Holy Spirit – Peculiar Faith

For the Healing of the Nations

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue.

To be clear, I find nothing inherently wrong with patriotic ardor. Indeed, I grew up loving my country and still do. I want to see the United States thrive and to live more fully into its founding ideals. But Christian discipleship—living as a disciple of Jesus Christ—is not attached to any one country or confined to any national borders (and let’s also note that discipleship might, on occasion, demand actions that run counter to national interests).

The timing of the Eastertide lectionary this year reinforced those convictions just yesterday about “God and country” and did so quite directly. On this Memorial Day weekend, we heard a poignant and beautiful image from the Revelation to John (21:10, 22-22:5), an image of the “Tree of Life,” whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

I have never been particularly fond of observing national holidays in a Sunday morning liturgy, but that passage from a complicated biblical book suggests a powerful way to frame our shared ministry as Christian people—not patriotically but for the sake of shared endeavor. More particularly on Memorial Day, the best way to honor those who gave their lives in service to this country is to work for peace, with justice, and the healing of all the nations.

That’s a tall order for any faith community, and certainly for the small parish I am privileged to serve in a lakeside resort town in the American Midwest. And yet, the way we shape our lives together in a community of prayer and service really does matter and does make a difference for the wider world.

Hearing also from John’s account of the Gospel yesterday presented some rich images for this kind of reflection and commitment (John 14:23-29). That passage features the promise Jesus made to send the Holy Spirit—a reminder that the Feast of Pentecost is just two weeks away. That gift is mission-critical for the Gospel because the Spirit creates, not a nation-state, but Beloved Community.

That image originated with Josiah Royce, a late-nineteenth-century American philosopher of religion whose work shaped the world-changing efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights Movement. Royce seems particularly insightful just now, especially as an inspiring guide for Christian communities trying to navigate the perplexities and anxieties of this cultural moment.

We might recall that the lectionary portion of John’s Gospel yesterday comes from what is often referred to as the “farewell discourse.” Setting aside all the convolutions of those chapters in John, overall Jesus is trying to prepare his closest friends for his death, and to reassure them about his impending departure. “Don’t let your hearts be troubled,” he says. They don’t fully understand what is about to happen, but they certainly understand enough to be terribly sad.

Royce would have us notice in this passage what he called the religious mission of sorrow. Few of us likely think of sadness as having any kind of a purpose; it just is, and we either accept it or deny it. But Royce—who was well acquainted with very deep sorrow and grief in his own life and family—Royce urged us to consider that sorrow carries potential for insight; sorrow itself, he said, is a source of religious insight.

For this to be so we must look at the world courageously, not as we wish it to be or with any filters of denial, but as it really is right now—a world of injustice, and pain, and violence. Royce would have us see the world as it really is so that we can meet that world as bearers of light, workers for peace, and agents of healing.

This is what Royce means by the “religious mission of sorrow”—and I freely admit that this often sounds to me like a fool’s errand. The much more prudent path would surely lead instead toward self-protection, and the securities of privilege, and the isolating walls of safety so that we don’t have to see the wounded, the fearful, or the lonely.

But we don’t follow a “prudent path” when we follow Jesus. As the approaching Feast of Pentecost reminds us, we go where the Spirit leads—we go, as Royce put it, to the “homeland of the Spirit” to build Beloved Community.

I love Royce’s use of “homeland” for this, which is not in this case about finding a place of cozy rest but to situate the hard work of forging the bonds of lifegiving—and for Royce, that means “atoning” and “saving”—community. “Hard work,” because for Royce, the Spirit is always, without fail, what he called the “Spirit of Interpretation.”

“To interpret” in a Roycean sense is to make meaning from a particular moment or an event so that the world becomes a better place—not a perfect place (we can’t do that), but a better place than it was—and with the Spirit’s energy and guidance, we can do that!

The “event” Royce would have a Christian community constantly interpret, and not only in the Easter season but always, is the death and resurrection of Jesus—the one who was killed by imperial violence and raised by the God of new life.

What does this mean for us, right now, today?
How do we then live, in our neighborhoods and in the public square?
What should we do with what we have been given?

These are the questions we ask together in the “homeland of the Spirit” as we seek to build “Beloved Community” together.

John the Divine, the scribe for all the fantastical visions and wild prophecies in that final book of the Bible—John shows us what such a community entails. First and foremost, it’s about healing.

His vision of the heavenly Jerusalem—a classic and ancient symbol for “beloved community”—features a river flowing from the very throne of God, a river of the water of life. Planted on the banks of that river is the “Tree of Life,” which not only produces an abundant harvest of fruit, but also leaves that are for the “healing of the nations.”

