In the unforgettable
words of Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back
in.”
For the majority
of you who have no idea who I am, I’m Gary Hall. I worked on the staff here for
11 years—George’s last five, Ed’s first six. In 2001 I left All Saints for a
15-year whirlwind ecclesiastical tour of the U.S., stopping in Philadelphia, Chicago,
Detroit, and Washington. Given the craziness of this year’s presidential
process, it seems I left the District of Columbia just in time. Now I’m back
here, ready, in retirement, to perp walk yet another rector through an All
Saints transition. If I believed in reincarnation, I might wonder, “Was it something
I did in a former life?” Socializing a new rector to All Saints is not pretty,
but somebody has to do it. “Just when I
thought I was out... they pull me back in.”
But let’s not get
ahead of ourselves. Today is Pentecost, the day on which we celebrate the
coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’s companions 10 days after his Ascension. If
you are like me, the word “Pentecost” conjures up images of people speaking in
tongues, rolling around on the floor in ecstasy, screaming how Jesus wants
everyone to use gender appropriate bathrooms. “Pentecost” elides easily into
“Pentecostal”, but there’s a world of difference between the two.
The word
“Pentecost” does not mean “slain in the Spirit” or anything like it. In Greek,
“Pentecost” means “fiftieth”: today is the fiftieth day after Easter. In the
New Testament chronology, Jesus rises three days after Good Friday, and then he
spends forty days after his Resurrection restored to his companions. But he
cannot seemingly stay forever. So ten
days ago on Ascension Day-- the fortieth day after Easter—Jesus departed for
good and told his friends to wait for what will come next. This ten-day period—the gap between the
fortieth or Ascension Day and the fiftieth day or Pentecost—is the time
theologian Karl Barth called “the significant pause”. It is a time of waiting,
watching, and (yes) feeling anxious. We
have been left alone here. We have been promised a renewed presence. But who
will it be and what will it look like? These
ten days are an epitome of the faithful person’s existential dilemma: we’re left
alone in silence and waiting for God to act. The disciples stay in Jerusalem
together, and all they can do is pray and wait.
This ten day
significant pause between Ascension and Pentecost gives us a compelling picture
of an anxious community gathered in expectation. After working with a group of
dedicated companions for personal peace and social justice in a dynamic and
compassionate community, and after a long lead-up to his final departure—a charismatic
faith leader has left his followers seemingly on their own waiting for what’s
next, with only a promise of something new to follow. The community anxiously awaits
the arrival of the one who will take them on the next steps of their missional journey.
Sound familiar? Who says
the Bible isn’t relevant? This could be Jerusalem in 33 AD or Pasadena in 2016.
Or it could be both.
Today’s celebration of
Pentecost is both a remembrance of what happened then and an enactment of what
happens now. Here is how the book of Acts describes the original fiftieth day:
When the day of Pentecost
had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from
heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the
entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared
among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with
the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them
ability. [Acts 2: 1-4]
On the fiftieth day of
Easter then, the Jerusalem Christians
got their answer. The Spirit of God came upon them in tongues of fire,
empowering them each and all not only to speak and hear each other, but also
transforming their hearts and minds. On the fiftieth day of Easter now, what might be on offer for us here,
today? In neither situation does the answer to God’s on-going presence with us
rest in the arrival of one flesh-and-blood person. Pentecost is not about a
replacement Jesus or a brand new Ed Bacon. Pentecost is about something
radically different. In both Jerusalem and Pasadena, the companions of Jesus are
called dramatically into the center of things in a whole new way.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus
makes this promise to his companions:
If you love me, you will
keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another
Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world
cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him,
because he abides with you, and he will be in you. [John 14: 15-17]
The word rendered as “Advocate” is the Greek word παράκλητος—or in
English “Paraclete”—and παράκλητος means a few distinct
things. In New Testament times, a Paraclete was an “advocate” in our
traditional sense, one who pleads another’s case before a judge. Jesus is
promising us a counsel for the defense. But a Paraclete was also one who
intercedes, prays for, acts on behalf of, someone else. So in promising us a Paraclete Jesus is
promising us someone who will pray for and with us. Moreover, a Paraclete is
also a helper, an assistant, one who stands by and with us when the going gets
rough. So in promising us a Paraclete, Jesus is promising us someone who will
help us do and become the people God wants us to be.
When we talk in
the church about the Holy Spirit, we often make her sound somewhat gaseous,
like an aerosol spray floating around in the ether someplace—a kind of cosmic
air freshener. When Jesus himself talks
about the Holy Spirit, he does so in these words: defense counsel, intercessor, helper. The Holy Spirit is not some vague divine
ghost in the atmosphere. The Holy Spirit is God standing in, with, and among
us.
