It’s a bad news / good news thing.
The bad news: times are not just hard; they’re terrible. Whole nations face existential catastrophe in the face of climate change. Countless millions of people are being caught up in global patterns of migration, and political resistance and violence confront them on nearly every shore. The U.S. is undergoing a long-delayed and much-needed, but searingly painful, reckoning with racism and systems of oppression. We are enduring a long era of partisan rancor that threatens democracy at a time when we need it the most, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. India is experiencing what can most accurately be called a holocaust as the coronavirus rages through the subcontinent, and there is a long list of nations that may not get adequately vaccinated before 2023. Life expectancy is leveling off, and for the first time in generations, younger citizens in this country do not expect to enjoy standards of living as good as—let alone better than—their parents.
That’s (most of) the bad news.
But there is truly good news. Whenever I stand here and preach, I try to do my primary task, which is to proclaim authentically good news to you. And I have some.
The Holy Spirit has seen worse times than this. She moves most powerfully in times of great peril. And she gives us not just a warm feeling or a sense of confidence—she goes further: she gives us understanding, comprehension, insight. She shows us the world, illuminating all creation with the Light of God, and she gives us the very power to see.
With the Holy Spirit’s help and by the Holy Spirit’s power, we see this good world, we see its manifold crises, we understand what we are seeing, and we comprehend our part in the new life that even now is rising up from the destructive fires around us.
The Holy Spirit fights fire with Fire.
The Fire of the Holy Spirit blazes: the Spirit’s tongues of flame are not quiet candles surrounding your bathtub; they rage, they leap up, they sear. We try to tame them, crafting hats for our bishops that mimic the shape of Pentecost flames, and rest all too comfortably on the head. We rightly marvel at the beauty of the Spirit’s Fire, but we are tempted to minimize its dangers. We want to domesticate it.
These are some of its dangers, and they will not be tamed:
The Spirit’s Fire reveals important things to us, and now that we know about them, we must do something. We see, by the light of the Spirit’s Fire, the evils of white supremacy and privilege, patriarchy and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, genocide and ecocide (ecocide: a neologism, a word that is no older than I am, a word that means the murder of earthly life entire). We see these problems now, and so we must do something. There is something terrible about that moral obligation.
The Spirit’s Fire burns us, too: its flames lick around us, pushing us to acknowledge and confront our complicity in the world’s problems, to readily confess our participation in them, and to amend our lives. That can hurt. The Spirit burns us like a crucible, reducing to ash all that is not gold within our souls. The Spirit’s searing Fire knocks Paul from his horse on the Damascus road, and blinds him in a vision of the Risen One that painfully changes him, and through him, the whole world.
But again, it’s a bad news / good news thing!
Yes, the Spirit’s Fire blazes brightly and burns painfully, but it also resurrects, restores, warms, comforts, enlightens, saves.
By the warmth of the Spirit’s Fire, we gather in prayer and we pray our deepest longings to God, our desires that are ill-served by our clunky words, our hopes that rise within us and burst out from us in a rush of passion. By the warmth of the Spirit’s Fire, our cold limbs reach out in a glorious embrace, and we slowly feel the warm blood of our community flow back into this place, this building that for so long has stood empty and alone. Even from the distance of zoom, we can see each other and feel the Spirit’s warmth, and together we can dare to hope that the re-opening is at hand, and that by autumn even more of us will be back at God’s Table.
By the gentler light of the Spirit’s Fire, we read with understanding; we see with compassion; we walk the path before us with confidence. It is the Spirit’s Fire that burns quietly by the seashore when the risen Jesus grills a fish breakfast for his friends. In the breaking of that bread, he repairs broken friendships and sends them on their mission.
The bad news of this world is distressing. And some of us have personal challenges that are knocking us off our feet, sometimes literally. I won’t sugarcoat any of that. But the Spirit moves most powerfully when times are tough, and I won’t fail to proclaim that too. When Jesus in John’s Gospel tells his friends that he will be sending the Paraclete—the Advocate, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit—when he is telling them this, they are reeling from a devastating betrayal. Judas had just gone out, set to his terrible task. And just when they might have been wondering who will leave them next, or what else might go wrong, Jesus himself says that he will be the next to leave. Even after the resurrection, when Jesus again assures his friends that they will not be left comfortless, even then they are deeply rattled at best, traumatized at worst.
And the disciples go through all of this within a larger sphere of catastrophe. Most of what we call the New Testament was written after the cataclysm of the destruction of Jerusalem (and the temple) in 70 C.E. The first generations of Christians soon learned that their lives would likely end in martyrdom. Like now, the forces of empire and reckless human nature kept people locked away in fear, stepping back from those who were different, seeing in the complexity of the world’s problems no end to mortal threats. The Spirit, like the risen Jesus himself, tends to find the disciples in retreat, gathered anxiously in locked rooms.
And that’s when the Spirit descends, blazing and burning, yes, but warming and enlightening too. The Spirit comes when all seems lost, when we don’t know anything for certain, except that we are vulnerable and mortal. That we know. But the Spirit opens our hearts and minds, even as she sears our souls. We can see by her light, and understand by her wisdom. We get it now. The Spirit’s movement doesn’t just give the newly multilingual disciples a sci-fi universal translator that helps them decode and transcend across language and culture. The Spirit truly helps them—and us—understand one another, make sense of the complex and dangerous world, and move boldly into that world.
It’s going to be okay. No, better: it’s going to be good. It is good. The Spirit is here, dwelling upon you and me, moving between us, opening up our senses to all of the beauty and challenge of this world, opening up our minds to face those challenges, opening up our hearts to bind us fiercely to one another, and to our neighbor, and to the stranger.
May we learn to rejoice as this Fire burns but does not consume us, and drives us out from here to all the ends of the world.
***
Preached on the Day of Pentecost, Year B, May 23, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Art: He Qi, The Day of Pentecost