Untitled (“For the Healing of the Nations”), Doug Himes

That word, “nations,” is a rough Greek equivalent of the ancient Hebrew word more simply meaning “gentiles,” or “non-Israelites,” basically all those who are not Jewish. Or in contemporary parlance, all the others, whether those “others” are on the other side of the world or just the other side of town. And hearing also from the Hebrew prophet Joel yesterday (2:21-27), those “others” are also not-human—the soil, the grasses, the trees, the vines, all other animals.

That’s a common English translation of that phrase, but not very helpful if it evokes only the modern Western concept of a “nation-state.” John did not have anything like the United Nations or the European Union in mind but something much closer to home, indeed we might even say he had something more “homey” in view.

What John seems to describe, in other words, is God’s own heart for making a home among us, and not only from our biological kin or with our closest friends, but all those “others,” the ones who are different from us—sometimes just a little “not-like-us” and sometimes very different in skin color, and accent, and language, and custom, and even species.

And that’s precisely why the leaves of the Tree of Life are for healing.

Differences and animosities and hostilities—whether inflicted on those who are far away or by those who are across the street or unfold in the mini-ecosystems of our own backyards—all such differences create wounds, and some of them are very deep, and last for a very long time, making all of us terribly sad and sorrowful.

Now is the time—or as Royce would say, every moment is always the perfect time—to embrace the religious mission of sorrow and to interpret across our differences in postures of healing, toward thriving, and for the sake of the home God envisions for all.

“Tree of Life for the Healing of the Nations,” Kelly Schumacher

Those who gave their lives for this country—for the sake of the democratic life and abundant liberty for which this nation ostensibly stands—they would surely urge us along this path and toward that Homeland of the Spirit.

Building Beloved Community together in that homeland, interpreting this present moment across our differences, would certainly be a legacy worthy of their memory.

A Joyful “Vision of Heaven” in a “Freak Imitation of Pentecost”

In the beginning, a wind from God swept over the chaos bringing forth the wonders of creation (Gen. 1:1). Creator God then breathed into the nostrils of a creature made from mud, bringing it to life (Gen. 2:7).

The psalmist reminds us that everyone dies without God’s breath, and likewise that God’s Spirit renews the very face of the earth (104:30-31).

John’s Jesus told Nicodemus that God’s Spirit is just like the wind—it blows wherever it wants to, untamable and uncontrollable (John 3:8). John later tells us that the risen Jesus breathed on his closest friends, inviting them to receive “Holy Spirit” for the work of forgiveness and to find peace.

These and other biblical writers relished making at least this one pun: in both Hebrew and Greek, the word usually translated as “spirit” can also mean “breath” or “wind.”

The Latin word anima is usually translated into English as “soul” but it can also mean “breath” and “vitality”; it comes from an ancient Indo-European verb meaning “to breathe.” In that sense, every single creature of God with the breath of life has a soul—humans, dogs, cats, birds, cattle, pigs, elephants (the list goes on).

The English word “inspiration” comes from a Latin verb that means “to breathe into.” When we are inspired, we are being filled with God’s own breath, the Holy Spirit.

Yesterday’s celebration of Pentecost marked a notably dramatic instance of that inspiration; as we most always do on Pentecost, we heard that story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21). Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, a group of his followers heard the sound of rushing wind and what seemed like tongues of flame danced on all of their heads.

“Descent of the Holy Spirit,” Joseph Matar

I think we should be really clear about this: “all” of their heads does not mean just twelve men, even though that’s how this scene is often depicted, with a grand total of twelve men receiving the Spirit.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, depicting Pentecost in that way actually serves an institutional purpose—to restrict the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first twelve male “apostles” defines who can become “bishops.”

But there’s another way to read this story. The evangelist Luke, who also wrote Acts, notes that there weren’t just twelve people gathered on that day; there were at least 120, and not all of them men.

That’s probably why Peter feels compelled to quote from the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel for that occasion, who wrote about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh—not just twelve people, not only men, and probably not just human beings, but all flesh.

When “all” really does mean all, communities become seriously diverse. And I confess: I sometimes find such diversity uncomfortably messy. I can’t be the only one who still thinks it would have been much more efficient and orderly if all those foreign visitors to Jerusalem on that day had suddenly understood a single language, but that’s not what happened.

Luke tells us that each of those visitors understood the Gospel in their own native language, in their own cultural idioms, and with their own ethnic sensibilities in place.

