ACTS 2:1-11

PSALM 104:25-32

1 CORINTHIANS 12:4-13

JOHN 20:19-23

 

Sermon – May 15, 2005

 

I love Pentecost.  It is one of my favorite days of the year – and not just because I get to wear red, my favorite color.  I also like it because there is no secular celebration of Pentecost.  There are no ads with a jolly man in a red suit telling people they just have to buy a plasma TV for Pentecost, and no one is dressed up in a rabbit suit telling people to buy their Pentecost candy early so their kids can experience “the real meaning of Pentecost” by over-dosing on chocolate.

No, the only people who are celebrating Pentecost are people who know what it means, who recognize it as one of the most important days of the year for Christians.

So, what does it mean?

Pentecost is the day we celebrate the coming of God the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ followers seven Sundays after Easter (or on the 50^th day of Easter season, hence the name).  The Holy Spirit (who is a person, not a thing, and certainly not “the force”) transformed the small band of Jesus’ followers into a dynamic, empowered, missionary enterprise who fearlessly preached about Jesus in front of the very people who had arrested him and the very people who had crucified him just 52 days before.

“Forgiveness of sins and salvation is possible for people through Christ” they declared, who they proclaimed to be the long-awaited Messiah of the Jews – who also was offering forgiveness and salvation to all Gentiles.

This idea was so radical that the Spirit knew a subtle way of putting it across would not work, so the Spirit briefly empowered Jesus’ followers to speak about Jesus in languages they had never learned, so that those who were in Jerusalem for the Jewish pilgrimage feast celebrating the giving of the law on Mount Sinai could hear about Christ in their own languages.  That’s what our first Bible reading today tells about.

Christianity, let us remember, is a child of Judaism, and all of the followers of Jesus on the beginning of that day – there were 120 in the whole world – were Palestinian Jews.  The reason that none of us had to learn Aramaic or Hebrew – or keep Kosher – to know Christ as Lord and Savior is that on the Day of Pentecost the Spirit made clear that faith in Jesus Christ was to be open to all people, and the Church was to be multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual.

The Holy Spirit’s vision for the church developed rapidly.  The languages listed in this morning’s scriptures come from what are now the modern countries of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Italy and Libya.  A few chapters later we hear of the conversion and baptism of someone we would call the Secretary of the Treasury of the nation of Ethiopia.  In Chapter 13 of Acts we read of the establishment of the first major Christian church outside of the Holy Land, in Antioch (located where Turkey and Syria now meet).  Barnabas was sent there by the original apostles as, essentially, the first missionary bishop in Christian history, and his assistants as leaders of that church, listed in order by Luke, were “Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Mar’a-en a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.”

This church, then, was led by Barnabas (from Cyprus), a black man named Simeon, someone with a Roman name from Libya in North Africa, someone who was an aide to a Jewish ruler under the Romans, and a rather prominent former persecutor of Christians better known to us as Paul.  If you’re looking for signs of ethnic and ideological diversity in the early church, they are pretty easy to find.

Biblical interpreters from early centuries of Christianity saw the Pentecost event as the reversal of the division of humanity at the time of the Tower of Babel, that instead of different languages dividing humanity and fostering suspicion and divisiveness, the diversity of languages and peoples could all be put to the purposes of praising God and serving each other.

St. Paul, in today’s Epistle, talks about how “in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free,” naming the most divisive divisions of his place and time.

And the ultimate biblical vision of unity in diversity is expressed by John of Patmos, who in the Book of Revelation described his vision of heaven.  “There was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” praising God.

Now, there are two fascinating things about the biblical descriptions of Christian community, which come from the pens of Luke, Paul and John of Patmos, and are in accord with the other Gospels as well.  First, no one has to adopt a different culture or ethnicity in order to become Christian.  There is no “melting pot” in these visions, rather a glorious mosaic.

And second, there is no mention of the term “race,” something Americans are so used to hearing about.  The Bible certainly recognized diversities of skin color (though it’s not viewed as important), language, ethnicity and nationality, but the concept of “race” does not exist in the Bible.

This fact makes an important point not just about the Bible, and about history, but also about what Christians – including all of us – are called to do in the 21^st century.

The reason that the concept of race did not exist in the Bible is that the concept of “race” was not invented until less than 500 years ago, when it was invented by Europeans to try to give some pseudo-scientific justification for what was then emerging European efforts to conquer people who looked different from them, which was pretty much everybody.  Those efforts at conquest were pretty successful, as anyone looking at an early 20^th century map of the world could tell.

