Day of Pentecost, Year C
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
June 5, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Good morning and happy Pentecost! Today we’ve gathered to celebrate three things: the final day of the Easter Season, the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and the spread of the Christian Church beyond Jesus’ initial disciples. The name Pentecost originally appears in the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible popular in Jesus’ day—as a reference for the Festival of Weeks. The Festival of Weeks was an ancient Jewish spring harvest festival held fifty days after Passover where people would bring a portion of the year’s initial crop to the Temple. Because of Acts’ account of the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church, Pentecost rapidly became a significant Christian holiday as well. After the destruction of the Temple in the late 1st Century as well as the growth of the Church over time, the name is now more frequently associated with Christianity than Judaism.
I find the “first fruits” idea an interesting connection that we don’t often consider about Pentecost since the harvest aspect of the day hasn’t remained connected to our traditions. The earliest disciples, however, would have retained that association, knowing that the first crop of wheat, planted roughly fifty days earlier, was now coming into maturity. My guess is that they quickly connected Jesus’s burial with the planting of the grain and the events of that seventh Sunday after Easter with the initiation of the “spiritual” harvest God had planned. The fact that we’ve forgotten that analogy probably speaks to the fact that it was such a strong association that the initial disciples didn’t think to emphasize it while Luke, as the non-Jewish convert and author of Acts, might not have caught the significance. But that’s all speculation…
Moving on toward more modern traditions, the main Christian emphasis of the day is the promised coming of the Advocate, or Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has always been the most confusing and elusive person of the Trinity. It certainly is for me, and it appears to have been just as puzzling to the leaders of the Early Church. If you look at the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, for example, you’ll see multiple lines or sentences dedicated to defining the Father and Son, but the Holy Spirit receives little more than a comment in each. In part that’s because, with far more controversies about Jesus’ status as the Son of God and relationship to the Father in the first few centuries of Church history, people gave a lot more thought about and definition to understanding those two Persons in an “orthodox” way. But it’s also because nobody has ever really figured out how to handle or adequately describe the Spirit. Since it’s always defying expectations and leading people to do the unexpected, as we’ve seen in our Acts readings throughout this Easter Season, no one can really figure out how to put decisive language on it. After all, how can you hope to define or pin down a deity that actively and regularly undermines, reinterprets, or even rewrites what we think of as fixed aspects of culture and reality, just “the way things are”?
Stepping back for a moment, there are a couple of important things to remind ourselves of before we get going too far this morning. First is that in most situations—both out- and inside the Bible—“spirit” is the probably the least preferred or helpful interpretation of that particular word for modern readers. The word itself, pneuma, primarily refers to air, wind, or one’s breath. And if any of those terms can fit in the space where we read “spirit,” it probably should. We know that while all those things are invisible, they remain very physical things, and our concept of “spirit” ought to hang onto that physicality as well. The “spirit” idea as something beyond air or wind comes from its connection to breath—something in the body is maintaining life and animation, and the ancient world associated that unseen essence with the body’s action of respiration.
A second reminder is that the idea of a sacred wind or purifying breath[1] wasn’t remotely out of line with accepted medical theory and practices of the day. People thought most disease spread through corrupt, bad-smelling air, so they used fresh or good-smelling air as at least a portion of treating many illnesses. The ideal air for healing would undoubtedly be sacred—or holy—air, which would be able to actively force out any contaminants or “foul air”[2] and, therefore, cure nearly any disease. As it filled and healed you, purifying air would also likely affect an individual’s abilities or behavior, bringing out their best possible self. Breath from God, then—“the breath of life” and the ultimate purifying air—would be able to align you with God themself and, as God continued to “breathe” through you, could support and energize you as you continued to walk in God’s ways.
So that would be the overall purpose and function of the Holy Spirit: to cleanse or heal us—from the inside—of any type of corruption and to fill us with God’s own Purifying Air or Sacred Breath, which would also then align us with God’s own nature. Those who receive God’s Spirit can’t help but carry that “holy” nature within them and naturally spread it—literally breathing it in and out—wherever they go.
Bringing that concept to a more approachable level, have you ever tried to help an upset child regulate their breathing? Maybe you sat beside them or even held them to your chest so they could physically feel and begin to mimic your healthy, steady airflow. As they fall into sync with the calming rhythm you’ve set, they’re soon able to move from a state of panic or fear and think clearly again. What you’ve done in that moment is shared your spirit—your breath—with them. Think of that as similar to how God shares Sacred Breath with us, pulling us close and helping us to take on not only God’s own respiration patterns but also the clarity of mind and purpose that can come along with them.
However, we shouldn’t expect that being aligned through God’s Spirit will mean we all become identical in our behavior, thinking, or actions. God wants humanity to live in the unity of genuine love—love-as-action—not forced uniformity.[3] In that breathing example, you shared part of yourself, but you didn’t expect the other person to turn into you when breathing together with you. The point wasn’t to force them to stay in your lap forever or always behave exactly like you do. It was to help them settle their minds and bodies and successfully return to the business of their own day. In the same way, God isn’t trying to somehow trap or restrict us or cram us into some sort of identical mold—some expectation of how all Christians “ought” to look. God is big enough and loving enough and free enough that we’re able to retain our individual identities and experiences as we breathe with God/God breathes through us. Sharing that holy spirit simply enables us to synchronize or align our ongoing activities and full selves—the best of who we can be—with the patterns God has set and encourages us to follow.
That one Breath—the Sacred Air—is the reason we still assemble as a congregation nearly two thousand years after the Day of Pentecost. It’s why we sit together and sing together and pray aloud together. As the Body of Christ, we gather ourselves to inhale and exhale as one, collectively united in the flow of one Spirit. It’s what binds all of us varied parts of the body in genuine worship, and that unity of breath connects us—including those joining us online—that breathing, acting, and living together. As we participate and respond and breathe as one, we experience the unity of the body of Christ within the diversity of its members, a unity available only through aligning ourselves with God’s Breath as it spreads across humanity and our wider world.
[1] Or any of a variety of other legitimate translations of “Holy Spirit”
[2] This phrase, often translated as “evil spirit,” also means “bad breath.”
[3] Requiring everyone and everything to take identical form or action is the result of Empire’s reign, not God’s.