Sermon for May 23, 2021 - The Day of Pentecost, Year B, The Rev. Isaac P. Martinez

Happy Pentecost, St. Paul’s! What a joy it is to mark this feast with you, where we move from our 50 days of Easter celebrations to our long season of learning what it means to be resurrection people, living that reality, and acting through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our Pentecost story from Acts is a fulfillment of what Jesus promises the disciples in our reading from John’s gospel. It is when God the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Comforter, came to our ancestors from God the Father, just as Jesus, God the Son, said she would. And today’s celebration is no different. In a few moments, our sister Rosalind will be baptized with water into Christ’s death and resurrection. And when Elise marks a cross on Rosalind’s forehead with chrism oil, she will be sealed with the same Holy Spirit that will empower her to not just believe in the Good News of Jesus, but to live it out in her daily life and work as a microbiologist. If you look closely, you may even be able to see tongues of fire rest on her. Rosalind, I can’t wait to welcome you into the family of God.

We remember on the first Pentecost that the disciples have a theophany, a revelation of God, unlike any the world had seen before. Their baptism by the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in the languages of the many nationalities that are represented by Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem. It is the beginning of how the first apostles would take the promise of salvation that God first gave to our Jewish siblings in liberation and law-giving and, through Jesus, bring it to the world. 

As with so much of our Christian faith, the roots of Pentecost lie deep and are nurtured in Jewish soil. The name itself is a Greek word meaning “50th” referring to the 50th day after the first night of Passover. The Hebrew word, Shavuot, means “weeks,” referring to the fact that the time between Passover and this feast is 49 days, or 7 times 7, a week of weeks. 

In biblical times, Shavuot was a pilgrimage festival, when the Israelite households were to travel back to the Temple and present a portion of the first fruits of their spring harvest. When they made their offering to the priest, each head of the family would recite this ancient confession of faith: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien…When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders…”

Later in Jewish history, during the time of the Second Temple, this feast came to be associated with God giving the Torah, the law, to Moses on Mt. Sinai. And of course, the Law, as Leviticus says, can be summed up in two great commandments: to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and to love your neighbors as yourselves. And so, Shavuot, this festival of weeks, is in fact a rearticulation of the earlier festival of Passover. While at Passover, our Jewish siblings remember the liberating, awe-inspiring, and death-defying act of God, at Shavuot, they remember that God revealed himself again, by letting them know what their response to this salvation should be: to love him and to love their neighbors.

And so it is with us Christians. Pentecost is a rearticulation of Easter, when Jesus Christ, our Passover lamb delivered the whole world from the bondage of sin and death. 50 days ago, we remembered the liberating, awe-inspiring, and death-defying act of God in the Resurrection. And today, we remember God that reveals Herself every moment as the Spirit of Truth, flowing in us and through us, empowering us to respond to our resurrection by loving Her and by being Good News. And today, nearly 18 months into a global pandemic, our world needs Good News.

On April 9, the Friday after Easter, I received my second shot of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. 2 weeks after that, I was fully immunized from a tiny virus that has wreaked enormous death and devastation to our world. That day felt like a theophany: a revelation that ultimately came from our liberating, awe-inspiring, and death-defying God. 

But in the 4 weeks after that, I have been in a state of hesitancy and constant evaluation, responding to the many small ethical dilemmas that an increasing number of us face by balancing the latest scientific knowledge and our deepest moral commitments, while adhering to the policies of various organizations, including our own. Despite my deep yearning for things to rapidly return to pre-pandemic “normalcy” because I now feel very safe from COVID, I nonetheless have to stay patient. There are many more people, including children, who need to be vaccinated. There will be people who medically cannot be vaccinated. And despite being a worldwide affliction, only 4.8% of the world’s 7 billion people have been fully vaccinated. As a follower of Jesus, baptized into his death and resurrection, and sealed with the Holy Spirit, I must love them as myself and seek their welfare. Distressingly, there are also people who refuse to be vaccinated because of misinformation and false conspiracies. Nevertheless, they are still my neighbors, and as a Christian, I must also love them. And loving them all now means to move slower than we would like: to keep many gatherings online, including our 10am service, to continue wearing masks inside public spaces, to keep encouraging everyone we know who can receive a vaccine to do so.

But as with the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost, perhaps this time of taking it slow has the potential be a revelation of God as well, a blessing, not just a burden. For there were things in the old normal that COVID revealed as harmful and oppressive choices we made as a society, things we could choose differently, like a workaholic culture and a devaluation of many lines of work like childcare and hospitality. We realized that we could support people who lost work more generously. We learned we couldn’t take something as small as a hug for granted. I’m sure there are many more lessons we learned. Now, may we use this liminal, Pentecostal time to reflect on them, and to commit, individually and collectively, to making our future ever more loving, ever more liberating, ever more life-giving, with the help of God our empowering Holy Spirit. Amen.