My unease is that they talk about an event in the past and do not see it is as an event which began long before that and has had thousands and indeed millions of manifestations ever since then and continues to unfold daily around and within us. These words, as far as I am concerned have pushed us as North Americans to separate spiritual from religious, they separate one part of the trinity from the other two, they draw a line between the past predictions of how God works and the movement of the Holy Spirit in our days and our times of 2015. As far as I am concerned those seven words set up a problem that we have not dealt with very well: that the Holy Spirit arrived but we have not seen that much of the Spirit since then. Or perhaps it is that we are not quite sure how to name when she has been spotted. We believe in a God known to us in three parts but the role of the Holy Spirit seems to have been whittled and watered down to an event long ago with little or no connection to us here and now. And nothing could be further from the truth. Pentecost is one of the great feasts of the Church up there with Christmas and Easter as we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit within the lives and the faith of the faithful followers fo Jesus still holding on and holding out to his presence. The Holy Spirit arrived but has continued to swoop down and sweep through the lives of countless people ever since then.
When the day of Pentecost had come is exactly the wrong kind of language to use for all days we know the presence of the Holy Spirit, indeed all days are days of Pentecost if we believe in the trinity of God. All days where we feel the wind, the fire, the language of the Spirit are days of Pentecost. All days where we notice the Spirit moving over creation or the recognition of holiness in another or moments where God’s hand touches us, breaks through a great silence, so that we know God’s love resting upon us. All days where we notice that the words of another touch us in ways we do not expect or a piece of music stirs within us a closer contact with God or the actions of compassion awaken us to recognize the hand of God, the hand of the Holy Spirit still moving in our world of today. All days where there is a transformation in our heart or our mind and forgiveness is allowed to sneak in or wonder is allowed to grow or gratitude overwhelms us or the word of a child makes us laugh… or cry or the wind blowing on a winters night or a fire burning in a campground on a summer’s eve or just a moment where we say “Thank you, I am overwhelmed by your gifts and your grace.” And these happen all the time not simply when we open our Bible to consider things of long, long ago where a visit from the Holy Spirit took place but every day, any day when we notice that indeed our souls are connected to the heart of God.
And of course down through the centuries people have felt and known this Spirit. She has stirred and nudged and ruined some plans and created even more grand new ones. Over and over again the Spirit has come to us and we in the Church have not always known what to do. It is hard to pin down wind, it is hard to put out a fire out of control, it is hard to argue against the wisdom and word of God. The Church has not always known what do as the Spirit has continued to reveal herself is a variety of wonderful and wondering places. But lots of people have known what to do. In fact they have revelled in the presence of this same Spirit.
William Butler Yeats expressed it this way:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
(from Vacillation)
Janet Lees writes this:
Wild Spirit,
do not let us be tamed
to a life made only
of straight lines.
May we also travel
like the geese,
sharing the load
enjoying the lift,
calling encouragement:
just flying.
(from ‘Still travelling’ in Tell Me the Stories of Jesus)
Thomas Merton wrote this:
“… being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds began to sing, and the deer came out of the morning fog, and the sun came up. The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. We live in the fullness of time. Every moment is God’s own good time, His Kairos. The whole thing boils down to giving ourselves in prayer a chance to realize that we have what we seek. We don’t have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”
Joan Chittister writes this:
“Life is an intoxicant no amount of more mundane inebriants—faster, deeper, more alluring, more captivating—can possibly equal. The problem is that for life to become its own exhilarant, we must learn to live it consciously, to live it deeply, to live it to the brim, beyond the visible to the meaningful. Somehow, in the midst of the purely natural, we must become aware of what is more than simply natural. We must cross the line between matter and spirit, between time and timelessness. We must allow one to become the other so that the gifts of neither may be lost, so that electricity of each may be released in us. That kind of encompassing awareness is clear in the voices of poets whose souls themselves routinely, eternally seized by a sunset, a single rose, the bleak sound of a nightingale cages and alone, the thundering crash of waves against cliffs too high, too dark to notice. It is obvious in the spirits of those who learn to see life more as a bridge to somewhere else than an excursion into deeper and deeper nothingness. It is, then, also clearly of the essence of those we call spiritual. These are the people who live on both levels of life at once, both the material and the spiritual, and find in them the unity that makes life worth living. These are all people who see more in the moment than the moment itself.”
Jesus said it this way, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” And ever since then we have been praying and inviting and noticing that Spirit continuing to blow and burn in the world down though the centuries. Not always in nice neat ways, sometimes troubling ways, sometimes divisive ways but nevertheless present and inviting us to drink much more deeply of life.
When the day of Pentecost had come. The day of Pentecost has come my friends and has continued to come stirring and shaking and shifting people of all sorts to awaken and take note that indeed the Holy Spirit of God is in our midst. Today is the Day of Pentecost, THE Day of Pentecost awaken to the Spirit amongst us here and now. The same Spirit that we invite to swoop down on bread and wine to change them and change us. May it be so.