A Reflection and Poem for Pentecost Sunday St. Andrew's Church, NagsHead, NC
June 5, 2022 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Genesis 11:1-9 Acts 2:1-21 John 14:8-17, 25-27 Psalm 104:25-35, 37
I know that you have heard me tell you that there are different ways to translate words from Hebrew or Greek because some words have multiple meanings. In Hebrew, the word “ruach” and the Greek word “pneuma” can be translated into at least four different English words: wind, breath, soul or spirit. From the beginning of creation in Genesis the writer says that the “Ruach Elohim”, the wind, breath, soul, Spirit of God, hovers over the formless mass and waters. It will be God's wind, breath, spirit which will bring forth words of creation. It is the God's breath, wind, spirit that is breathed into the lump of clay to become human, a being made from humus, that has breath and spirit. A being in whom the movement of air, the wind, in our lungs will allow humans to speak, reflect and project the spirit that is within us.
In the first lesson for today, the mythic story of the Tower of Babel is told about having the freedom to speak, reflect and project God's spirit within in us humans. The people gather together, but there is a spirit of arrogance inside them. That spirit brings into being a desire to build a structure to rival God. The people were declaring war on God to show who was the biggest, meanest SOB in town. The writer wants to attribute the division into differing languages as a reaction by God. However, what usually happens with humans having an arrogant spirit is that we end up speaking AT people rather than WITH people. The Tower of Babel fell apart as people stopped listening with each other and they were speaking at each other. Winston Churchill said, that it is always better to talk jaw to jaw than to have war. However, when we arrogantly refuse to talk jaw to jaw, heart to heart, soul to soul; it is just a matter of time until we start the whole exercise of lowering our flags to half staff in honor of the victims lost to our arrogance when we refuse to listen or try to understand, Of course, we don't listen because that gets in the way of our freedom to pursue our own agendas. We think freedom is a vacuum of responsibility to our neighbor.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, after the Babel story, there comes an awareness that pure freedom without relationship may not be the best way to run a universe; so the religious leaders came up with Law; a list of things we were not allowed to do like: steal, kill, sleep with someone's wife, lie in court, not make religious idols etc. But law breaks down when it is only applied to people without power. The religious authorities usually went along and turned a benevolent eye toward the rulers of the nations. As Gibbons warned in his study of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar. that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”
In almost all the stories that are in the Hebrew Scriptures there is a theme about the centuries of people following their own agendas for their own freedom, that arrogance of an “no one can make me do anything” attitude, and people just talking at other people rather than with them, not trying to understand each other. Then, in tension with that attitude, almost all the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures try to talk with the people inviting us into that Holy Space that exists between each person and their neighbor; where each person has a responsibility for the other. They suggest that we are like Moses who when he meets with God, he must remove his shoes, because wherever God is, is Holy Ground and nothing should get between us and God. The Shalom, the Peace of God, is not a just cessation of outward conflict but a change of life where we stop stomping on people, places and things. We have prophets like Micah who in his conversation with people advises; “What does the LORD require of you. To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.”
Another prophet, Isaiah, laments the tendency of economic, political and religious systems in which he lives to hinder a faithful relationship with the Holy. Isaiah sings a song it which he hears a lament of God: Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood of innocent victims Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. Many of those prophets ended up imprisoned for undermining the authority of the economic, legal or religious institutions. “I mean after all”, the authorities say, “what kind of economy would we have if people forgive debts, or cared for people who are drains on our gross national product. To care for the poor is wasting precious time and resources which could be spent on our own economic or religious interests?” The prophets still speak with us.
Last Sunday, on May 29th, at 8:20 AM I heard a prophet speak with us, not at us. Your Rector was speaking about what it was like as a parent to be confronted with the horrible news of the slaughter of children in Texas. He told about what it was like to stop working on next week's sermon and go home and hold his children and his wife. Love of our children and our neighbor, which is the work of all of us, is much more important than sermons. I was sitting in the pews and I heard a prophet speak with us in moments of absolute honesty.
Later that same morning, Senator Cory Booker was speaking on a television program, Meet The Press, where he said: “I’m sorry we are at a point we have to mobilize a greater movement than just expressing regret and sorrow. until the redemptive power of love for all of our children is greater than the destructive power of the love of our guns and money and power, until that redemptive love of our children turns into action, then nothing is going to change.”
The message of the Hebrew prophets is “Where is our love?” They warned about the un-official national message of arrogant self-interest. Their nation became like any nation, alienating many of its own people by fawning to their own power brokers. Eventually, nations lose out to nations who practice that same arrogant self-interest but who are bigger than them.
On a sabbatical in 1994, Pat and I were studying in Jerusalem and on different walks we would see the signs of the different nations that came to overthrow the governing parties; first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, than the Byzantines, then the Arabs, then the Crusaders, then the Mamluks, then the Turks, then the British, then the Zionists, then . . . who knows? And all the time, they are speaking at each other.
Yet, the prophetic voice continues to urge a deeper conversation with God. Jesus continued that Jaw to Jaw conversation in the Gospel for today: “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." The community around Jesus held on to this Peace even after Jesus was no longer in their sight for they understood that Peace of Christ is in the midst of them. And it is turned into action.
Centuries later Teresa of Avila wrote about this awareness: “God of love, help us to remember That Christ has no body now on earth but ours, No hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes to see the needs of the world. Ours are the hands with which to bless everyone now. Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good, Ours are the eyes with which he looks. Compassion on this world. Amen.”
The lesson from the book of Acts for today remembers how the disciples acted by enter into into the wind, spirit, breath of the Risen Christ dwelling in and among them, driving them out into the world in order to enter into conversation with people who have decided that life is too short to have people speak at them instead of with them.
Pentecost Poem 2022
All right! Uh uh! Get it over with! Please
just stop talking AT me. Banging on of God
being pleased we're putting bodies in sod
as a way of reaching someday some peace.
We all dutifully lined up to spew some hate
on the enemy de jour; who are just like us
under the labels and languages that we cuss,
so we'll get more to stuff into one more crate.
Can't we stop making a lot of volume sound,
dial back our language by at least two-thirds,
finding instead hopeful, loving, gentle words,
to speak together as we walk on Holy Ground.
The Holy One's Spirit has not left the building,
but rather is singing for us; Shalom rebuilding.
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