Pentecost (C), May 15, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our burning hearts, 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.

Some of you, who follow along in the bulletin when the Gospel is being read, might be wondering why there are no capital letters or punctuation marks in our printed copy this morning. It’s because the capitalization and punctuation is so objectionable to me that I just didn’t want to print it the way it appears in our English translation. Many of you have heard me preach about punctuation being a medieval invention, developed centuries after the Gospels were written. When our scripture was written, it was written without spaces between words, without punctuation, without indication for titles or other proper nouns. So punctuation, while very useful, is a layer of interpretation, just like translation is interpretation. In this version, the doctrinal freight of the interpretation weighs me down. For example, in our Gospel reading today, the number of times that the word father appears with a capital F (when Jesus’ mother never gets a single capital M) was just too heavy for me this past week! There are other heavy stumbling blocks, such as where to attach adverbial clauses, whether ‘and’ or ‘but’ is a better conjunction, and so forth. So in a fit of pique, I asked our parish administrator, Amanda March, to take an ee cummings approach to the text. I have to say, I like the look. It takes some of the interpretive heaviness away. Let’s not be the weights around God’s ankles, especially on this day when we celebrate the gift of Spirit!

While I’m on the subject of heaviness, I’ll tell you that one of the things I love about the Church holiday of Pentecost is that it is a celebration that doesn’t come with a lot of freight. Pentecost comes without cultural expectation or theological baggage! Pentecost isn’t at all commercialized – there’s no Pentecost greeting card section in the drugstore. There’s not much decorating to do (except for red clothing) and there are no presents to open or eggs to find! Of all of our liturgical customs, I think hearing the story of the first Pentecost after Jesus’ death, read in many languages simultaneously, might be my favorite! I love how disturbing and exciting it is to hear the ancient story of the gift of the Word of God coming in the form of languages that people from all over the world could understand.

The phrase “the sound of a violent wind” in the Pentecost story always makes me think about tornados because I grew up in a part of the country where the coming of spring meant the coming of tornado season. I spent a good deal of my childhood in the basement of our house, listening for (or to) the sound of the rush of violent wind. As a kid, being in the basement with my family during tornado warnings was thrilling – it was an adventure complete with games to play and special snacks to eat. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that our special basement snack was a corn chip called “Bugles,” which, when held upright, strongly resembled a bite-sized tornado! (I think this was my mother’s subconscious effort to conquer her fear.)

Violent is probably not the most useful translation, however. Strong or overpowering or even vehement conveys strength without carnage or devastation, and that is certainly what the Church should be encouraging and celebrating on a day like today. The word for wind and spirit and breath is all the same in Hebrew (ruach) or Greek (pneuma). So, like a strong wind, like an overpowering spirit, like a vehement breath, the house felt full with a heavenly or divine presence. It was as if the disciples were on fire with a new ability to communicate the love of God to people from around the world who were in Jerusalem for the festival.

You might remember that the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, Shavuot, was one of the three Jerusalem pilgrimage festivals in Jesus’ time. The Feast of Freedom (or Passover) was followed by the Feast of First Fruits, also known as Shavuot (weeks), or Pentecost, so called because it came fifty days later. (This year, because Easter and Passover were almost a month apart, our Christian and Jewish Pentecost observances are also almost a month apart!) During Shavuot, the first harvested fruits are offered to God in thanksgiving for God’s bounty. According to ancient custom, the first fruits were wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates – delicious! The instructions for the festival offerings can be found in the Torah, [1] where harvest, thanksgiving to God, and concern for people who were poor and alien are inextricably linked.

