Pentecost Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, May 28th, 2023
Today we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, as always fifty days after Easter; it is the feast of the Holy Spirit, and today we remember the day the disciples learned how the resurrected Christ would continue to be present with them and in them and how this would make all the difference. This language of “the Spirit” is so much a part of our Christian tradition that it shows up in nearly every prayer. It’s a language that appears less and less in our culture. The language of the Spirit is one heard mostly in Church. Why we need it is that it is a word for “depth.” St. Paul writes in one of his letters, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Spirit is a word for people who are not content just with the material surface of the world, but want more. We are constantly bombarded with images of all kinds, it is mostly all surface, sometimes very large digital surfaces that have the illusion of depth but still just present the exterior of things. If what you want is depth, if you want more than the image, if you want the Spirit, you can feel really alone and even perhaps wonder, what is wrong with me that I want more?
Our reading from Genesis is an ancient story of peoples gathering on a level plain to build a giant tower to the heavens, seeking to elevate themselves so that they would together be like gods through their mastery of brick and mortar. They did not lack materials for the construction of their city and tower; they lacked Spirit. The pride and the hubris of the enterprise, along with an astonishing overconfidence in their technology, make it so that they end up speaking past each other, speaking different languages, becoming divided and unintelligible to one another. They didn’t need height. They needed depth, Spirit rather than material bricks. The Babel story is a story that has been repeated in countless ways in human history as towers rise and towers fall and there are always new voices calling us to make bricks and start stacking.
It is in that world of hard surfaces that we are told in the gospels that without Jesus, the disciples hid, leaderless, in fear from the world unable to bounce back from the events of Holy Week. Jesus momentarily appeared in their midst again and everything changed. Suddenly they had joy again, but how would that joy last? After all, Jesus was no longer going to be present with them. He would not again walk beside them as he once did. They and their descendants would live in a world where the body of Jesus was noticeably absent. How would they get beyond struggling to survive while hiding in a locked room away from others, and venture out to live that abundant life that Jesus had been describing to them for years?
If the disciples were not going to lapse back into fear and stay forever in that locked room, something needed to change in them. They needed not just to hear Jesus’ message, but also to make it their own. It was no longer enough to follow Jesus in his mission; they needed to make it their mission. Instead of hearing passively, they would need to speak actively. But they could not make this transition on their own. They needed help. And this is no small problem, because without that help, Christianity would be nothing more than remembering what happened in the past in the life of Jesus and what we hope will happen in the future, but we would have nothing of any substance here and now in the present.
Although I would like to be the kind of person who can live only on memory and hope, I can’t for long. I need something sustaining and meaningful now and in every present moment. Great acts of God in the past or the future don’t seem particularly real to me, however much I tell myself that it is foolish to make judgments about the universe based on the tiny little sliver of it I have seen and experienced in a matter of decades. The present always seems to me to be all I have, and even if that is not strictly true, for talk of God to mean something to me, it better be about now, my now. Otherwise, I am with the disciples, thinking about the past and the future, but for the present remaining in my own closed room.
The disciples were not left in that closed room and we are not either. They would have what Jesus described as an Advocate, that is, one who comes alongside us to help, whom he calls the Holy Spirit. What is crucial to notice here is that we are not told that Jesus’ followers discovered their own courage or willpower or ingenuity. No instead, they were moved, the way our hearts and minds can be moved. And when something or someone other than ourselves moves us, it is always mysterious because it means being caught up into something that is not us, but somehow makes a claim on us. To those who were full of anxiety and afraid, Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” He breathed upon them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He then said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
All the details are important here. Having breathed the Holy Spirit into them, he sent them out of the locked room into the very world they had previously feared. Filled with the Spirit of Christ they continued Jesus’s ministry courageously as if it were their own. The good news of Pentecost that they discovered was that even though the security of God’s perfect kingdom is not available now, the security that comes from God’s perfect love is already here.
St. Paul would write a few years later in his epistle to the Romans, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (5:4). The kind of love that the Holy Spirit pours into the heart became ever after a source of inner strength, resiliency, and purpose. The world that they previously feared was not different than it was before, but they were different, having experienced a profound inner transformation or even conversion of the Spirit.
Those present at the first Pentecost discovered the Holy Spirit to be the real presence of Jesus here and now for us with the power to move us and save us. The very same ability that made it possible for God to be present in Jesus Christ in the first place makes it possible for God to make Christ present with and in us through the ongoing presence of Christ’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not just a doctrine, belief, or story, but God for us present in a life-changing way right here now.
I regularly attend what we call “safe church” refresher courses that are required of all our clergy because it is really important to us that the Episcopal Church is a safe space for all. This is something that is very important here at St. Paul’s. Recent years have brought new trainings about internet and social media sites. We have been instructed how people’s experience of community is more and more online through various virtual communities, and not just Facebook, or gaming, but many many others. But what was most remarkable about that discussion was how all this time online has not at all resolved afflictions like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and many others, how the world-wide internet has not fulfilled so many of its promises. Being told that it is what should meet your needs, it can be really, really, difficult to be a young person in our age of technology. So much material surface reflecting back at us, so little “Spirit.” So many people locked up in rooms alone like the early disciples. They are right to want more than what they are told they should want. It is not wrong for them to hunger for the Spirit.
The feast of Pentecost is at the very heart of our parish life because we are a people of the “Spirit,” people of depth, people not alone in the world, people who venture out together. All the best endeavors that happen here, happen because lots of people get involved face to face, lots of people find themselves moved by the Holy Spirit of love deep within them, lots of people find something more substantial and mysterious and wonderful than we have often been led to imagine.
Pentecost is a reversal of Babel, where what would otherwise divide, where the bare letters of language make us unintelligible to one another, where the forces that drive apart, instead become Spirit, and through the Spirit’s work we discover a dimension of depth that is deeply human, shared, and connecting.
As we celebrate the first Pentecost, let us recognize the ongoing presence of Jesus in our world and hearts. Let us keep saying yes to the Spirit’s invitations beyond the outer surface of things. Let our hearts become open to being converted, moved, and changed, so that our outward profession of faith may mature into inward conviction. Jesus, stand in our midst and breathe your Holy Spirit into us; open us to your invitations; lead us into the depth and mystery of life, give us peace, and send us into the world as you send all of your disciples. Amen.