of the wider community, you might have seen the Pew Research Center report issued last week that shows that the Christian-identifying portion of the population in the U.S. fell from 78.4% to 70.6%” between 2007 and 2014, while the number of those who identify as religiously unaffiliated grew from 16.1% to 22.8%. These kinds of statistics cause a lot of hand-wringing in the Church. I am not drunk on new wine when I tell you that I get excited and encouraged when I read reports like this. It seems to me that it’s good news that people are leaving institutions that are not life-giving, inspiring, and loving. Do you hear me, Emmanuel? Our mission field is growing! There are more and more people out there who need what we have to share, what we have in abundance at this progressive parish: (5 c’s) compassion, creativity, commitment, courage, and craziness (sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the last two).

When Emily Wood wrote to me to begin a conversation about strengthening her commitment to the Episcopal Church, she wrote so beautifully about her experience at Emmanuel that I asked her if I could quote her in my sermon this morning (and she graciously agreed). Emily wrote: “I truly believe Emmanuel Church to be a magical place. Similar to many recent Episcopalians, I have had a long and sometimes less than pleasant journey with the Christian faith. Many of the things I had longed for in a community I found at Emmanuel, and my participation in …services has done more to grow my personal theology in the last year than many… other years combined. I am continually looking forward to the words that you share each week as well as experiencing communion with everyone who calls Emmanuel home…. thank you so much for, perhaps unknowingly, being such an important part of my spiritual formation. In so many ways, I imagine that I will always feel that Emmanuel is a church home to me.”

Emily went on to say that as she prepares to move to Nashville to start a new job, she wanted to make a ritually significant act – a sacramental step marking the transformation that is already begun in her. That’s what all sacraments are of course – outward signs or ritual gestures pointing to inward grace already at work. Emily is making an adult affirmation of belonging and beloving as a Christian because of her experience of the Holy Spirit in this gathered community. She’s also discovering that many parishes request proof of baptism – so I can furnish her with documentation! (Episcopalians love documentation!) I’ll be using words provided in our tradition called “conditional baptism” used “if there is reasonable doubt that a person has been baptized with water, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I’m both thrilled that we can celebrate this important step and so sad that Emily is moving away. We’re in the middle of a lot of goodbyes this year at Emmanuel – and the loss is hard to bear. At the same time, it feels to me as if we are scattering Emmanuel seeds all over the country – forming and sending people all over the place who know what amazing life and love are possible when a parish combines compassion, creativity, commitment, courage, and craziness. One reason is what happens when humans experience awe. Maybe you saw the New York Times article by Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner on Friday about the experience of awe, “the ultimate ‘collective’ emotion.” They wrote, “It motivates people to do things that enhance the greater good…Awe arouses altruism…[even] fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.”

The other day, The Rev. Cody Sanders, pastor-elect of Old Cambridge Baptist Church (OCBC) in Harvard Square wrote for the Baptist news service about the wider Church saying, “We really aren’t guaranteed a future. … [so] we need to put the security of our institutional life on the line for something we really believe in…Churches need to do something so audacious and risky that it can still be said, ‘Folks in the community talked back and forth about that church, confused, saying, ‘What’s going on here?’and others joked, ‘They must be drunk.’” That sounds like Emmanuel Church to me! Or as my friend John DeBeer says, alluding to the Sea of Galilee, “Let’s figure out how to communicate what we know [in languages everyone will understand] so that people will want to chase us around the lake!” Happy Pentecost.
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