Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, May 19th, 2024, on the Feast of Pentecost, one day after the election of the 17th Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts
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, but 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?
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?
Yesterday, leaders from all over our diocese gathered at Trinity Church in Boston to elect our next bishop. We all knew it was a momentous decision that would affect the lives of many people for years to come. The decision weighed heavily upon us. We had to choose between five candidates. When the results of the first vote came in, the results were evenly divided between the five candidates. Each one of them had support. After that vote, many of us cancelled any plans we had scheduled for later in the day because it became clear that we were going to be there a good while. We had this voting app on each of our phones and we spent our time looking at those impersonal, cold, metallic surfaces as much as at the human faces around us. That was the only way to vote because how we engage our world in 2024 is through those devices.
There was also some fear and anxiety in the room. I know because some of it came from me as I worried and wondered whether we would be able to keep together amid widespread disagreement. Would we turn against each other much like we have experienced in so many secular elections? If we were going to find unity, a shared Spirit, it wasn’t going to be because of the lifeless metal objects we registered our votes on and clung to.
In that tough that room, I thought about what it might have been like to be one of Jesus’ first disciples hiding away from the world without him. How easy it would have been for them to turn on each other! If they were going to get past the fear, trust one another, and venture out of that locked room, something needed to change in them. They needed not just to hear Jesus’ message, but also to make his life 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, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
No longer alone, but with the Spirit of Jesus as their Advocate, they ventured out of that 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, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not [even] know what to pray for, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” 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.
Those present at Trinity Church yesterday stayed together one vote after the next, even as part of the room each time was disappointed and deeply grieved as their candidate withdrew from consideration. In the end, Julia Whitworth was the only candidate that had a majority of votes among both the lay delegates and the clergy. We had our next bishop and now we are pulling together, and we all are placing our support behind her, much like the early disciples of Jesus did on that first Pentecost as they discovered within themselves how unifying the Spirit of Jesus can be as it sounds the depths of our hearts.
In our deeply divided world so much of what we know–and even how we feel–is given to us through screens that are shallow and flat. These screens can’t possibly be to us what we need them to be because they lack Spirit, they lack depth. They cannot resolve our afflictions; they are not powerful enough to unify us; they cannot, in St. Paul’s words, “groan” knowingly inside us with “sighs too deep for words.” They remain outside us and, despite appearances, do not even know us. Being told that they are what should meet our needs, it can be really, really, difficult to be a hopeful and whole 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. We are right to want more than what we are told we should want. It is not wrong for us 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. Your cell phone is not what connects you to other people here. The name for what connects us to each other names no human technology. It is Holy Spirit. 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 feast celebrating how 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, in our Diocese and in our church. 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.