According to Leviticus, people who harvest food are prohibited from harvesting all the way to the edges of their fields or vineyards or orchards, because foreigners, refugees, and other poor people must be able to collect enough to eat. Note well, immigrants and other poor people are those who did not plant, or weed, or water, or prune. The Torah teaches again and again, that those who have been transported out of poverty and slavery are obligated to support those who do not yet experience abundance and freedom. [2] This is true whether one has experienced poverty and slavery, or one’s forebearers were impoverished or enslaved. By the way, that’s what the Gospel teaches too. We must never forget that the good news of Jesus Christ is that hungry people are to be fed, thirsty people are to be offered something to drink. People who are suffering are to be comforted (comfort=with strength). People who are stuck are to be set free. That is what the disciples were suddenly inspired to communicate, and the feeling of inspiration to reach out in love was suddenly more powerful than the fear that had kept them huddled together behind closed doors. What was burning inside them was the deep, deep truth that love was stronger than death, and it tumbled out of them in words that everyone could understand, even if their enthusiasm made them seem drunk! It was, as Biblical blogger Debie Thomas points out in her post this week, “a brave and disorienting act” [3] to communicate this deep deep truth across barriers of race and ethnicity and culture.

You know, in our sacred stories of creation, the whole world comes into existence through God’s act of speaking. In ancient Hebrew, there is no distinction between word and deed. “In the beginning was the Word,” is how the Gospel of John’s love story begins. On Sunday mornings, we use beautiful language in our prayers and music, asserting that language is powerful. “Words make worlds. And unmake them, too,” Debie Thomas says, “there is nothing easy about substituting one language for another. Languages are intricate and messy. They carry the full weight of their respective cultures, histories, psychologies, and spiritualities. To attempt one language as opposed to another is to make oneself a learner, a servant, a supplicant. To speak across barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, culture, or politics is to challenge stereotype and risk ridicule…[and yet] Something happens when we speak each other’s languages. We experience the limits of our own words and perspectives. We learn curiosity. We discover that God’s “great deeds” are far too nuanced for a single tongue, a single fluency.” That is what the Pentecost story teaches us.

You know, at some point, well after the start of the Common Era, Shavuot developed into the celebration of the giving of Torah. [4] Although attempts have been made to demonstrate that this development was pre-Christian, the arguments are inconclusive according to Torah commentator, Bernard Bamberger. [5] I suspect that the Christian Feast of Pentecost and the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, celebrating the giving of the Spirit of Holiness and the giving of Torah developed side by side, informed by one another to become the annual celebration of people committing themselves to serving God in response to the ongoing gift of God’s fundamental truth and of moral law. For Reform Jews, Shavuot is a time for confirmation following a season of anticipation. For Episcopalians, Pentecost is a time for confirmation following a season of anticipation. Rather than one coming from the other, I think these traditions may have developed the way siblings or cousins develop, each in their own way, but not particularly far apart from one another, with similar themes and meanings and characteristics.

So what commitment or confirmation might the Holy Spirit be pressing us toward on this Pentecost? We are living in a time of so much fear, aren’t we? Extreme racism, misogyny, xenophobia, intolerance, shaming, violence. Fear is such an arch enemy of love, of compassion, of generosity, of peace. Surely Jesus knew this because he said “do not be afraid,” more than anything else he is reported to have said. He knew that his followers were afraid, and he encouraged them to not get lost or swallowed up by fear, but rather to use love as their truthful and moral compass. Even as he was facing his certain execution, Jesus had joy and peace enough to give away, because of the love of God that was in him, indeed the love of God that he was. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ teaching about the Love of God was that it is both individual and communal, both particular and cosmic.

The other day I saw a quotation from the late Audre Lorde, self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.”  I immediately wanted to re-cast in first person plural for our purposes. I hope Lorde would appreciate the collective expansion of her words. She said, “When we dare to be powerful, to use our strength in the service of our vision, then it becomes less and less important whether we are afraid.” Emmanuel Church, we have a vision that needs to be shared with others. We are a people who know where some good bread is, who know where some healing prayer is, who know where some beautiful music is. We are a people who know that we are stronger together than any of us is on our own. We know what it feels like to feel inspiration like strong wind, like an overpowering spirit, like a vehement breath, to be in a house filled with a heavenly or divine presence. We must offer food to someone who is hungry and set someone who is captive free. We must speak across borders that separate us from others, especially with those with whom we disagree. Rather than talk about issues or positions, we must talk about experiences – theirs and ours. Listen to what matters most to others and speak about what matters most to us. Let our hearts be filled with the lightness of joy and peace. Do not let our hearts be troubled. Do not let them be afraid, because a spirit of holiness is our advocate and guide when we walk in love.

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