Have we missed entirely the real message?

As a way to get at what is most important in today’s readings, I want to make quick reference to a couple of stories also recorded by Mark, for his particular form helps determine the meaning that, otherwise, might not be apparent.

Early in his Gospel, he tells of an incident when several men carry a paralytic friend to the house where Jesus is staying. By the time they arrive such a crowd has gathered that there is no room for them to enter. As a mark of their determination, they lower their friend on a stretcher through the roof. The scene is set. Expectations are high. And Jesus looks on this man and tells him that his sins are forgiven. But no one has come for this. Jesus’ declaration is disappointing and unsatisfactory, for everyone had rushed in to witness something more impressive. They want to see the man healed – a wish that Jesus grants, but not without first warning them that they are missing the point. His first words were finer and more astounding. But the people didn’t care a wit about forgiveness. They were amazed only when the paralytic walked out of the house on his own.

Not long after this, Jesus and his disciples retreat to a desolate area to get some relief from the continuous press of the crowds. Their efforts are thwarted, however, when they are spotted and soon surrounded by thousands of persons, each eager for something from this possible Messiah. By late in the day, all are tired and hungry, and rather than leaving each to his own resources, Jesus instructs his disciples to gather what food they can. Five loaves and two fish are collected. The food is blessed and distributed, and all, more than five thousand, are fed, and they are fed more than enough. As night falls, the people return to their homes, the disciples set out in their boats for a more hospitable place, and Jesus remains behind, alone. We are informed, then, that the wind on the water became ferocious, that progress in the boat was hard fought and tenuous, and that the disciples, increasingly exhausted, became terribly anxious. At the darkest hour, Jesus came to them, walking on the water. As he approached, he told them not to be afraid. And as he stepped, then, into the boat, the winds stopped. And the disciples were stunned by Jesus’ seeming control of the weather.

It is here that Mark adds one of the most caustic lines of his Gospel, suggesting that in the disciples’ amazement at this they have missed entirely the real message. For what does the wind matter after they, by Jesus’ instruction, have fed so many with so little? They are transfixed by a mere gesture, and remain oblivious to the greater care that is God’s sure promise. Loaves and fish and baskets full were, hours later, not even a distant memory. They were forgotten.

And so, too, this morning, we have heard a third story from the Gospel with the same form. Again, the disciples, with Jesus, are crossing the sea. And again, a storm arises. Again, the disciples are terrified – a terror that is all the more aggravated by Jesus’ complete inattention. While the rest are battling, he is asleep. They wake him to angrily protest his indifference to their fate. He, in turn, stills the waves, and he asks them, then, why they were afraid, when there was no cause, when there is no longer any cause for fear at all, if they would only truly understand him. But the disciples do not answer. They are, rather, more impressed by how, at his word, the storm had ceased. And, again, they miss the point, for this is the smaller matter. Fear is more insidious, more malicious, than any calamity. It is far harder to quell. Yet precisely this is not heard. In the immediacy of the moment, the mere calming of the waters took precedence.

In his text, Mark provides us numerous warnings that we tend to look in the wrong places for the wrong things. This is evident not only within the events he has recorded; it holds for us as readers no less. We are all probably tempted toward the same misdirection, believing that the power of the story read today must, somehow, lie in the miraculous stilling of the sea. And in many churches today, I imagine that endless bad analogies will be made, with the implication that, if only we have enough faith, Jesus will quiet the storms of our own lives, too. This is not, however, what the story says, no matter how much we would like it to be so. The real point of revelation is not that the seas were settled at Jesus’ command. Mark prods us always to look elsewhere, to find the central point right where we would least expect it. And in this story, that place is the disclosure of Jesus’ sleeping. This is the miracle, literally – his sleeping while all around him chaos was literally descending. This is what should capture our attention, because this is what is most marvelous.

