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Pentecost
by barry brake
editor's note: this is the second in a series on the Christian calendar by Barry Brake - a special to Communiqué
There's a great moment--one of the unappreciated great moments in music--about two-thirds of the way through Richard Wagner's Love-Feast of the Apostles. The chorus is telling the story of that shattering Sunday, in gorgeous a cappella phrases: how the apostles were gathered together praying and singing, when suddenly a huge noise comes like a rushing wind that shakes the whole house, and they are filled with the Spirit of God. Just in that place in the music, you hear--catching the breath--the sound of instruments playing. Instruments! Strings, and then a full orchestra, which then ravishes the chorus for the rest of the piece. Even if you know it's coming, and have heard it before, it's a thrill. Just thinking about that flood of music, those sumptuous fiery burgundy sounds, filling the eardrums after thirty minutes of nothing but male voices, makes me have to get up and walk around muttering and on the edge of tears for a while.
As usual, Wagner hit on the perfect musical depiction of an idea: finally, the Spirit of God pours itself down on humans, giving us depth and richness, giving us a new dimension, a new way of knowing God and of relating to the world around us. Giving us something where we had nothing. Like singing all alone, and suddenly hearing a full orchestra playing along with you.
That's Pentecost.
PENTECOST Proto Indo European *dekm, *penkwe Greek pente- five, -konta ten times *pent_e_konta fifty pent_e_cost_e_ fiftieth day
Pentecost n (first in print before the 12th century): a Christian feast on the seventh Sunday after Easter commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles. Called Whitsunday or Whitsuntide, for the white clothing of those being baptized
Like Easter, which was a redirecting of Passover, Pentecost is based on a feast of ancient Israel. God laid it out for them, recorded for us in Leviticus Chapter 23: It was a harvest festival, sometimes called the Feast of Weeks because it's seven weeks--actually fifty days to the day--after Passover. That puts it on a Sunday.
Pentecost as we know it happened fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead. In Acts Chapter 2 Luke tells us about what must be the strangest day in Christian history: they were all together, and the whoosh, and tongues of fire settling on the twelve, and the Holy Spirit filling them, and strange words coming out of their mouths. And people understanding those words, hearing their own languages. Accusations, weirdness. A great sermon by none other than Saint Peter the Loser. And three thousand people whooshing into the Kingdom of God in one day. Talk about a harvest festival.
Pentecost is the Easter of Easter's Lent. For forty days we fasted and prayed, and then for fifty days we celebrated and sang; now we go. Now we preach, plod, work, live, reach, move. Assisted and enriched, filled--orchestrated--by the Holy Spirit of God.
I love to imagine what the prophet Joel was thinking when he envisioned the day God's Spirit would be poured out on all flesh--the day when not just a few but whoever will would be filled to overflowing. The day that Peter, filled with that spirit, quoted Joel's words. I think Joel probably trembled and cried some. One Wednesday evening last July some of us had a truly supernatural time of worship. We just couldn't stop singing, and we were, as we are, filled with the Holy Spirit. Radiant. Radiating. And we said to each other, "This is what Joel was talking about." The Spirit of God being poured out on our ordinary flesh. Starting with Pentecost, the holy comforter that Jesus promised, the holy presence of God that would fill us up and work within us, actually came, and got to work.
I think we who live on the Anno Domini side of things don't quite appreciate that. Think: We've got the Spirit of God inside us. That would have knocked Abraham over. And the great thing is that as soon as they were filled with the Spirit they started talking.
I also love to imagine what it must have been like for some of those foreigners who had come from who knows where to Jerusalem to do this feast. The exasperation of trying to get across the simplest ideas--where can I get a room, where can I get food, how much does that cost, how many drachmas is a shekel again?--and the inevitable hilarity of dealing every day with people you don't understand and who don't understand you; and then one day, hearing your very own language flowing out with the most beautiful words you ever heard. Anyone who ever spent some time in a foreign land knows that just hearing the train schedule spoken with no accent at all can make you cry. Not to mention hearing poetry. Not to mention what they heard that day.