The concept of “race” was invented by would-be conquerors to define themselves as “superior” human beings whose destiny or duty it was to rule others – what Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden.”  “Race,” in short, was invented by racists to justify their own attitudes, behavior, and power.

If you think this is an outlandish idea, consider two questions.  One, how many races are there in the world?  Two, where does one race end and another one begin?  The answers have varied all over the place between the decades and different countries – including different laws in different American states.

The tale of racism’s impact on world history is a long and sordid one, and it includes the warping of Christianity itself by some people into a vehicle of supremacy for some people and oppression for others, although the true Christian vision – as described in, for example, the Scriptures just cited – had a way of leaking out because the Holy Spirit who came to the disciples on Pentecost is still here on this earth to guide people into all truth, as Jesus told his followers.

On this Day of Pentecost, of all days, we should embrace the Holy Spirit’s vision for the church, recognize how far the church and society have fallen short of that vision – and recognize there is still plenty of work for us to do in this area in the world today.

We have to learn the truth in the Bible, we have to learn how the Bible has been warped and distorted during history in oppressive ways which have produced some of the problems we have in the world today, and we have to learn how much there still is to do.

There is a lot to do both on the level of personal attitudes – what the baptismal vows the parents and godparents will shortly affirm call “sinful desires that draw people from the love of God” – and on the level of structures and institutions of society – what those vows call “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

Let me offer three anecdotes which build from personal attitudes to structures and institutions.  Last month I spent 2Ẅ days in training at an anti-racism workshop sponsored by the Diocese of New Jersey.  (Learning to be anti-racist is based on the sound principle that racism is not something one can ignore or be neutral about, for those attitudes leave it in place.)  We met in a retreat house in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

Ocean Grove can be confusing, and one carload of blacks coming to the workshop got lost.  They asked for directions, and the person they asked offered to have them follow him to the place, help they gladly accepted.  Upon arrival, he then parked, went into the retreat center and asked, “What was going on, that they were in his town.”

And he was the City Manager.

So we’re not just talking about the attitude of an isolated individual, but of one with some power.

Power takes many forms.  It can take the forms of gangs of kids, even – like the gang of older kids who took a five year old boy on his first day of kindergarten, tied him to a tree, spray painted the “n” word on him and threw rocks at him.

The kid’s name was Tiger Woods.

You think he’s ever going to forget that?  And how many other people have had that, or worse, happen to them?

And one more story about racism and power, this one which I heard first-hand from its victim, who is Hmong, a tribe from southeast Asia, a number of whose members immigrated to the United States after the war in Vietnam.  This lady was born in the USA, while her siblings and parents were immigrants.  Tragically, both of her parents had died by the time she was eight.  She and her siblings and their grandmother wanted to continue to live in her parent’s house, which was paid for.  The tribal elders gathered together and developed a plan for making the finances work and child care work for the five children by a team effort by the tribe.

The tribal elders had to present that plan to a judge, for the children had become wards of the State of Wisconsin upon the death of their last surviving parent.  The State of Wisconsin, however, decreed that the idea of extended family had no validity, that the children had to be adopted by a married couple, and in fact the only way all five children would be allowed to stay together was to be adopted by a white couple who lived 400 miles away.

Goodbye to grandmother, goodbye to extended family, goodbye to the tribe, goodbye to their language, their food, their culture, their identity.  Government’s orders.

And, oh yeah, the white couple also abused them.

There are people all over our country, and all over our world, who carry the scars of oppression of one sort or another.  It is the task of Christians today to understand the depth of those wounds, to learn the history, to learn present realities, to look within ourselves, our churches from the local to the global level and all organizations to which we are connected and say “This is not what we are about.”  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about liberation, respect, repentance, forgiveness, healing and new life – starting on this earth in this life, and coming to fruition in the Kingdom of God.

To design our lives as individual Christians and as a community of Christians, and to see how we can make an impact on society in both ways, we need to get back to the Bible and understand God’s vision for the world, to look around us with open eyes and understand how deeply messed up the world is, and dedicate ourselves to doing something about it.

For today at both services, all of us will shortly be invited to reaffirm the baptismal covenant, which includes the question, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”  That’s not an optional extra, that’s part of the basic package.  The Day of Pentecost is a glorious day to remember that, to embrace that call, and to go forward – together, as a glorious mosaic of people which, at our best, reminds us of the original vision of the Church and foreshadows its ultimate, wondrous consummation in the Kingdom of God.

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church