Dorothy Soellee, the acclaimed German theologian, once noted that the supreme form of intimacy available to us as human beings is not any act that we can engage. It is, rather, the simple submission we make in sleeping with one another. For sleep is not an interaction, during which we are attentive and aware and therefore able to withdraw if threatened. When we sleep we allow ourselves to be fully passive in the presence of another, and, as such, it requires and shows unequalled trust. We give ourselves into the hands of someone else, with the confidence that, having nothing between us, not doors or locks or any effective buffering space, even in such utter proximity, we are safe. This, she said, is a stupendous beauty in life and a deep expression of love. And in the story from Mark, Jesus’ sleeping reveals his own absolute conviction that his life is, profoundly, in God’s hands, regardless of all the turmoil around him. He lives his own words. He is not himself afraid, not because he mysteriously knows the storm will not defeat him, but because he has chosen such intimacy with God that nothing in or of the world can ultimately disturb this peace. His trust has no boundaries. It isn’t hedged by a gnawing wariness that keeps him awake or ill at ease. God is too close for such disturbances. Jesus slept. The singular goodness of this is what should astound us. While, all the while, the disciples fretted and lashed out with irritated accusation, interjecting fear where there might have been assurance instead.

Now, this short pericope is followed immediately by the more complex account of Jesus’ encounter with a man possessed by what is referred to only as an unclean spirit. At every level, the man is troubled. He makes his home in graveyards. He roves about, aimlessly, injuring himself. No one can subdue him. He is able to break every form of constraint. And, most forebodingly, he calls himself Legion, explaining that he – or those like him – are many.

There has been much speculation about his affliction, that he was bi-polar, or schizophrenic, in need of medication. But I think that Mark leads us to a more dramatic insight. What this man suffered was fear, as plain as that, as common as that, as general and as varied and as ambiguous as our own or anyone’s being afraid. Mark notes of him: he was sleepless, wandering night and day, even among the dead. He was loud and restless even amid the heavy silence of the tombs. And he, destructive and haunted, is even more than many. For, in truth, as such, Legion represents all of us. In him we see the consequence of the fear we all experience, the fear we perpetrate, and all the anxieties that lead us to our own injury even today.

We are engaged in a war right now, but, following Mark’s lead, we might be inclined to check whether this is the right one, conducted in the right way. It has been continually called a war on terrorism, and it was begun in the usual manner, with a blazing show of force bent toward shock and awe. In the years since, we must admit, it has not defeated terrorists but has further spawned insurgence, institutional abuse, rationalized torture, suicide, civil chaos, widespread protests, entrenched hatred, and such utter confusion that no one knows who to trust or how all this turmoil may come to an end, someday. I must try to be clear here: I am not trying to make a political comment. I am not qualified to do so. But I am struck by a deeper, rhetorical observation. Whatever victory means, it won’t come by swinging a bigger stick. And our safety won’t be secured by so exponentially multiplying our suspicions that, trusting no one, we can locate all our enemies ahead of time. Fear breeds faster than we can act… for it is Legion.

Our primary struggle is not against terrorism. It is against its beginning and its end, which is fear, which seduces us to falling prey to the same impulse, and, woefully, the same actions. Faith has a different vision, a different means, a different goal. For its focus is not whatever it is that troubles us. It is the more fundamental grace that in God we gain the freedom to forgive the evil that has been done, even to us. In him, we are able to feed others even when we wonder if there is any food at all. And faith’s first object, always, is the prayer that our life itself can be the expression of such intimacy with God’s eternal love and mercy that anxiety will never drive us to anger, accusation, division, and, finally, injury.

Our world, as all profess, has become smaller with the advent of globalization. But in so doing, it hasn’t become more intimate – a world set at greater ease, able to sleep easily. It may be that the most important gift we as Christians can contribute is the very peace that arises from this very different form of courage.

"We are all promised eternal life; the question . . . is where."

