Incarnate for All Time

Reflection on Acts 2:1-21 for Pentecost Sunday 2012 by the Rev. Dr. Kate Hennessy-Keimig

Easter Sunday seems like a long time ago.  Since Easter, I have moved from one home to another, one town to another, said good-bye to one congregation and have started getting to know another, and am wrapping up with my therapy clients in this practice at the same time I am in the process of getting ready to start my new job next month.

From Easter to Pentecost day is fifty days, days that have flown like the wind for me, but in retrospect, seem to wind far back in time.  As I read this lesson from Acts, I find myself wondering what that same time span felt like for Jesus’ disciples.  They too had been through lot of change and transition in the days between Easter and Pentecost. I’m guessing that they had many thoughts and feelings about Jesus, about themselves, about their place in the whole scheme of things.

The big time of transition for them actually started before Easter with the crucifixion and the events that led up to it. All the chaos and pain and betrayal, then Jesus had died, and was buried in the tomb, and for those three endless days there was sadness, grief, despair. There was fear and confusion, anxiety and worry. We might imagine, too that there were feelings of guilt and self-recrimination, thoughts of “How could I?” and “Why didn’t I?”

Then there was Easter morning.  Shock, surprise and wonder…all expectations turned upside down in this wondrous undoing of death.

And in the forty days that followed, Jesus continues to present himself to his friends, letting them know that he was going to be leaving them in a physical sense, impressing on them that now it was going to be their turn to carry on his mission in the world.  During this time with him, the disciples appear to develop   a deeper understanding of what it meant to be “followers of the way."

Then that day came when Jesus did what he had been promising since after his resurrection, and he leaves them, as he tells them, to return to the Father.  Ten days have now passed since he has gone from them again, not dead this time, but “present in absence” after his ascension. 

The disciples are once again gathered as they were after the crucifixion. They seemed to have a sense that there was something larger than themselves that they must be about; that it was time to get organized, to get moving. They replace the vacancy in the leadership and seem to prepare for whatever comes next.  I wonder if they were anxious, not so much about the forces outside themselves, but from the sheer magnitude of what lie before them.  I wonder how they experienced that call to carry on Jesus’ mission in his place, how it was that it settled in them the knowledge that they were now the ones in charge of continuing Jesus' ministry to to forgive the sinners, to heal the sick, to feed the hungry and care for the poor? That it would be their job to speak truth to powerful, to stand for justice, to be the voice of compassion? 

Luke says the Spirit came upon them with the sound of a "rushing wind" and with "tongues of fire" resting on each of them.  This imagery of course calls us back to all those places in the Old Testament where, wind and fire are associated with the presence of God. As it was at the beginning of creation and in the history of Israel, the Spirit of God has been actively showing up, calling people into relationship.  In the New Testament this Spirit shows up even more personally and intimately in Jesus, symbolized by baptism in “water and the spirit” and now present in wind and fire descending on the disciples.

The descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was both a communal and an individual experience. It happened to all of them and it happened to each of them.  Each disciple, filled with the spirit, was given the ability speak in common yet particular languages, allowing each to hear and understand one another, creating and strengthening the bonds of relationship, of community in and with God.

The Pentecost story is a story of individuals like Peter and the other disciples, but it is also the story of the church, it is our story.  Like those in the upper room, each of us has received that same indwelling Spirit of God.  Each of us and all of us are part of the grand sweep of the same story. At baptism we become part of the Christian community as we are baptized with water and the Spirit. This same spirit enlightens, illumines and unites us.  We have many gifts,  expressed in myriad ways, but we all belong to the one God who loves us beyond imagining and who set the grand story in motion.

As we move through the church year we celebrate touch points. Christmas -- the Incarnation, God stepping into history in a new way and changing forever the way we see God and the way we see ourselves.  Then we hear the unfolding story of who this Jesus is, the great both/and who shows us both God is and who we can be, culminating in the story of Easter. This story of Jesus, the Incarnate One, loving us to the end, willing to suffer and die to earthly life so that we might know forever and always that death is never the end of the story.

 And today the Pentecost story reminds us that Jesus is present still, incarnate not only in that time and place, but with us for all time, his Spirit among us and within us.  It reminds us that we too, are an integral part of the story; that this spirit is ours by baptism.  Those gifts of grace from Jesus that are part of our birthright as part of this lineage, given on this birthday of  the church, empower and enable each of us to go and be God’s love to the farthest corners of the earth.

Pentecost

A reflection on the feast of Pentecost by The Rev. Camille Hegg

The Collect for today reads that, ”…on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit…..”

The story of this day is well known in Christian circles. The disciples had an experience which moved them to have some clarity about their mission and how to go about accomplishing it in the world.

As a child when I heard someone say “eternal life” or “everlasting life,” I imagined an endless stream of years. It was time as I knew it then, but with much improved conditions: no sickness, arguing, death, poverty, hunger, but lots of fun things to do. Since I have always liked to sing I imagined I would be in a choir of angels. But everything was just better.
As I got older I started thinking, pondering. Somewhere along the way I decided that eternity is too long a time for this loving God I learned about at church to hold a grudge and send someone to hell.

I began to think there is more to eternal life than an endless string of years and activities. It seemed to me that eternal life is not something that may or may not be granted after death as a reward for good behavior. Eternal life has to do with actions and responses here on earth that don’t go away, are not changed, just because the person – someday me – dies.

Once I was visiting someone in the hospital and only on that day I took a notion to leave by a side door which I almost never used. When I got outside to the steps and the sidewalk to the parking lot, there was a parishioner sitting on the steps crying. I slowed down; she obviously didn’t see me. I approached her very quietly and gently said, “Is there something I can do for you?” She looked up and smiled and said, “God told you to come this way, right?” I said I couldn’t explain it and that yes, I usually leave by the front entrance.

We talked for a few minutes and she never said anything about what had brought her to the sidewalk steps to cry. After a couple of minutes’ I stood to leave. She stood up and hugged me and said, “I will never forget this.”

Years later when I was preparing to leave that church for another call, she hugged me and said she had never forgotten what it had meant to her that I spoke to her that day. As she hugged me she whispered, “The Holy Spirit brought you that day.” That does seem like a work of the Holy Spirit and apparently nothing had changed her mind either. It seems eternal to me. I was only the one privileged enough to have an idea to go out that door.

Over the years I feel more and more convinced, assured that ‘eternal life’ is not a marker, nor a yard stick, nor a set of checks that offsets the x-marks which keep score and will be tallied when I die.

God sees past, present and future all at the same time. We don’t. Everything is present for God. Eternal life is the ability to see life as God sees it and maybe after we die we see things that way, too. Now we get only a glimpse every now and then and those glimpses come as they will. We can’t create them. I think she was right, that was the Holy Spirit that brought breath to me, inspired me, to take another exit that day. That is what won’t change; that is eternal.

I used to assume that eternity is static, not changing. But eternity is that which doesn’t go away even if one dies or forgets an event. That eternity implies life, movement, growth.

There is a beautiful prayer in the burial service which is that we pray that the person who has died will go “from strength to strength..” That phrase expresses a faith that life is always moving, changing, learning. Another prayer states that was believe that things have changed, not ended.” I think those are great prayers for us everyday.

Knowledge of God is not acquiring something or information. It is an ever deepening relationship with God. The love, power and wisdom of God are infinite and can never be complete. The wind of the Holy Spirit is forever breathing into us and into creation.