Good morning! In typical June fashion here at St. James, we have a LOT going on today, all of it joyous. First we have the baptism of little Penelope Doherty. Her brother and cousins were baptized here two years ago. The Doherty’s are members of our parish and it’s a joy celebrating this big occasion with them.
Today we’re also bestowing an important award at St James. It’s named for Audrey Davies, and is meant to commemorate her example of outstanding service. This year it goes to Ocean Mills. A big welcome to her family and especially her parents, Charles and Kathleen, here from California.
I won’t pretend for a second I need to tell you who Ocean is or why she deserves this accolade. We all know her by what she’s accomplished here. Ocean, you’ve been a force for so much good at St James over the last years, decades even, of your time here. I’ve personally enjoyed working with you. You’ve challenged and strengthened me. You’ve encouraged and inspired others. You have a real talent for making things happen.
Please continue that. And I hope that you’ll build in some R&R for yourself after these last two particularly rigorous years. Can others here help hold her to that? Mom and Dad: do you have that sort of sway over her?!
We’ll hear more about all this at the announcements, but again, we are grateful for your work.
Last but certainly not least, Today is the Day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church, a major feast, one of the four traditional days for baptisms in the year, and the day on which we remember the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples all those years ago, as told in the Book of Acts.
Fifty days after the resurrection, ten days after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, the disciples are waiting in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when a wind rushes in, drives them out into the street where they’re swept up by the Spirit and made to speak in all sorts of languages they’d never spoken before. Around them are people from all over the Jewish diaspora, there in Jerusalem for the Jewish feast of Shavuot (still being celebrated this time of year by our Jewish brothers and sisters), and these pilgrims from out of town marvel that their own languages are being spoken by the disciples, just like that.
Bystanders catch wind of all this and wonder whether the disciples are drunk, but I’ve never understood how you can mistake people who intelligibly erupt into a foreign language like they’ve been speaking it all their lives are drunk. It seems to me That would take some real sober concentration. But never mind that, or all the things in this story that don’t quite add up. It isn’t here for us to analyze and make sense of. In fact, this story should check those impulses in us--the need for order, for sense, everything to line up.
The Day of Pentecost is an important yearly reminder to Christians that the Church wasn’t founded in rooms with people writing up documents explaining things. It wasn’t founded in a pretty building surrounded by polished brass and fresh-laundered linens and pointed Psalms, each note mapped out on a graph for order and harmony with not a stray note to be found. The Church was founded in the street, in a raucous, joyful mess--not drunk, mind you! But pushing the boundary of decency just a little. Maybe more than a little. OK…a lot more than a little.
A parishioner from my former parish used to always call Pentecost Sunday Pentecostal Sunday. I never had the heart to correct her. She would stand up and remind everyone to wear red on Pentecostal Sunday, to bring a covered dish for the picnic, and so on. The potluck sign up sheet in the undercroft even said in really big red letters across the top, Pentecostal Sunday and I let it stand, warily. I mean, I worried it might scare a few new members off, hearing it described that way.
Pentecostal Christians are those whose worship is ecstatic, riotous, who speak in tongues, language inspired by the Holy Spirit. They often meet in store-front churches, broadcast on television, heal people in dramatic displays, throwing them backward (and all that). They point to this story and say that their worship looks a whole lot more (certainly than ours) like that of the first Christians. Whereas calling this The Day of Pentecost, as we do in the Episcopal Church, makes clear that may be talking today about the Holy Spirit, but it’s just for today and it’s not really that out of control, or if it was it’s not anymore, so please don’t worry.
I have two quotes to share about the Holy Spirit. I wrote them down many years ago. The first is from an essay in Poetry Magazine: “One does not invite the Holy Spirit into one’s life and expect it to operate on one's own terms, as a sort of butler to the soul.”
Inviting Into our Lives, the Holy Spirit (as we do on Pentecost) is inviting in The Unpredictable, the Ecstatic, the Silly, the Passionate, Exuberant side of life that we’re told to tamp down, to keep in check. It can also be an invitation into our lives of disorder--what some Christians call “holy disorder”--the uncomfortable but occasionally necessary upending, rearranging, of our lives in order to grow spiritually.
It’s true, the Holy Spirit often doesn’t operate on our terms, which tend towards stasis and safety. I know this can be hard for Episcopalians to hear, but Disorder is as holy as Order sometimes, and today we acknowledge and embrace that truth.
The other quote, from a sermon I read years ago and saved, says: “Too much word [“word” representing the more controlled, rational side of our faith or our life] “Too much Word and we dry up; too much spirit and we blow up; equal parts word and spirit and we grow up.”
This is not a crowd, That needs to be told, Live more in your head, not in your heart. Pentecost Sunday might fall when we’re super busy and preoccupied with all the other cares of life and wrapping up the year, but that’s exactly why it needs to be so loud. We need this message. The Holy Spirit is what makes us grow, as Christians, and as human beings.
So on this happy day with so much to celebrate, we invite as our guest--not that it needs our invitation--the Holy Spirit. We invite it, and then we accept it, on its terms. Amen