I have recently
become a fan of the work of Monica Youn, a poet and lawyer who teaches at
Princeton and regularly appears in the New
Yorker magazine. In a recent poem
(“Goldacre”, June 1, 2015) she writes these intriguing words:
the young morning
grommeted
with minutes
threaded
with wisps of wool
Now that line is part of
a larger argument, but its reading depends on understanding the word
“grommeted”. A “grommet” is a metal eyelet placed in a hole to allow a string
to run through it. Think of a shoelace hole. In Monica Youn’s sense, a grommet
is a hole made useful. When she talks
about the young morning being grommeted with minutes, she is suggesting that we
have made the gracious gift of time “useful” by cutting it up into measurable
bits. Grommeting takes things wild and unruly like holes and time and makes
them useful. But in domesticating these things, grommeting deprives them of
their wildness.
Grommeting: Isn’t this what we in the church have done
with the Holy Spirit? In ancient Greek
religion, the sibyls received the wild gift of prophetic speech. The religious establishment
made this ecstatic prophecy useful by turning it into an oracle at Delphi where
the wild spirit could be commercially available on demand. In the same way, the church took the Holy
Spirit and we forced her into a grommet. We made her useful, tame,
institutionally reliable. Here was this wild gift where each person received what
Jesus calls elsewhere “power from on high” (Luke 24:49) and we caught her,
organized her, and tried to build a structure around her so that we could tell
you, “The Holy Spirit will be reliably available at 132 North Euclid Avenue on
Sundays at 7:30, 9, and 11:15.” Child care provided. We told you that we had
the Spirit and you didn’t, and if you wanted to get a piece of her you had to
come to us, the Spirit’s official licensed distributors. We tried to make the Spirit useful. We grommeted her, turning her into something
like the official deodorant of the National League.
The trouble, of course,
is that the Spirit we heard about this morning, the Spirit Jesus promises us,
the One we come to know in places like this but also out in the natural world
and in the prophetic justice work of the Gospel—that Spirit is neither domestic,
tame, nor useful. That Spirit refuses to be grommeted. She is wild and free, an
expression of the One at the center of the cosmos, the One we know in Jesus,
the One who speaks in and through each of us when we are becoming the people God
made and calls us to be.
Friends, I have spent
forty years of my life serving and representing the institutional church, and
nothing I say here should be taken as a disavowal of all the wonderful ways our
structures forward the mission of the Gospel.
But let us not delude ourselves. Let us not confuse the institutional
church with the Spirit of God. The witness of scripture, the witness of
countless people who have gone before us, is that the Sprit of God is wild,
free, and available to all. When the Spirit descended on the gathered community
in Acts, she did so in flames of fire. She came not to one but to all. And if
you read the next chapters of Acts, you’ll see how the Spirit sent them out
into the streets of Jerusalem, not only proclaiming the name of Jesus but also
finding and serving the lame, the blind, the lepers, the sinners, the lost, and
calling them into a new transformed community of love, justice, healing, and
peace.
“Just when I thought I
was out... they pull me back in.” Kathy and I are so happy to be back here. I
am thrilled once again to be part of a community that seeks to claim and know
that Spirit in its prayer, its community life, and in its witness. And speaking
as one who loves this place and its people, I would remind us that Pentecost
came not in a single human being but in a spirit of love, power, and joy that
transformed a community so that we could transform the world.
The Spirit of God will
not be grommeted. Try as we might, we cannot make her useful, domesticated, or
safe. She calls us onward into new and sometimes dangerous places. I know we’re
all eager to meet the new rector, but as qualified and charismatic as he or she
will certainly be, the next rector of All Saints Church will not be the exclusive
official representative of the Holy Spirit on earth or even in Pasadena. Pentecost suggests that the Spirit is alive
and at work right now, in you, in me, in us, in ways we cannot ask for or
imagine or even understand. She calls us to new work, new hope, new service.
Our Paraclete is not someone awaited from the outside. Our Paraclete is here
among and in us now, calling us to invite a new leader as our sister or brother
into the good thing we’ve already got going on to help shape and build its next
iteration for the years ahead.
Michael Corleone was
right: “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.” We’re all in
this together. Let us not grommet the Spirit. Let us not grommet the next
rector. Let us not grommet ourselves. We
have been clothed with power from on high. It’s all going to be all right. Amen.