One of the wardens reminded me this week of a sign that was for a time posted outside a local Episcopal church, the kind of sign that is supposed to encourage the interest of passing motorists and thereby invite them into the church – the kind of sign that is supposed to offer some indication of the substance of our faith. It read: “We are all promised eternal life; the question… is where.”

Ordinarily such a message might be the occasion for a bit of humor, even though is was intended to be deadly serious. Some might be a bit more polite in offering a more empathetic comment. After all, there was nothing highly original or creative suggested here. This has become the standard line of Christianity, all of God’s grandeur reduced to a quick and convenient either/or, made in reference to something entirely abstract – our fate after our fate, God’s judgment that issues an unchangeable decree of punishment without end or an everlasting reward. We have learned, somehow, to assume that, indeed, this is what Christianity is all about: a hope for a heaven that bears no compelling resemblance to our life now (it is commonly envisioned as being wholly ethereal), and conversely, an equal warning of hell that erases all the beauty of our present time, because all of this will ultimately pass away in the blink of an eye, anyway. The point of decision is promise or threat, up or down, bliss or torment. And in the face of such extreme stakes, while driving by on Sunday morning, one would do well to get groceries at another time or postpone brunch in order to cross the threshold of the church to gain some important disaster insurance. A little time spent in worship is negligible in comparison to the risk of dying unsaved. So the sign seems to suggest.

On this matter, however, we can no longer afford to be politely quiet, because it is exactly this presentation of Christianity that is its worst degradation. Right out of the gate, everything is warped. This kind of a message is an offense, bad religion for small minds and even smaller spirits, often promulgated by those who want to lure people in by calculated manipulation, offered, falsely, tragically, as the church’s wisdom. As many a politician knows, nothing is as effective as simple fear, most of all when it is conveyed in God’s name. This message deserves the ridicule it receives, and we should be the first in line with the fiercest objections, for it is our own faith that is being twisted from within and, consequently, vilified and rejected from without – with good cause.

In the interest of clarity, I hope that you will pardon my being just a bit pedantic this morning, but it is imperative that we can be eloquent counter-witnesses on behalf of the church and, even more, on behalf of the glory and the grace and the reconciliation that is our true calling.

So first, in regard to eternal life, our testimony is that, precisely here, there is no question at all. Nothing trails after this promise threatening to disappoint it. This is our news. No conditions wait to be satisfied. Our destiny has been already determined. It has been accomplished not only irreversibly but from before the beginning of the world. No barriers remain before us. No exclusions hold. The last, said Jesus – the very last – shall be first. Never, in all the times this is recorded in the Gospels, is there added a qualification or even a reference to what, distinctly, should be measured here. It may be that this phrase was meant to be without limit. This is how comprehensive the reach of God is.

Yet we constantly retreat from this trust, protesting that God and divine love can’t be this generous, thrusting up extraordinary examples that must, by rights, demand condemnation: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh, the list could soon become quite weighty. Some actions, we protest, are simply too horrific for mercy, too depraved to forgive.

But our fundamental claim is that in Jesus God has destroyed death itself, and with death, all evil and all its effects. There is no longer any place so removed that we cannot be reached, either left to abandonment or banished – there is no place. For even the tomb has been emptied, literally, and thus, in every manner, figuratively too. We have no basis on which to speculate about or declare any persisting division between punishment and reward. There is no “where” to fret about, no last and final accounting to face with trepidation. Jesus’ resurrection has abolished every nagging doubt. Borrowing the words of Gertrude Stein, we may and should say, “There is no there there.” The only hell we can posit is not God’s but the one we create ourselves, in our own denial of grace, in vengeance then taken against others, and in the injustice we perpetrate by seeking our own private heaven at the cost of those we deem expendable, insignificant, or reprobate. We must dispose of this picture of faith. “Where?” is not the question. And asking it, pressing it forebodingly, diminishes us all, and it blinds us, hiding from us from the true revelation of Christianity.