The indigenous translation we used at my parish yesterday morning makes very clear that many of the places from which those visitors came were considered “outsider nations,” at the very least treated with suspicion by Jerusalem’s “insiders.”

The Spirit breaks down those barriers between groups, not by making everyone the same, but by forging a much stronger unity than mere sameness ever could—forged from previously unnamed shared hopes, the drafting of common dreams, discovering a surprising confluence of desires and yearnings.

For some years now on Pentecost, I reflect on a wonderful story about what can actually happen when a community embraces this broader Pentecostal vision of being church together. Here’s just a brief version:

Back in the early 1900s, African American preacher William J. Seymour and his wife Jennie opened a small mission in an abandoned stable in what was known as the “Black ghetto” of Los Angeles.

As the story goes, God poured out the Spirit there on Azusa Street, drawing dozens of people to Seymour’s preaching and Jennie’s teaching. Soon hundreds were coming, not only for the preaching and teaching but for the ecstatic trances, the speaking in tongues, and the miraculous healings.

The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 and lasted, quite remarkably, until roughly 1915. This astonishing moment in a rickety building on a neglected street corner launched the world-wide Pentecostal movement, still the fastest growing branch of Christianity.

At the time, it was also the most scandalous. Erupting in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, this revival attracted white, Black, Latino, and Asian converts, all of them “intermingling,” as one commentator complained at the time.

Even more: fourteen years before women could even vote in the United States, the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street encouraged women in positions of leadership. This alone caused some to dismiss that revival as “outrageous” and even “blasphemous.” One local minister called it “a freak imitation of Pentecost,” and a “horrible, awful shame.” (See Jack Hayford and David Moore’s account of this in their book The Charismatic Century:)

Breaking down racial barriers and rejecting gendered privilege enraged both secular and religious observers alike. Azusa’s participants, by contrast, called those social disruptions nothing less than a vision of heaven, and a taste of salvation.

Maybe because I still draw from the insights of my Evangelical past, and love my Pentecostal colleagues, and have been shaped by Catholic traditions in my weirdly EvanPenteCatholian life, but I think it’s high time for Azusa Street moment today. I mean something like a revival worthy of today’s challenges, for a renewal of Pentecost in the twenty-first century, for an outrageous and scandalous vision of what Gospel transformation looks like in a broken and fragmented world.

We cannot, of course, manufacture such moments ourselves but they can happen when we cultivate a joyful spirituality.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, reminded that the vestry of the parish I now serve identified “joyful spirituality” as one of the aspirational values we seek to embrace as a parish, and it needs much more attention. Joy, after all, is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t mean happiness, which is almost always associated with how we happen to feel, with our material possessions, with our social and economic status. Joy has nothing to do with any of those things.

Joy, it seems to me, is resilient gladness, completely independent of one’s circumstances—in times of scarcity and abundance, in times of suffering and hope, in times of consternation and confusion, the Spirit’s gift of joy remains.

A community gifted by the Holy Spirit with such resilient gladness will not merely grow—it will deepen its diversity, it will find healing in hospitality, it will, as the prophet Joel declared, see visions and dream dreams never before imagined.

We’re overdue. The need is real. The time is now.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Pentecost Matters: Convenience is Killing Us and Recycling Won’t Save Us

I found Lent rather harrowing this year, and these fifty days of Easter now coming to a close frequently sobering, with the long post-Pentecost “green season” looming in California as a mostly brown and brittle time, punctuated with wild-fire anxiety.

In fact, we’re expecting our first heat wave of the season this weekend, with the Day of Pentecost itself breaking the 100-degree mark; the National Weather Service has issued its first “red flag warning” of the year—a dismaying reflection of the color for this liturgical feast day.

fire_globe

Political discourse and national policies have been setting many of us on edge for some time, not least for the gut-wrenching treatment of migrants and their children at the U.S. border with Mexico. This would have sufficed to bathe our liturgical patterns with unease, but these distressing moments have unfolded in the crucible of a planetary emergency I can scarcely comprehend.

A short list of that emergency’s features: living in the midst of this planet’s sixth great extinction event, which we ourselves have caused; an alarming range of foods and beverages testing positive for the carcinogenic compound glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed-killer Roundup (even organic foods are not safe given the porous character of farming boundaries and “forever chemicals” lacing everything we touch); dozens of dead whales washing up on the western shores of the U.S., starving from lack of food or with their bellies filled with our plastic waste; otherwise pristine environments littered with micro-plastics (from the sea creatures at the deepest part of the deepest ocean trench to the crisp mountain terrain of the Pyrenees where it actually rains plastic). whale_air

I used to take some modest comfort when confronting these vexations by following an assiduous regimen of recycling; this too has collapsed toward the brink of despair—what we thought can be recycled efficiently, can’t; and what could be, no longer is. China’s refusal to take any more American trash and deal with our steady stream of barges bulging with “recyclables” simply revealed a nasty truth about Western approaches to “ecological management”: There is no way to live with the many conveniences we now enjoy without also damaging and, indeed, killing the very ecosystems that give us life.

