When you were growing up what traditional meal did you have on Pentecost Sunday? We have our traditional Christmas and Easter dinners, but not on Pentecost. The feast has none of the trappings of a big holiday for us: no exchange of gifts, a tree with colored lights, egg hunts, or new wardrobes. Pentecost is treated like just another Sunday on our calendars. We don’t exchange Pentecost cards, or visit family and friends bearing Pentecost gifts. For most of the people coming to church this day it’s just another Sunday — only it has a special name. Nor do we expect big crowds attending church today as on Christmas and Easter.
But in the church year Pentecost is on a par with Easter. Maybe it is good that there is no fuss in our culture for this feast, because it gives us a chance to focus on its importance and meaning for our church and our personal lives. While it may seem this way, the Spirit doesn’t just pop in on this day like a newly arrived visitor needing introductions to those assembled in church. The Spirit has been present with us throughout the history of salvation.
The Hebrew word for “spirit” is also the word for “breath” and “wind.” As we read in the opening verses of Genesis, the Spirit (“wind”) hovered over the watery chaos. This “wind,” brings order out of the chaos. When Genesis describes God creating the first human it takes place in two steps. First, God forms him from the clay, but there is no life in the clay. God breathes life into the clay form and then there is a living human being.
Recalling this first occurrence of the Spirit gives us pause. God continues to breathe life into the dead places of our lives and the world. God’s Spirit has not stopped creating, not stopped breathing into our lifeless situations, deteriorating relationships, conflicts and hopelessness. No situation is beyond the life-giving possibility of the Spirit’s breath.
It is true that Pentecost doesn’t have the cultural trappings of the other secular and religious holidays — “60 days till Christmas!” But this gives us an occasion to focus on the feast and the possibilities the Spirit offers for our lives. We celebrate God’s love today; God’s constant outreach, offering life even in the seeming-impossible places and conditions of our world. Replay in your imagination God’s breathing into lifeless clay, creating life. It’s a powerful image that can give us hope when we see no hope.
God’s Spirit was active throughout the history of the Chosen people. The Spirit was given to those called to lead the people and the Spirit raised the prophets to call the wayward people back to God’s ways when they went astray. The Spirit was active throughout Jesus’ life, from the moment of his conception, at his baptism and in the signs and wonders he performed. Before Jesus returned to his Father he promised the Spirit to those who had followed him.
Today’s gospel begins in an atmosphere of mystery and anticipation. The disciples have locked themselves in a room out of fear. Mary Magdalene had reported the good news of the resurrection to them. Peter and the Beloved Disciple had gone to the tomb and found it empty. The suspense builds. What’s happened? What are we to believe? How can this be? What should we do next?
Amid the disciples’ fear and confusion the resurrected Jesus appears and bids them peace. He commissions them and gives them his Spirit so they can carry out their mission. John describes the giving of the Spirit by Jesus breathing on them. One recalls Genesis and God’s breathing into lifeless clay at the creation of the first human. What could be more dead than clay? Can you imagine a more dispirited group than Jesus’ shattered, fearful and disillusioned disciples — they are like that clay? But even here nothing is beyond the life-giving power of the Spirit. Having been given the gift of the Spirit the disciples, with their history of failure and dispersion, will be formed into a church that will leave their confined quarters and go to proclaim the risen Christ they have personally experienced.
There are two ways we come to faith. The first, is what the disciples experienced, an encounter with the risen Lord. The second, is through the Spirit-filled witness of those who have passed on the faith to us by their testimony and lives. Can you name those who have done that for you: been witnesses in word and deed to the risen Christ?
We can’t prove the “fact” of the resurrection to everyone’s satisfaction. Nor can we prove God created the world. What we do have, in our messed up world, are the people who are powerful signs of the active presence of the Spirit: peacemakers and those who practice forgiveness, mercy justice and reconciliation. Where do these powerful signs of the convincing reality of a good and beneficent God come from? These witnesses give evidence that God does, what God has done from the beginning, continues to breathe into formless clay to bring life into our world — again and again.
In parish neighborhoods where I have preached retreats, I’ve noticed signs of religion everywhere: people wearing crosses, rosaries hanging from rear-view mirrors, T-shirts proclaiming, “God loves you,” houses with statues of St. Francis or the Blessed Mother on their front lawns. All well and good.
But on this feast of the enlivening and invigorating Spirit questions come to mind. Are we responding with the new breath of the Spirit to Jesus’ mandate to go and be his witnesses? Are we forgiving our enemies, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger? Or, is our faith merely expressed in religious symbols and perfunctory church attendance. Have we inhaled the breath of our God, changed our lives and discovered our own vocation to be witnesses to the risen Christ?