Which leads to a second correction. Eternity, in the Christian perspective, is not a future event, that awaits us in a fog of obscurity, dependent first on our demise. Eternal life is our here and our now. It is being made evident all around us in the explosion of life that occurs in every moment of time, in such profusion that we cannot trace even its merest dimensions. This eternity is already. It has long preceded us. It includes us, presently. It is available to us whenever we choose to see and be astounded by the conviction that God’s promise is not merely a pledge given to us. It is us. We are his promise. In us, in our very lives, he is bringing his word to fulfillment. And when we realize this, then nothing remains the same, not our past or our future or our understanding of this very day. For this – all that so magnificently encompasses us – is God’s disclosure of what his kingdom is and what it will be, abidingly. In so far as we can imagine any legitimate heaven, it looks like this world. It looks like our faces. It consists of God’s unwavering faithfulness to his whole creation and to us, not as diaphanous souls, but as persons of beautiful carnality, who, in the thrill of touch, sense, and embrace, live the love of God.

In us, God’s pleasure is being expressed, currently. It is not our task to win it, nor should we be haunted by the possibility that we lose it. Our delight comes from the deep recognition that all that we are, now, is the substance of God’s own joy. This is the measure of our celebration and this is the root of our thanksgiving as Christians – as Paul noted, all our time, no matter our circumstances, should be reason for rejoicing – every day – because every unfolding of every experience is and will be part of God’s infinitely extended redemption – ourselves included.

Paul set this out in a single phrase. Our reality is fully defined, he wrote, by this one progression, this one confidence: all that is mortal is being swallowed up by life. The whole of creation therefore stands, first and always, as the vehicle of the glory of God, in redemption and exaltation. Our true word is this victory and freedom, which opens to us an unabashed gladness, solace, and an hopefulness without any boundaries. For, by God’s will and passion, there is no place where mortality prevails and defeat will, by force, be either pronounced or conceded. God’s life swallows up all death, literally, and thus, too, in every small way that we suffer guilt, harm, or the pangs of inadequacy.

Our mortality is being swallowed up by life: there isn’t much more we need to know, nor is there more we need to say. If we were to put out a sign, this is the message that should be posted. Mortality is not our end, nor is it the nature of our time, impressed upon us in judgment and division. As the church we gather to give witness to a greater love, which transforms all things, which gives life with abandon, which extinguishes all fear. To worship is to consciously draw your own life into this eternity, more eloquently, more profoundly in our present time, more collectively in gratitude for one another, so that these words may be our constant witness, our own disclosure of God’s heaven in our midst: our mortality is being swallowed up by life. So we may sing a song of perfecting grace for all the world to hear.

Trinity Sunday

In a recent opinion piece printed in our denominational magazine, The Living Church, Bishop Duncan of the diocese of Pittsburgh put forth what he believes is the major divide now in the Episcopal Church. The issue, he argued, is not fundamentally about the place and privileges extended to gay men and women. As persons, he wrote, they should be welcomed and embraced as the church would any others. The real point of controversy is not our differing understanding of sexuality, per se. It is rather, and far more gravely, the liberal church’s wholesale disposal of the doctrine of sin. This, he insisted, is the departure from orthodoxy that can’t be tolerated – because this conviction of us by God is the very heart of the Christian faith, matched, then, only after, by the opportunity we are afforded by Jesus to be saved from a grim and terrible condemnation. We have lost our bearings, Duncan declared, by so seeking to affirm others that we have lost the courage to mark sin’s presence, with righteous judgment, calling others to repentance and amendment of life, so that they might attain the grace of forgiveness. According to this view, we live tenuously balanced at the edge of a great abyss, at risk of plunging in untimely manner into the consuming fires stoked by the long and sorry history of our misdeeds, and the message must be urgently conveyed by fervent voices that salvation is possible, if only we turn around to grasp the sturdy hands of Jesus, reaching for us, waiting for us.

