The Cost of Pentecost

I'm back from vaca/convention.  Did you miss me?  Don't all speak up at once.

One of the Sundays that I was gone for was this most recent Sunday, the day of Pentecost.  Which I am sorry that I missed, because I like Pentecost.  Not just for the obvious reasons that it's one of the high holy days of the year, not just because it's one of the days that we celebrate the working of the Holy Spirit in the world, but for reasons that are integral to our identity as protestant Christians in the here and now.  I'll explain.

The message of the Christian faith has always, perpetually, been one of the movement of God towards people.  It's been a message of the distance between God and humanity, and Him trying to close that gap.  You see, the difference between our faith and what we would expect, is that it's not a story of you trying desperately, against all odds, to reach God.  We think it would be, of course.  We expect that it would be, because that's the plucky underdog story that we all want to have, and to experience.  We want it to be a voyage of self-discovery, a journey in which we climb up a mountain, Moses-style, and see the face of God.

But that, that isn't Christianity.  Not really.  That's more akin to a Greek mythology understanding of how the gods work.  An understanding that there is a mountain, and that you can climb that mountain, and get all the way up there and there see the Lord your God face to face.  It's that understanding, that idea of God, that lead Nikita Krusch

ev to say these words about Yuri Gagarin about his orbit above the earth as the first man in space:

"Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there."

Yeah.  Because you can't climb that mountain.  Because it's not a real mountain.  and even stretching this metaphor out as far as we can, viewing even space and orbit as a mountain, you can't climb that high.  It's not possible.  Because God isn't accessible in that way.  If you will, for a second, go with me into this journey in which it's a one way street.  There is a great chasm fixed between these things, and you can't voyage freely between them.

So, what's to be done?  Well, quite the opposite of what had happened up until that time.  Think of the people of God, and who they were back then.  In the Roman empire, the Hebrews were sensibly called Hebrews because they spoke Hebrew.  I know, crazy, right? But this is a thing!  How do you get to be a responsible adult in the eyes of the congregation?  Through the Bar Mitzvah, which involves reading of the Torah in Hebrew, or at the very least pronouncing the blessing in Hebrew.  How do you become a Muslim?  By pronouncing the Shahada in Arabic.  That's all you have to do to convert to Islam.   And for the initial Christian community, that was still a fundamental break that they had, in which they were Christians, sure, but Christians still in a very set apart way, so that in order to worship their God, you were going to have to eat their food, speak their language, and so on.  This was a major dispute and discussion amongst that earliest group of Christians.

Until pentecost.  Pentecost is where that all got flipped on its head.  It got flipped upside down.  In the festival of Pentecost, you have the first real, genuine understanding of how significant the incarnation of Jesus actually is.  It's not just a teacher coming to his pupils to explain how to be nice to each other, and it's not just a matter of Jesus blessing his people, it's a matter of God coming into this world, with all its languages, all its people, and being a blessing to all of them.

All the people who were there that day, ard the disciples speaking in their own language.
Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Lybia near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts, Cretans and Arabs. And Pentecost is still a rallying cry for us in the here and now.  It's still a matter for us to consider, for us to work with, because we, we who are Protestant Christians, have to continue to live out the Pentecost message.  Even when we don't want to.  Because my gosh, we don't want to.

Now, you can possibly make the case for us continuing to translate the Bible into a wide variety of languages (as we ought), or about how we should offer German services, or whatever (as we ought), but it's about the essence of the culture of our churches, and about the culture of our worship.  For you see, what we say to people who are wandering around, who are seeking spiritual fulfillment, is that they must integrate themselves into our church culture, our language, our way of doing things.  We tell them, not in outright words, but in how we show ourselves, that folks need to conform themselves to what we're doing, even if it's non-Biblical.  Even if it's just the culture of this particular place, even if it's the beat of the music, or organ vs guitar
, or coffee after the service vs during the service, any of these things, it comes down to us insisting that the outside world has to conform to our culture in order to be a part of what we do.

And that just straight up isn't right.  Although a lot of the early disciples had in mind that their food, their language, their way of looking at the world was right, and that other people from outside their experience were going to have to fit into that in order to approach the throne of the Living God.  But the whole point of the incarnation of Jesus was that he came into the world and met people where they were.  He learned the language of the people he was with.  He ate their food.  He worked for them in their world.  He became in every way (except sin, obvy) like them, and made the God, the up high on the mountain God, the far off unapproachable God, all of a sudden easy to find and easy to see.  And his humanity makes the unknowable knowable.  With every word he says, with every action he takes, he emphasizes the nature of what by definition must happen, that God comes to his people, no matter who they are.  No matter how filthy the world is, no matter how broken down it is, no matter how full it is of wildly imperfect people, it's the world that God came to redeem.

So what's our job?  Preach the word in season and out of season, and to make the word of God as accessible, as straightforward as possible for everyone.  It's about not putting up additional barriers around this word of God, it's about not making it more difficult for people who are outside, about not hiding this under a bushel, but allowing it to shine.  And each time we insist on someone getting to our level before they're allowed in the door, it's one more bushel on top of the lamp.  Or, in a sense, it's us pulling down the blinds of our house, and saying that the light is only for us who are already inside.

It's so wonderful that the story of Easter naturally lends itself to the story of Pentecost.  They're all connected.  The people living in darkness have seen a great light.  It's up to us, as people living in the light of the empty tomb, to not build boxes and scaffolds around the tomb and charge admission, and only if you're from a certain place, and all that.  It's about pulling down all the layers added up over time, and letting the incarnate Christ speak in words of power that are still for today.

PJ.