The feast of Pentecost that we celebrate today has its roots
in an ancient Jewish agricultural festival.
It was originally a thanksgiving ritual for the spring wheat harvest
known as Shavuot in Hebrew. Shavuot
means “weeks” and it marked the counting of the seven weeks of days between
Passover and Shavuot, or fifty
days. The first fruits of the wheat
harvest were brought to the priest and offered in thanksgiving to God for
sustaining the life of the people.
In the Levitical prescription for the observance of the
festival, we also find this admonition: “When you reap the harvest of your
land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the
gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien:
I am the Lord your God.”[1] This ritual recognized that life is a gift,
and that honoring this gift requires the practice of justice and mercy.
Perhaps given its celebration in relationship to the
Passover festival, Shavuot eventually
became associated with the giving of the Law (Torah). Remember that the Passover festival
celebrates the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. According to tradition, fifty days elapsed
between the exodus from Egypt and the arrival at Mt. Sinai, where Moses
received the Torah from God. The Torah
constitutes a covenant between God and the Jewish people, creating a new
community. Shavuot thus celebrates not only the gift of life, but the gift of
freedom, and the grace of a way of life that preserves both.
What is important to notice here is that the Jewish covenant
is a response to God’s liberating and life-giving love, and its observance is
ordered toward the preservation and expansion of a way of life centered on that
love. Thus, the Jewish covenant isn’t a
privilege enjoyed by a single people, so much as it is a vocation to model a
way of life that opposes the injustice and cruelty of empire.
In the Greek speaking world, Shavuot became known as Pentecost, the “fiftieth day.” When the disciples of Jesus were gathered in
Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, they were there to observe Shavuot.
By then, it had become one of the three annual Jewish pilgrimage
festivals, bringing Jews from all over the world to Jerusalem to worship in the
Temple. But this Shavuot was different. Around
the time of Passover that year, Jesus had been crucified outside the walls of
the city. Then, God raised him from the
dead, and he appeared to his disciples in a resurrected body – similar, yet
different, from the Jesus they had known – for some forty days before ascending
into heaven.
Now, about 120 remaining disciples are together for Shavuot, praying and trying to make
sense of all that has happened. It is
here that they receive a fresh outpouring of God’s Spirit, a renewed
understanding of the covenant in light of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and
ascension. Through Jesus, they have
experienced God’s liberating and life-giving love in a new way, and begin to
reimagine what it means to be the people of God. The
Acts of the Apostles invite us to see the Easter – Pentecost experience in
terms of the Passover – Shavuot
experience: the birth of an alternative community in opposition to empire.
One way of reading the biblical story is as the history of a
people struggling to reimagine again and again, under different circumstances,
what it means to be a community centered on God’s love. This is what distinguishes a spiritual
community from other kinds of communities.
Martha Campbell defines a spiritual community “as a group of individuals
who recognize a mutual sense of belonging which is centered in God’s Spirit and
in their deep desire for and love of God.”[2]
What kind of community to we want to become?
What does it look like for our common life to be centered on God’s love
in our time and place?
It would be easier if there were a single, once and for all
answer to this question, but different circumstances call forth different
responses. The annual observance of Shavuot/Pentecost is a reminder that
God’s Spirit is continually refreshing us and renewing our capacity to live in
such a way as to become the spiritual community that the world needs us to be. Becoming that community is an evolutionary
process, proceeding in fits and starts, because the spiritual community is
always struggling to differentiate itself from community centered on the power
of domination and death.
Writing in Germany in the 1920’s, from the center of the
gathering storm of fascism, the theologian, Eberhard Arnold, wrote,
Here it becomes abundantly clear that
the realization of true community, the actual building up of a communal life,
is impossible without faith in a higher Power.
In spite of all that goes wrong, people try again and again to put their
trust either in human goodness (which really does exist) or in the force of law. But all their efforts are bound to come to
grief when faced with the reality of evil.[3]
This is a strong statement, and it reflects the biblical
affirmation of the power of love rooted in our openness to God’s Spirit. It is in response to this love that spiritual
community is created, strengthened, and renewed from age to age. Reflecting on this affirmation, Thomas Merton
wrote,
The ultimate thing is that we build
community not on our love but on God’s love, because we do not really have that
much love ourselves, and that is the real challenge of the religious life. It puts us in a position where sometimes
natural community is very difficult.
