Pentecost
Transcribed from a
sermon given
June 12, 2011
St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
The Rev. Valerie Hart
Pentecost - the coming of the
Holy Spirit. I love Pentecost. I love the energy of the Holy Spirit, and the
presence, and the power and the surprise. Because one thing about the Holy
Spirit is that it tends to surprise us. It is not domesticated. The Holy Spirit
does what it will and transforms what it will. The images for Pentecost - fire,
wind, breath, red hanging down from the ceiling, flames coming out of people’s
heads. All these wonderful, wonderful images of strength and power.
When I was a kid the Holy Spirit
was always called the Holy Ghost as it was in the first song that we sang. I
know I’m dating myself saying that, but as a little kid my image of the Holy
Ghost was Casper the friendly ghost. Anybody remember Casper the friendly
ghost? You know the Holy Spirit was sort of this friendly warm fuzzy thing.
Well, it can be. The Holy Spirit can be comforting; it can be a breath that
heals. Just like on a hot day, a breath of cool wind can be refreshing and
healing, or on a cold night a fire can be warming and feel really good.
But if you have been watching the
news at all lately, you know that wind and fire are not always comfortable.
We’ve had horrible tornados in the middle of this country, where the wind comes
into a town and it swirls around and knocks down everything, picks it all up,
mixes it all together and throws it all out. And right now there is a fire
going on in Arizona that has covered hundreds of square miles burning
everything in its path.
Wind and fire. I remember one
Pentecost Eve on a Saturday night where I lived in Brentwood East of San
Francisco. We lived out in the country on a hill and we noticed early in the
evening, looking off of our back patio that there was some smoke in the hills.
And then we noticed that the smoke appeared to be getting larger and coming
closer. And then we heard and saw the airplanes going over dropping water just
behind the last hill. And then we started seeing flames and it started to get a
little nerve wracking. And then the sheriff came and knocked on the door and said:
“You don’t have to evacuate yet, it’s still on the other side of the road, but
you should be ready to evacuate.” I thought, “Wow, this is a Pentecost.” Wind
was blowing; it was hot, now this was Pentecost.
When you know you might have to
evacuate you find yourself in a very interesting position. It makes you take stock of what’s really
important. The first thing is that we would have to figure out how to get the
dogs and cats all in one car. That would be the first thing, the animals. But
after that, what do you take with you? Some pictures? The computer? Some
important papers? Some things your children made? What do you take? What’s
really important? And the more we thought about it we realized that all that
was really important was the dogs and the cats and that everybody got out alive
because all the rest was just stuff.
Well, fortunately, the fire
stayed on the other side of the road and we didn’t have to evacuate. But it
made me rethink things. What are the priorities? What’s really important? The
next day we got up and the hillside was all charred and black. If you have seen
hillsides where there has been a fire, you know and it is not a pretty sight.
Everything was destroyed and burned. And hillside looked like that all summer
long, reminding us of the power of the fire. And then the rains came. And in
the part that was burned the green came up really fast. Because all the left
over from the year before was gone. All the weeds, all the stubble was gone and
all you saw was the green shoots. Then as spring came the wild flowers were
extraordinary. I’ve never seen wildflowers the way they were on that burned
hillside. Everything that would interfere with the wildflowers growing had been
burned away and the ash was a great fertilizer. It was the most beautiful
hillside I’d ever seen.
Wind and fire can be destructive,
can be disorienting. The Holy Spirit can be like that sometimes too. The Holy
Spirit can come upon you all of a sudden. Everything gets turned around. It is
like a tornado, everything that you thought was true gets confused. You don’t
know which way to go; you don’t know what’s important. Everything is up in the
air because you are being transformed. Of course the Holy Spirit sometimes comes
upon you when you need comfort; and when you need comfort it is soothing and
helpful. But other times you need purification, other times the Holy Spirit
comes upon us and burns, burns away the dross, burns away the stuff left over
from our past. Burns away the guilt we still hold onto, burns away the anger we
have at others. Burns away memories we may not even know we have. And sometimes
that can be hard, and that can be painful. But that’s God’s love.
If you have ever been in love,
whether it be with a spouse, or a grandchild, or with Christ, if you have ever
been in love and you have felt that passion of love you know at times it burns.
It burns good, but it burns. When you are not with the person, it hurts, when
you are with the person there is a flame. Everything gets shifted and changed.
Nothing looks the same. Colors are not the same. When you read a love poem,
suddenly it is “Ah, that’s what this is about!” that you never understood
before. Everything has changed.
When the love of God comes upon
us as the Holy Spirit everything is changed. Our ears are open to hear in a new
way. Have you ever been reading scripture or listening to scripture in church
and it might be a passage that you’ve heard many times before, but all of a
sudden a word or a phrase just jumps out at you. It’s like if you are reading
it on the page it’s in bold and it just stands out and suddenly you understand
it in a way you never understood it before. That’s the action of the Holy
Spirit. Opening our hearts and minds to hear.
The Holy Spirit came upon the
disciples for one purpose - to empower them to be sent out. To empower them to
be instruments of God’s love. To empower them to go into the world and say ‘God
loves you. God came as Christ. God wants us all to know that He is with us.’ To
empower them to tell that good news, to share it in whatever way they could.
And it comes to us for the same reason, to empower us to be instruments of
God’s love.
In order to do that we have to be
free of things about us that get in the way. If you are kind of shy and you
don’t like to talk people, well maybe that’s going to get burned up so you can
talk. Or maybe the gift you have is a gift as an artist, but when you were in
fifth grade the art teacher said, you don’t have any talent and you made the mistake
of believing that. The Holy Spirit needs to come in and say ‘nope, they were
wrong. You are an artist.’ There’s
that wonderful passage from Corinthians that talks about that we all have gifts
and they are all different and they are all empowered by the Holy Spirit. And these
gifts are there for one purpose, to strengthen the body of Christ. To empower
us to be sent out into the world as Christ was sent into the world. That’s the
power of love - to transform us and empower us.
When we gather today we invoke
the Holy Spirit. When you in you
life finally say, ‘Okay God, whatever,” God just might take you up on it. And
it will be amazing. Maybe it will feel like fire or like a tornado has gone
through your life, but it will empower you and strengthen you to be the
instrument of love that God intends for you to be.
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