Pentecost

 John 14:8-17

Today is the great festival of Pentecost in the church.  One of a handful of major festivals that shape the whole of the church year.  It is the birthday of the church, the festival of the Holy Spirit.  But it is also one the grates a bit against Episcopalian sensibilities.  Because quite frankly Pentecost can be a little intimidating.  I mean just look at the story, rushing wind, tongues of fire, people suddenly and impulsively speaking in foreign languages, generally making a public spectacle of themselves.  Maybe that is why this is a holiday where we tend to keep our celebrations smaller.  Anyone can handle Christmas and Easter.  They deal with discrete historical events, events that perhaps most importantly happened to someone else.  We can easily sit by and stand as silent witnesses to the events of Jesus’s birth, life and death, but not Pentecost.  In a world full of spectator events, Pentecost is a full contact sport.  No one knows when or where that wind will blow or what it will drive us to do.

But Pentecost doesn’t actually have to be so big and scary.  It’s not really about big displays and pyrotechnics, speaking in public or working miracles.  Because yeah, every now and then the Holy Spirit does blow with hurricane force, but most of the time, like the wind outside, it blows in gentle gusts and pleasant breezes.

And here is the thing about wind.  The wind is invisible until it moves something.  If you walk outside just look up at the sky you probably can’t immediately tell if it’s windy.  If you want to know how windy it is, or what direction the wind is blowing, you have to look for what it is doing, how it is affecting things in the environment.  We may look at the trees, and if the leaves are moving and how much or we listen for the sound of it.  I am permanently grateful that my neighbor a few doors down always flies this huge marine corps flag on his lake frontage.  It can always tell me exactly how hard the wind is blowing and from what direction before I decide what my kids need to wear to go swimming or biking or playing outside if the weather is dicey.  In order to understand the wind, we need to look at how it moves the world around us. 

And the same is true of the Holy Spirit.  We know it, we know God’s love, primarily through the working of the people around us.  And Jesus knows this when he is talking to his disciples on his last night with them in the Gospel passage we heard today as well.  Jesus says to them “Believe me that I am in the Father and the father is in me.  But if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”  Jesus knows that it is hard to believe out of nowhere.  Generally speaking, we believe because of what we have seen.  We believe because of the works of the people around us, the ways that they live out their faith.

Think about how you came to be here in this place today.  How you came to believe in Jesus. How your faith was formed.  Think about those who showed you how to be a faithful Christian, who taught you the ways of faith.  While I suppose a few of you might be able to point to some miraculous moment, some sort of Pentecost style divine revelation, I bet for most of us the path to faith was paved with much smaller fair.  Hundreds of little works and simple moments.  Prayers before meals, parents talking about faith or reading bible stories.  Attending worship services and being fed at the table.  The witness of people who modeled a life of compassion, kindness and service.  Parents and Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and Siblings, Sunday school teachers, priests and church friends who have cared of us, prayed for us, taught us and shaped us. Thousands of tiny actions, tiny little gusts of wind, that have shaped our lives into what they are today. 

One of the reasons I love Pentecost so much is it is one of the few times a year, we use red paraments and I get to break out my Ordination stole.  And to me this stole represents so much of how the Holy Spirit works in our lives.  This stole was made for me by hand by a woman at the church I attended before starting seminary and it is filled with symbols of the memories and experiences I had there when I first felt the call to ministry.   It was laid on my shoulders at my ordination my Grandma, one of my great mentors in faith, life and ministry.  Both of them died short after I was ordained, but there faith lives on through their gifts and their example in my life and ministry and in the lives of countless others.  In the countless tiny works that they did in the name of Jesus Christ, in the thousands of tiny gusts of wind they put into the world.  I bet that many of us have similar stories, perhaps without the express physical mementoes but important none-the-less, our own little gusts of the spirit.

But here is the thing about the wind, each little gust may seem insignificant but the wind has the power to literally move mountains.  Those of you who read your eBlast this week learned a bit about Aeolian landforms.  Massive geographic features like sand dunes and mushroom rocks made only by the wind.  By nothing but gusts of wind carrying tiny little particles of sand that rub against a rock or lay down some bits until one day something amazing emerges.  It’s a slow process, nothing dramatic or violent but for those who are patient, that steady, relentless wind blows a new creation into being.

Jesus tells us in the gospel lesson today, “I will ask the father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever, this is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.  You know him, because he abides in you, and he will be with you.”  Jesus reminds us that the steady relentless wind of the Holy Spirit never stops blowing in our own lives either.  No matter where it blows us, with gusts large or small, the wind of the Spirit continues to breathe new life into being every day. 

And this means that now that you have received this gift, now that you have been shaped by these thousand gusts of wind, now that you have breathed in this breath of life in the Holy Spirit, you have also received a sacred trust to become a Holy frontage flag, to reveal this rushing wind, this glorious working of the Holy Spirit to the world.  Every one of our lives has the power to be a beacon of the Holy Spirit’s work in the lives of others.  Every one of us has a legacy we leave in the work of the Holy Spirit in the way our faith shapes the world around us.  And even if the results take generations to reveal themselves, our faith still moves mountains.  Little by little each one of us truly does have the power to change the world.  Amen.

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