Whitsunday
31 May 2020
Acts 2.1-11; 1 Cor 12.3b-7,12-13
Fr. Patrick Allen
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We keep today the great and solemn feast of Pentecost, or Whitsunday as perhaps some of us better know it, when we recall to our minds and hearts that day, fifty days after our Lord’s blessed Passion, precious Death, and mighty Resurrection, ten days after his glorious Ascension, when, just as God the Son had promised, God the Holy Spirit descended from God the Father in power upon the Apostles who were gathered close to Mary in prayer and in obedience to the Lord’s command. We all remember what happened, so briefly but vividly described for us by St Luke in the Acts of the Apostles: the sound as of a mighty rushing wind, the tongues as of fire that rested upon the Apostles’ heads; and their sudden and supernatural ability to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance, so that divers and devout men from every nation under heaven could hear and understand the Gospel message - those same mighty works of God in Jesus Christ which had occurred just fifty days before.
But what was the effect of all of this? What was accomplished by these miraculous manifestations of the Holy Spirit? Well, St. Luke tells us that the first effect at this sound the multitude came together.
They came together. They gathered. And of course we can not help but note and feel with wistfulness the irony. Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit bringing people together, but we are kept apart. Some of us will begin to come together again for Mass next Sunday, but even then it will be prudent - and painful - for some of us to continue to stay apart. But this is of course a temporary and extraordinary thing. It is not and cannot be the ordinary and permanent character of the Church. As much of an introvert and a homebody even as I am, I know and feel that life in Christ is necessarily social, communal, even familial.
We see that all over our Epistle lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. St Paul notes the gifts of our individuality - spiritual gifts, or “charisms” as we say in the Church. We are individuals; we are not the same, not interchangeable:
To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
All these gifts and more are given to each one individually. But why, to what end? To each, St Paul says, is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
“For the common good.” The gifts of the Spirit presume and are ordered toward this gathering, this new community, in which the individual members are bound so tightly, so vitally together, that they are like the different parts of your body - individually significant; each possessing its own gift and glory; but also and wonderfully a part of the whole, the Body. Life in the Spirit has a kind of centripetal force that always draws us together. And so the gifts, whatever they may be, that God has given me and that God has given you, are always for one another for the building up of the Church, for the common good. They are instruments of unity.
And that unity - that gathering - which we experience in our own local contexts, beginning in the family - the domestic Church - and in the parish as we gather around the Altar, and in the Diocese as we are gathered by the ministry of a bishop who is a successor to those same Apostles who were gathered together at Pentecost - is a sign and foretaste of the great gathering which is the life of heaven. We see it in Revelation when the Holy Spirit grants us a glimpse of the heavenly courts:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev 7.9-10).
A gathering of disparate peoples - devout men from every nation under heaven - is the first effect of the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost, and it is also the last and ultimate effect. That is where life in the Spirit, life sharing in the Spirit’s gifts, life cooperating with Spirit’s graces, leads: a great gathering in Christ and for Christ of people of every race, speaking every language, of every nation, every ethnicity, who will share together in the worship of the Lamb of God, “who takest away the sins of the world.”
And to the degree that we share in the Spirit, that our lives are directed by the Spirit, that is the orientation, the goal, the destination for which we will eagerly long.
And so this Whitsunday, this Pentecost morning, after the murder of George Floyd, after the murder of Ahmaud Arbury, after the massacre at Mother Emanuel, after the murder of Walter Scott, after the whole ugly history of slavery and Jim Crow of which we are the heirs and so many of us - let’s face it - are the worldly beneficiaries, our hearts - all Christian hearts - should be broken.
The sins of racism - personal and systemic - are sins against the Holy Spirit, whose work is to draw us together in Christ, by a love that does not erase the particularities and gifts of “every nation” and “all tribes, peoples, and tongues,” but transcends them and creates a higher, better, deeper, a true and eternal unity: so it is with Christ, For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
None of that excuses rioting, vandalism, or violence - just the opposite; those things are always the demonic tools of division, no matter who is wielding them. But, the things Charleston experienced last night at the hands of a few cannot become an excuse for us to ignore the real and ongoing injustice that remains pervasive in our society. As our Catholic bishops said on Friday:
“Racism is not a thing of the past or simply a throwaway political issue to be bandied about when convenient. It is a real and present danger that must be met head on. As members of the Church, we must stand for the more difficult right and just actions instead of the easy wrongs of indifference. We cannot turn a blind eye to these atrocities and yet still try to profess to respect every human life.”
When George Floyd lay on the asphalt with a police officer’s knee on his neck, he said, “Please, please, I can’t breathe.” Our word “spirit”, you know, is derived from the Latin spiritus and it’s root meaning is precisely “breath” - we hear it in our word “respire.” In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word we translate as “spirit” is ruach, which also means exactly “breath.”
Today, on this Whitsunday, let us pray for the Holy Spirit to descend again in power, that we may breathe again - may breathe justice, and mercy, and love; that the Spirit convict us of our sin, and end especially those “wrongs of easy indifference,” and grant us the grace of repentance; that we may know and love peace; that we may feel that breath - God’s own breath - like a mighty rushing wind, and like those devout men from every nation under heaven, we also may come together, and grow together, one Body in Christ, until that day when we too will gather “great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues,” in praise of the Lamb who was slain - asphyxiated on the Cross - for our Salvation.
Come, Holy Spirit.