The Feast of Pentecost (May 23, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

While I was in seminary, I worked for the Office of Student Housing at Liberty. One of the department’s managers was a charismatic woman and, at lunch one day, I mentioned being Anglican and loving the liturgy we practice, she kind of scoffed at me and said, “Um, do you all even believe in the Holy Spirit?” I think this anecdote does point to a larger reality in American Christianity, which is that the Holy Ghost is often overlooked or improperly related to. Some ignore him altogether while others equate him with emotional highs and loud worship services. I would argue this is largely because many in the American churches have a poor theology of what it means to be the Church.

The Feast of Pentecost is a timely Feast in this regard because it is so instructive for us. In the descent of the Holy Ghost, we see what the Church is. To put it in theological terms, our ecclesiology is our pneumatology and our pneumatology is our ecclesiology. In other words, our understanding of the Church is intricately connected to our understanding of the Holy Ghost and our theology of the Holy Ghost directly informs to our theology of the Church. We don’t have one without the other.

To understand the connection, we should first ask what we mean by the Feast of Pentecost. Our minds might first go to the Epistle reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and we aren’t wrong to do so. However, there is an Old Testament grounding for Pentecost: before it was a Christian feast, it was a Jewish feast. The name Pentecost, which means 50 days, helps us understand a little bit. The Jewish celebration of Pentecost took place 50 days after Passover. By the time of Jesus, Pentecost was largely celebrated as a harvest festival where two loaves of bread were made from the new corn and offered to God. But this was not the original intention of the Feast. Initially, the Feast was the commemoration of the Day Israel was adopted as God’s People. In Exodus 19, God tells them: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:5-6) It’s not surprising then, that on this Feast Day commemorating the birth of Israel as God’s covenantal people that the Holy Ghost would descend on his Church, the New Israel. And to accompany the Christian version of Pentecost, we see this great gift of speaking in tongues. Now if we closely read Acts 2, the tongues there are not some kind of “private prayer language” like some modern denominations suggest but rather other human languages because the gift operated as a way for the Apostles to preach the Gospel to their surrounding audience in their own languages. So the Feast of Pentecost is a reminder that the Church is open to all people, regardless of their language or ethnicity; it is a reversal of the events of the Tower of Babel. There, the human drive for autonomy apart from God led to the punishment of scattering humanity over the face of the earth and confusing the languages. Here on Pentecost, that punishment is reversed as language barriers are overcome and people from all over the face of the earth are unified in the Church.

So it’s clear that Pentecost was the coming of the Holy Ghost and that there are all these beautiful connections to the Old Testament that involve a kind of rebirth of Israel and the reversal of the curse of Babel. But what is the role of the Holy Spirit? Do we, as Anglicans, “even believe in the Holy Spirit”? The answer is that the Holy Spirit is integral to our common life together. Perhaps the reason many are confused about the Holy Ghost is that his actual role in the economy of salvation is sometimes unclear. Jesus, we know, is the Person of the Trinity who becomes Incarnate and affects salvation for us by his death and resurrection out of love for his Father. We also know the Father as the person who sends the Son, the speaker of the Word. But what does the Holy Ghost do?

This is a question answered by the Gospel lesson from John which comes from part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. In this part of the Gospel, he prepares his followers for his impending death and subsequent Ascension. And so he lifts the veil briefly on the divine plan: in his earthly absence, the Holy Ghost will be sent to those who have been elevated into the love shared by the Father and Son to act as a Counselor. This is what Jesus means when he talks of himself being in the Father. Those of us who are baptized are translated into Christ and he dwells in us (something we [will/saw] this morning as Walter underwent such a translation into Christ and now has Christ dwelling in him). The intimacy we share with our Lord is a beautiful reminder that we have a God who doesn’t stand far off as unapproachable but who takes us into union with himself so that he can say to us what we read today: “you in me, and I in you.” And this unity is evidenced by our love for him which is expressed by obedience. Talk is cheap. People may say they love you but you can discern the veracity of words by the actions that accompany them. “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me” and “he who does not love me does not keep my words.”

The Spirit, then, plays an important role because he helps us love our Lord and keep his commandments. How? by teaching us all things and bringing to remembrance what Christ said.

Who does he teach? The Church.

How does he teach? By the Church. This means the Creeds and Counsels, the liturgies, and the Scriptures that belong to the Church.

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “Fr. Wesley has a very naive view of the Church — I mean look at all the divisions and errors and trouble the Church has gotten into.” I promise you, I’m not naive. I’ve experienced these things in various contexts. It is a good reminder that as long as the Church Militant exists, it will have human beings in it and, where there are people, there will be problems. We can probably each create a long list of examples that would prove this. Yet somehow, Pentecost Sunday is the reminder that the Church is divinely led by the Holy Spirit, even in spite of ourselves. I was recently reminded that when we began to reopen, we got a note from someone who said that our use of masks means Satan was winning. Yet, where the Gospel is preached, the Mass celebrated, and other Sacraments rightly administered, nothing could be further from the truth because in each and every means of grace, there the Holy Ghost is moving, working, and guiding us into all truth. And this can even happen with a bad minister, as Article 26 of the 39 Articles states: “sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ’s, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men.”

At the end of the reading, Jesus says “the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.” And then, a short exhortation that was left out of our reading that ends the chapter: “Rise, let us go hence.” Here, we see that Jesus’ victory over the Devil is certain. We can think of Colossians 2:15 as a summary: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them.” In Jesus’ cruciform victory, then, we have confidence that this spiritual edifice he has built that we call the Church will not ultimately fail, “The gates of Hell will not prevail against it.”

So “Rise and let us go hence.” This exhortation speaks to us at St. Paul’s, a microcosm of that Church founded at Pentecost. “Rise and let us go hence” so that we can accomplish the will of the Father. How? By keeping his commandments, being attune to how his Spirit leads the Church and by turning that love outward to a dark and hurting world that desperately needs the saving medicine of the Gospel. For us today, life in the Spirit may not be accompanied by great external miracles that we read about in Acts (though I don’t think we have to exclude them either). But the real miracle is that he takes hearts of stone and turns them to hearts of flesh, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. If we persist in quiet but steady faithfulness, authentic and self-giving love, we know we’re learning from our divine teacher and heeding our Counselor by living out the mission he has given us as his people: to know him and make him known.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.