It’s a familiar summary of Christianity, especially suited to our modern, American perspective. Faith is burnished down into private piety, consisting ultimately only of one’s own individual relationship with God. It’s not enough that Jesus is Lord and Savior. He must be this personally, claimed and grasped. And absent this singular confession, we are lost. It’s been the ploy of many revivalists and televangelists, people who have proved themselves impressively skilled at whipping up potent combinations of fear and guilt and deep remorse, all to then announce God’s costly deliverance, which comes with maximal emotional punch. Jesus snatches us from the clutches of the devil. Jesus redeems us from all the shameful burdens we have been encouraged to dredge up from within ourselves. And in the drama of shouts and tears people declare their conversion. And some, thereafter, in bouts of enthusiasm, are even inclined to post this on the bumpers of their cars, letting all passers-by know their conviction, proclaiming “God is my co-pilot” and “ My boss is a Jewish carpenter.”

Now I want to be careful here, for I am not trying to discredit either the redemption that does indeed come from God or the way that this can be experienced profoundly and with breath-taking intimacy. But exactly here we must be wary too. We must be wary because too easily this piety makes God too small, too friendly, formed too much in the image of our own personal feelings about what is right and wrong, good and bad, reprehensible or admirable. And sin then names not a vast, mysterious, and humbling blindness that conceals God’s vigorous and present grace. It becomes, instead, a lengthy and exhausting laundry list of do’s and don’t’s, personal and often petty, by which we then divide ourselves, as if the first act of religiousness is to endlessly wag a scolding finger – which is in many circles the primary public image of the church.

All this does, however, is make us hypocrites or purist tyrants or both. There are plenty of examples of preachers and evangelists who have risen astronomically, only to fall, themselves humiliated, with tragic and comic and awful effect. And the same pattern, in lesser ways, is sadly carried on in Christ’s name daily by many within the church as well. It is deeply injurious, and, in its worst form, it is absolutely consuming, leaving no one unscathed. We should be reminded how God’s presence was manifested to Moses. When he came to holy ground, the fire he saw did not destroy the wood nor kill the bush. It preserved everything even as it burned. In so far as we make any claim to holiness, ourselves, then, perhaps it should be seen in the same light, a fire that emerges from and among us, yet without causing harm, without destroying or dividing.

In this regard, especially today, on Trinity Sunday, I think it should be said that the fundamental message of Christianity is not sin and redemption. And the divide that threatens the church isn’t the displacement of the doctrine of sin for a more progressive and baldly affirmative agenda. For God is not merely our savior, and faith is not just about me or any other individual, and grace is not found in forgiveness alone, and sin should never be woefully reduced to the offenses and violations we mark best in others. On all counts, there is more that has been revealed and must be included in both our understanding and our witness. Holiness is greater than and different from any assessment of moral uprightness we can make, and God’s reality extends well beyond the slight measure of our actions, good and evil. Such a God, such a faith, such a calling are all too small, for all are pinched back to fit primarily the nature of our own failures, missing, then, the surpassing magnificence of God himself. And as so much violence has shown, it is a dreadful thing to thus make God in our own image.

Trinitarian faith disciplines us to maintain a more comprehensive and expansive vision. We cannot speak of a savior without first acknowledging a creator. We cannot speak of the Son without noting, clearly, that Jesus’ sole function was to do the will of the Father. Whatever redemption he accomplished, it was no less than the fulfillment of creation itself, of all things – not souls alone, not persons chosen here and there from amid the rabble, but the infinite fruition of everything that has emerged from the Father’s hand in the abundance of finite time itself. God the Holy Spirit draws us into this confidence and truth, cosmic and universal. In the spirit we realize this ahead of time. By the spirit’s making known to us the Father and the Son, we are given the glory of living now within eternal promise, in the joy of expectation beyond all the boundaries we can name. We are not precariously poised at the very edge of personal destruction, awash in fatal sin. We are, rather, more fundamentally, persons included, without exception, within the marvelous and exquisite beneficence of God.