That bears repeating: We can no longer live the way we do, and this will be profoundly inconvenient (a word, as Al Gore reminded us, that the modern West finds terribly distasteful).

The global juggernaut known as Capitalism lies at the root of this distress, but this means much more than dealing with questions of “free trade” or shareholder value. Scholar and journalist James Dyke aptly describes the situation like this:

Most of humanity is tightly enmeshed into a globalised, industrialised complex system – that of the technosphere, the size, scale and power of which has dramatically grown since World War II… The purpose of humans in this context is to consume products and services. The more we consume, the more materials will be extracted from the Earth, and the more energy resources consumed, the more factories and infrastructure built. And ultimately, the more the technosphere will grow…

The stark and grim reality of the “technosphere” is the depth of change now required to dismantle it; “conservation” is not enough and recycling will not save us. That is precisely the insight that shaped my Lenten discipline as I tried desperately to rid my daily life of single-use plastic and mostly failed. Achieving that goal would mean changing dramatically the way I live. And, frankly, I found this too difficult.

My longstanding attempt for quick-and-easy solutions to ecological disaster repeats a similar (and equally ill-founded) way to manage the sickening shock of crucifixion and death. Quite frequently in my life, whenever Easter arrived on the calendar, my spiritual temperature registered relief more than life-changing astonishment:

Whew! We sure dodged that bullet! Great to have you back, Jesus. Now, let’s pick up where we left off.

This is, of course, the very same posture Luke imagined the first disciples of Jesus to adopt in that first Easter season. Encountering the risen Jesus, they ask of him: “Is this the time you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) To which Jesus replies (patiently, I trust) with something like this: “No. This isn’t about going back or staying put; it’s about moving forward. It’s about something New.”

The great proclamation of Easter is not about restoration but rather resurrection, which is not a confirmation of what has been but rather a transformation who we are. This is what the flame-drenched outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost ought to signal—not the fortitude to keep living exactly the way we have before, but burning away the old to make room for a brand new kind of existence.

Pentecost matters—and by extension, the whole of the Church year—in large measure because of the reminders of hope scattered throughout its calendrical rhythms. More than this, for the sustenance needed to live with hope at all. I mean still more by evoking what matters for Pentecost, or the matter of Pentecost itself.

The celebration of the Holy Spirit has too often drifted toward the ethereal and immaterial, especially in the modern West, where the word “spiritual” carries with it at least a suspicion of the “physical.” That suspicion stands in stark contrast to how many of our ancestors in Christian traditions understood the presence of the Holy Spirit—a physical manifestation of a material reality, one that quite literally infuses our bodies, circulates through our arteries and remakes us (among others, see Dale Martin’s work on this).

Right there is where the hope I need resides, in the divine embrace of the bodily and physical announced at Christmas, marked during Epiphany, tested throughout Lent, and raised to new glory at Easter; it is the essence of marking the season of Pentecost with the color green–the living, breathing, animating presence of God on and in Earth.

advent_bubble3

This is not, to be clear, a hope that enables any passivity on my part, as if I can simply wait for God to fix the mess our species has made of God’s dear and precious Earth. It does mean that the transformation this planet now desperately needs is made possible at all by what Elizabeth Johnson compellingly describes as the “deep incarnation” of the Divine Word and the “deep resurrection” of life inaugurated at Easter. God’s creative and redeeming presence, in other words, runs “all the way down” into the deepest depths of God’s creation, to the cellular, atomic level.

That “great work” of God, the healing of our bodies and the body of Earth together, is the work to which the Holy Spirit calls us to join and encourages us to imagine and equips us to do. It is a call, and it does take courage, and we need help, because it will mean a complete and utter transformation of how we live.

Modern (Western) convenience is literally killing us and the planet. Recycling will not save us from this catastrophe, but conversion will, to use an old fashioned word that deserves a comeback.

If the “miracle” of the first Pentecost was the ability to speak in languages one had never learned to speak, then the equally miraculous Pentecostal moment we must pray for today is the ability to live in ways the modern West has not trained us to imagine—in a word, inconveniently.

Come, Holy Spirit.

pentecost