So, fellow Christians, as we celebrate Pentecost, and as that celebration is thrust forward every day till November 29th, I remind you that you are filled with the Spirit. That you have that way of relating to God that folks before us didn't have.
And that that means you can finally speak a language people can understand.
Pentecost is the event that marks the end of the "high" part of the Church Year. For the rest of the year, we name our Sundays for how many weeks they fall after Pentecost. (Or in some churches Trinity Sunday, which is the week after Pentecost, and is sort of a reverberation of it: the idea is that we've experienced the Father and then the Son, and now the Holy Spirit, so we celebrate that the Trinity has been revealed to us.) Anyway, that's it till Advent: today is the nth day after Pentecost, we say.
Which brings us to the central paradox of Pentecost: if you look at the "low" part of the Church Year as boring, or somehow less than the other part that starts again at Advent, then you are missing out. It would be like saying Sunday is great, and the rest of the week is not much. Actually, Sunday is our day off, and the other days are our days on; the other days are when we get things done.
In the same way, the high season is when we celebrate--celebrate Advent, Lent, Easter. Celebrate by richness, plainness, exuberance; by feasting, fasting, feasting again. But the low season is when we get to the work of our Heavenly Father. And its initial holiday is Pentecost, when we commemorate the Church's first big event: when God's Spirit came to those apostles and the first thing they did was go out into the messy, political, ordinary, crowded world and preach the Gospel of Christ.
So it's a bit unfair that we associate Pentecost merely with "speaking in tongues" or "being filled with the Spirit," because although those are essential parts of the story, they are not the whole story: Pentecost is also the day they stepped out blinking into the heat, and started preaching and getting questioned and bringing people to Jesus Christ. It was the birthday of the Church, complete with political hassles, astonishing triumphs, head-counting, crying, laughing, getting wet.
A pastor of mine, every Sunday at the end of the worship service, said the same thing: "We have worshiped; now the service begins."
So, friends, we have worshiped; and for the rest of the year we serve. What I like is that worship is what brings service, and, as the apostles found out that day, service is what brings worship.
Both of the churches I went to in college told us what Sunday it was every Sunday. Right at the top of the bulletin, it would say: "First Sunday of Advent" or "Third Sunday of Lent" or "Twelfth Sunday after Trinity" or "Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost" (those last two are the same day, remember). At the time I thought the ones during Advent, Lent, and Easter were manageable, only being a few Sundays, but that the ones that counted after Pentecost were an exhausting exercise in marking time--boy, we can't come up with a holiday, so we'll just count how many Sundays it is after Pentecost so we can fill in that line at the top of the bulletin--but now I see the beauty of it. It's a way of being haunted by Pentecost, that spirit-filled, action-filled day. It's a way of saying that the book of Acts was never finished because we're still in it. It gives a highness to the low season, ennobling it with a divine purpose, the way Christ ennobled this world by coming back to life in it, and the way he further ennobled it by instructing us to go out into it and baptize it, and the way we ennoble it by getting up off our knees and going about the business of living, utterly changed.
I've never heard Love-Feast of the Apostles live before--it's hard enough to get a recording of it--but the experience, sitting in front of a stereo and hearing that orchestra just plop in from nowhere, is something that can't happen in a concert hall. After all, the full orchestra is sitting there throughout the whole thing, waiting to play, so you know it's coming. Throughout the piece you hear these unadorned a cappella voices, knowing that the orchestra is counting the measures, waiting for the cue, and at some point you'll hear Full Wagner. Then you see them stir, and raise their instruments, fingering the strings and valves in anticipation. It takes away the surprise, perhaps, but the piece has to be richer for that knowledge, that delicious tension as you brace yourself for what's about to hit.
The more I think about it, the more I see that the concert hall experience is a God's-eye view of what happened. It may be exciting to picture the Holy Spirit bursting in from nowhere, onto these unsuspecting people; but far more exciting to picture the heavenly host, watching this all happen, knowing that the Spirit of God is sitting, preparing, waiting patiently for the cue.
Downbeat is this Sunday. Don't be late.