This is God’s revelation of himself: as God he gives – without reserve. He gives of himself in creating. He gives of himself in sustaining all things. He gives himself to us, in descent, in degradation, and even in death, for our reclamation. He gives himself in reconciliation, so that we, as the church may offer ourselves in kind, as a community of challenging hospitality. This generosity, unlimited, is, in God, first and last and absolute – love both patient and relentless. The foundation of Christianity, therefore, does not lie in threat laid against us, an impending and severe judgment. Christian faith is established in the deeper recognition that all the world and all of time is God’s unfolding of divine gift, and to us, within this dynamic grace, is bestowed a peace that extinguishes all anxiety. Holiness is exemplified in freedom, a freedom from the constraints of ourselves and all the pettiness we proudly propound, thinking it right and courageous. Instead, in all things a greater grandeur is being furthered, of which we are an integral part.

This is the whole thrust of Paul’s exhortation that we have heard this morning. We must listen closely, because in two-fold manner he unveils the true heart of the matter – in the negation of negation and in the affirmation of affirmation. “You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.” No. We have “received the spirit of sonship,” so when we cry, Father, “it is the spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” This is the destiny of all creation, to which the church stands as witness, which sin can surely occlude from view. But, by God’s own testimony, his own incarnate Word, neither rebellion nor abandonment can prevail. Brokenness is not our foundation, and personal salvation is not our goal. The purposes of God far exceed this; it is only a thread within the weave of a greater fabric.

Our divisions begin when this reduction is given too much prominence, when sin disposes of grace – for some – and when, still most eager to point out shadow, we as the church curtail the light of God.

May this day, of extravagant expression, of even seraphim and cherubim in endless song, be a strong word toward our glad and joyous correction.

The Glory of Pentecost

This morning I’d like to set the record straight about Pentecost, especially because the church’s own long habit has been to encourage exactly the wrong understanding of what this event was and what it means. Whatever happened on that day, and whatever hope we may glean from the descent of God’s own spirit upon us, it has nothing to do with the multiplicity of languages or, as some enthusiastically advocate, the experience of speaking in tongues. It was not the occurrence of an extraordinary miracle, brazenly supernatural, nor was it God’s impromptu breaching of the language differences we suffer in order to announce the start of the Christian Church with an appropriate bang.

We seem to be perennially inclined to misread the text, eager for splash. As the whole testimony of the Bible shows, we are repeatedly more seduced by special effects than content. Even now, even among those who adamantly declare their absolute rationalism and dismiss the validity of any religious conviction, we still use our most advanced technologies to create virtual, magical worlds that promise to enthrall us, that offer all the excitement without any of the consequence. And just so, it is seductive to imagine Pentecost in the same manner, as an impressive instance of divine interruption, the kind of magic, the kind of intervention, we’d like from God every once and a while. It’s easy to be swept away by visions of tongues of fire, even when this is just a simile; as it is easy, too, to marvel at a cacophony of foreign voices, all sputtering at once, yet all being understood. And I’m sure that in many churches today, in some way, what will be tacitly celebrated is precisely this plurality of languages and, for some, the extravagance, the eccentricity, of being ecstatically caught up in the spirit. Such emphases as these can make us feel exceptional, and that can be powerfully attractive… and very marketable. But this all falls away as quickly as it’s spoken, and then, outside these doors, nothing is changed. Like television, church becomes little more than one more momentary diversion, always searching for new ways to be enticing, relevant, or as some painfully attempt, cool.

If, however, you read on in the Book of Acts, you will see that the Apostle Peter’s own response to the event was far more mundane. In essence, he told the crowd to take a more sober view. The event, the phenomenon, he said, was not the point. It was only a sign, a symbolic occurrence. The point was neither the variation in languages nor the diversity of tongues but the singular importance of one word, the message of the story of God as it was disclosed in Jesus. This word, said Peter, unlike all others, addresses all persons. This word alone has universal bearing. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection God has judged the whole world, the world in every age, the world of every culture and religion, by a grace of infinite measure. And thus, in him, all our painful divisions are refracted and experienced in a different way. They are transcended – in effect, it is as if, in the embrace of such love, we can begin to hear strangers as if, now, they were friends. The miracle lies only in him. Jesus is the comprehensive word of God, whether you are Parthian or Mede, an Elamite… or even a resident of Mesopotamia.

