A Reflection on Pentecost
All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
May 19, 2013 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Since we already have heard from two speakers about their
mission trip, you will hear a short reflection from me rather than a homily or
a sermon. From my misspent youth in theatre, I have learned that you need to
leave before people ask you to leave.
One day this week, as part of National Hospital Week, and for
the third year in a row, I was asked to spent
almost four hours at the Outer Banks Hospital, hanging out in the chapel
and wandering the halls during the two major shift changes, being available for
blessing the hands of hospital personnel and praying for their ministry of
healing. I blessed the hands of doctors, nurses, technicians, orderlies,
clerks, administrators, janitors, hospital security persons, and basically
anyone who agreed. Individually or in small groups I would anoint their hands
with oil that had been blessed and pray for their work with them. The underlying
message of the prayers was for them to know that God is blessing them so they
can live into being a blessing to others.
The prayers came from my heart, not from a prayer book, and
were appropriate for the person, the team, or the time. I love the prayer book
with its beautiful prayers for all occasions which share the thousands of years
of experience of prayer, but if you have only two hands and are holding another’s
hands and anointing, there really is no hand left over for a book. I am pretty
sure that the prayers I said were not masterpieces of prose and I impressed no
one with my erudition, but they were heard by those who opened themselves up to
listen.
Spiritual conversations have three dimensions:
1)
An opening up of a spiritual heart to speak in
response to God's invitation.
2)
An opening up of a spiritual heart to listen in
response to God's invitation.
3)
The claiming of the space between the two hearts
as “sacred and holy ground” in response
to God's presence.
Those dimensions of the spiritual conversation is what I
think is going on in the Pentecost experience in the Acts of the Apostle lesson
for today. We usually want to analyze the event and ask things like “What
language were they really speaking in order to be heard by all? How does one
get the gift of tongues? Is it limited to only a few? Is it a sign of an
unbalanced mind? - for indeed there is always a thin line between the spiritual
and the pathological, as both are outside the narrowness of a busy life doing
all things to get along in this culture. Are tongues gibberish, or unknown languages,
or a special spiritual prayer language said by angels, or does it come from a
deep in our DNA of pre-conscious and prehistoric memory of when our common ancestors
were evolving as human beings? The
answer to all of those questions is probably “Yes”.
We want to explain it, domesticate it, making it into one
more tool and talent for spiritual athletes in their competition to be more
spiritual than the rest of us. However, what I see happening is ordinary people
opening themselves up to God, as connections between people are filled with a
depth of knowing that surpasses understanding, a living sacrament that participates in the divine, an
intersection where the vertical and horizontal of the divine and human meet,
cross, and are held in dynamic tension.
Pentecost was a singular event happening years ago but it is
also an icon of how everyday can work today. I see ordinary people opening
themselves up to be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking words and sounds they
have heard from the interaction of the divine lover, beloved and love of the
one God. I see ordinary people opening themselves up to hear God, stopping and
listening without trying to filter things though their usual barriers. I see ordinary
places where ordinary people meet to speak and listen, where something
extraordinary happens and we enter into God's time of holy space.
For lack of a better definition, we call it a miracle, but I
call it ordinary life when we let God in.
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