Pentecost Sunday
TL/DR: Some days are days aflame with the Holy. Other days…there are no other days.
This is day is the beginning of all days.
On this day, the tower of Babel is eradicated. The sin of hubris done away with.
On this day, we stand at the threshold of what it means to be a Holy people.
On this day, we begin the season of the church. Called. Ordained. Sanctified.
I think that’s how I would start my sermon if I were preaching today. I would talk about what it means to be called, ordained, and sanctified. It’s a simple three part approach to preaching. I would situate it in the life of the community rather than the individual. Pentecost is the day when we celebrate the birth of a community that knows itself. People understand one another. The sin of hubris, that is to say Babel, is overcome by the Holy Spirit.
We actually can understand one another.
We are not abandoned to our solitary egos.
I have preached around 20 (‽) Pentecost sermons. And in each one, I have struggled to articulate this truth about the Church. We are Church because we are community. One is never the Church alone. And the time that we call “Ordinary” is the time of the Church, the Ordained Community. That the word “ordinary” also means “commonplace” tells us where we can find the Holy.
But it does not lessen the Holy. It does not diminish it. It accentuates it.
The Holy is present in every thing in every day. Pentecost marks this truth for us.
The Holy is present in every people, in every nation, in every society. The Holy is present and we are community together.
The Holy is always Ordinary. The Body of Christ is always plural.
But we in the United States have a problem with Pentecost. We do not believe it’s claims. We do not practice its precepts.
Was it Moltmann who famously quipped that reducing the Gospel to personal salvation diminishes it into “an introverted and self-centered individualism”? I believe it was in a lecture at Duke. He wasn’t wrong.
American Christianity, dare we say Christianity of the Western world, is relentlessly individualistic. It’s a function of language. It’s a function of culture. And America may be the most individualistic of Western societies, though it didn’t start that way. “E pluribus unum” is not a statement about the individual. It is a statement about the corporate nature of the nation. Out of many, one. Rhode Island’s story is not Virginia’s story. But we are one society.
It is strange to me that this motto was displaced by “In God we trust.” The desire to Christianize American society is as old as the nation itself. One need look no further than New England. But Christian nationalism is not the raison d’etre of this republic. To suggest otherwise is to ignore an enormous portion of the political philosophy behind the founding, both historical and contemporary.
And here is where Pentecost becomes inconvenient for the American religious psyche.
The pressure to make America a Christian nation is bound up with the pressure to make Christianity a single, univocal thing. One true faith. One true expression. But the Spirit did not fall on one people in one language. It fell on many.
I am struggling to find the Holy in my evangelical kin. God, help me. And I say kin deliberately. These are not strangers to me. But when the faith becomes a weapon of empire, when it mistakes dominance for devotion, when it centers the self where the community should be, that is not Pentecost. That is not the faith as I understand it.
That is Babel with better branding.
Those of us who believe differently must remain vocal. Not to condemn, but to testify. To point, like John the Baptist, away from ourselves and toward the Christ who, when offered the kingdoms of the world, said no. That refusal is right there in Matthew 4. Theocracy is not a Christian virtue. It is a temptation Jesus named and rejected.
Pentecost calls us back. The Holy is in every people, every place, every language. We are not the only ones. We were never meant to be.
This is day is the beginning of all days.
On this day, the tower of Babel is eradicated. The sin of hubris done away with.
On this day, we stand at the threshold of what it means to be a Holy people.
On this day, we begin the season of the Church. Called. Ordained. Sanctified.
May it be so; so may it be.
Thank you for the different perspective. I know these things to be fundamentally true but it is so hard sometimes to see things when we are so steeped in our own culture.