All other talk fractures. All other talk, no matter how vigorous or patient or careful, still marks our distance from one another. We separate ourselves by thousands of distinctions; every distinction given a name; every distinction hardened, all the more, by the frequent need for translation, which, at best, is no better than approximate. Our own speech, of itself, inevitably divides us. No amount of talk brings lasting union. And in this light, the story of the event of Pentecost is not a miracle but only a gesture. It relays an event in service of a greater reality: which is the total reconciliation that God has accomplished by one person for all. Our only stable unity is this one name, the event of God’s passion that touches, gathers, and changes everything.

As Christians, in regard to Pentecost, we can no longer afford to maintain our pleasant delusions. Our own relatively quiet world is being tested and torn by the resurgence of vicious, ever-expanding tribalism. A quick, familiar recitation skims only the surface. Sunnis are killing Shiites and Shiites Sunnis. Both are ambushing American forces. And when soldiers react in kind, killing indiscriminately, mitigating factors are voiced. Even marines break under the stress of violent difference, some say. Brokenness explains our breaking, carrying the cycle even further. As Rwanda tenuously rebuilds, Darfur descends. As immigrants march in the streets, citizens become increasingly agitated. We have become well-versed in the vocabularies of identity politics. Whites can’t understand the plight of blacks. Christians can’t comprehend Muslims. Palestinians can’t sympathize with the suffering of the Jews; Israelis have no empathy for the Palestinians. Our own denomination is stubbornly divided by unrepentantly maintained caricatures: liberal/conservative, traditionalist/progressive, fundamentalist/neo-pagan. At countless levels we insist: to each, her own voice; to each, her own language; to everyone of us, our own absolute individual right to declare our individuality with particular shrillness. This is the cause of much injury, degradation by means of self-promotion. Which has no natural end. As Christians, we can’t afford to imagine Pentecost with the quaintness of its being just a long-ago fantastic event. It’s an offense to the violence we are suffering. It’s an offense to the violence we are perpetrating. If the Spirit of God is present to us, truly present, then we must be engaged in a more dramatic, demanding, and transforming calling.

The last verse of the Gospel lesson places before us the choice that is the heart of the matter. We have before us always, Jesus said, this singular option, waiting for decision. We may blithely choose to continue binding ourselves in division, opposition, alienation, and condemnation, or we may choose, with sturdy deliberateness, to make of our own lives the radical freedom of offering forgiveness, such forgiveness as is not diminished by any difference, however egregious. We may choose to approach others, assiduously, in love alone, as if it were inexhaustible, as if it were its own language that never needed translation but was always heard as one’s native tongue. We may breathe peace.

We are naturally more skilled at conflict. But it has been given us to enact reconciliation – no matter who we are, no matter what our position. When Jesus announced this to the disciples they were hiding away for fear of their lives, terrified by the hatred they thought might be directed against them. In our modern terminology, they were the victims. They were the oppressed. Yet it was precisely to them that this divine mission, this command, and this promise came.

This is the glory of Pentecost, that even the least and the last have no less role in forgiveness, in opening unexpected space for communion and joy. For here we all share the same undifferentiated word. One man, one death, one resurrection, one abiding voice addresses all of us. When the Spirit of God descends, we may be those who, by exhibiting such grace as his, allow others in seeing us to see something true of God – not miracle but marvel, the marvel of God’s own boundless love being accomplished by our decision, our action, and our own extension of ourselves, selflessly. Pentecost is more a way of breathing than a mode of speaking.

Dominican Republic film loop