People are sent here and there, and often very incompatible people are
thrown together. Groups of people who
would never have chosen to be together in an ordinary human way find themselves
living together. It is a test of
faith. It puts God’s love to the test
and it is meant to . . . It isn’t just a question of whether you are building
community with people that you naturally like, it is also a question of
building community with people that God has brought together.
What is tested in community is
faith. It is not so much a question of
who’s right, but do we believe? I think
that is the real issue. Of course there
are problems, but you put them all together and work them out on the basis and
in the context of faith. Faith is first,
and the only one who is right is God. No
one of us knows precisely what God wants.
What we have to do is believe in the power of [God’s] love. This power is given to us in proportion as we
work together to find out what the score is, and then, if we do get together
and decide on something – even if it is mistaken – if it is done in good faith,
the power of God’s love will be in it.
We are going to make mistakes, but it really doesn’t matter that much.[4]
Merton invites us to take risks in re-imagining what
spiritual community looks like in our time, trusting in the power of God’s love
to teach and correct us. It is through
reflection on our collective experience that we discover God’s will for us,
including, perhaps especially, our experiences of failure. Our Scripture readings today assure us that
the same Spirit that was poured out on the disciples at that first Pentecost
after Jesus’ resurrection has been given to us.
It bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and this
Spirit gives us the courage to resist falling back into slavery to fear.[5] We can take risks for the sake of love.
This Spirit abides in us, and empowers us to love as Jesus
loved, to act as Jesus acted, and, in fact, to do even greater things than him.[6] It does not lock us in the past, but rather
frees us to imagine what it means to be the spiritual community in service to
the new creation that God is birthing. We
are the sons and daughters upon whom the Spirit has fallen so that we may
prophesy the good news of salvation to all people, even in the midst of blood,
and fire and smoky mist.[7]
Leon Blum, writing in a Nazi death camp, wrote, “We work in the present, not for the present.”[8] Our
vocation is to become the spiritual community that is not defined or
constrained by the division, suffering, and death of the present time, but
rather is open to receive the future that God desires for us. This is the mystery of Pentecost, the mystery
of the spiritual community that God is continually bringing into being that
extends beyond the horizon of our own time, and for which we give ourselves,
our souls, and bodies.
Next year, St. James will celebrate the 130th
anniversary of its founding, and mark the 10th anniversary of my
tenure as rector. It is an appropriate
time for us to pray for a new Pentecost, a fresh outpouring of God’s spirit, so
that we may renew our commitment to spiritual community centered on God’s love.
Beginning this fall, we will engage in a series of prayerful conversations
together and with our neighbors, to re-imagine what kind of community we need to
become in service to the future God is calling into being. I invite you to pray for curiosity, discernment,
and courage, as together we discover a 2020 Vision for St. James.
As we prayerfully open ourselves to God’s Spirit, may we
discover with St. John of the Cross that
The soul feels its ardor strengthen and
increase and its love become so refined in this ardor that seemingly there flow
seas of loving fire within it, reaching to the heights and depths of the
earthly and heavenly spheres, imbuing all with love. It seems to it that the entire universe is a
sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the living point or
center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of the boundaries of
this love.[9]
Amen.
[1]
Leviticus 23:22.
[2]
Martha Campbell, lecture notes from Shalem Institute seminar on spiritual
community (January 2009).
[3]
Quoted in Thomas Merton, “Building Community on God’s Love,” Plough, accessed at www.plough.com on June 5, 2019.
[4]
Merton, ibid.
[5]
Romans 8:14-16.
[6]
John 14:12-17.
[7]
Acts 2:17-21.
[8]
Quoted in Constance Fitzgerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory,” CTSA Proceedings 64 (2009), p. 39.
[9]
Quoted in Fitzgerald, p. 41 footnote 57.
