In a Wednesday Zoom meeting, a colleague from up county mentioned the odd juxtaposition of a Holy Day all about the Holy Spirit as “pneuma,” as breath and wind, literally breathed into the disciples by Jesus in John’s gospel, and the moment in which we find ourselves, where we are masked up and distanced and doing everything to avoid death by breath, for breath can be deadly. What immediately popped into my head? Not sophisticated theology, oh no, but rather that smash hit by the Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” which came out during my Senior Year in high school. Because, you know, I love you, but don’t stand so close to me…
And here, the Holy Spirit. I love Pentecost, for despite being totally formed by European Enlightenment thinking, Modernity’s religion of reason and the scientific method, I believe in the Holy Spirit. Not that I’m going to drop to the floor or start speaking in tongues, though speaking in tongues is something we are going to discuss.
No, I believe in the Holy Spirit because I believe that Divine Mystery we name as God is not an absentee landlord, but is real and present in creation, that God as Spirit is the unsolvable X in every single equation, the real world wide web, that the world is full of the hidden and the magical, that the more our European Enlightenment reason and scientific thinking discovers, the less we know and the more we realize that the world is freaky and strange, but in a good way.
I believe that mysterious X is the same force that draws us out of ourselves and that draws us to thin places and to one another, a spiritual quantum that right now is breaking your heart, for the thing that makes us images of God, the synergy and synchronicity that is relationship, is the very thing that can kill us right now. This too shall pass, but not nearly soon enough.
And I believe God is not God in the absence of Creation. No Neo-Platonic ideals for me, no abstractions. I just can’t wrap my head around an eternal God who sat around for an infinity and beyond before spontaneously zapping all into being. It makes my head hurt even trying.
God is God in relationship to what is made manifest, whether it is Big Bang or Big Bird. So while I might be a bit squiffy on traditional Trinitarian thinking, I believe that which the ancient Hebrews named as God is real, though maybe not in the ways they thought. I believe that some Hebrews and some Gentiles experienced God in an un-credentialed itinerant rabbi who they came to understand as that same holy and creative and relational power incarnate, made flesh. They believed that the mysterious thread running between Jesus and the holy was not severed when he was brutally executed, nor when he ascended to an equally mysterious heaven as claimed by our tradition. I believe that X is still here, that creation is still freaky good, and we are still more than we know. So yeah, Holy Spirit…
But the whole Holy Spirit thing starts long before this scene in Jerusalem, wind and fire and tongues, or before that whole creepy “breathing the Spirit into them” in John, for the Spirit of God is not some new-fangled invention of Christianity, something Jesus made up. The Spirit of God is there throughout the Hebrew scripture. In the eleventh chapter of the Book of Numbers, set during the Exodus from Egypt, the Spirit rests upon some of the elders of the people, and they begin to prophesy. There are other instances, especially of God’s Spirit as God-in-action, God’s Spirit is how God is manifest in many Hebrew testament writings. Sometimes, especially in the collection known as Wisdom literature, the Spirit seems to be wisdom itself, Sophia, feminine. But I want to claw back, beyond even the Exodus, to the creation myths of the Hebrew people, sometimes shared with other cultures of the Ancient Near East, back all the way to Babel.
Humans create myths to explain things they don’t understand. Some myths are huge, dealing with ultimate questions, like the two versions of the Creation myth at the very beginning of the Hebrew scriptures, or the myth of Job, meant to answer the eternal question of why bad things happen to good people, though today many of us find the answer unsatisfactory and the god portrayed there as unworthy of our worship. Some myths are more concrete, stories about why there are ruins on that hill over there, the actual history a long lost memory, or why, as in the story of Babel, humans are so divided.
And again, the god in the Babel story seems to fall short of the mark, for it is a god that is afraid of what humans might accomplish together, so that god confuses their speech, and the result is exactly what they had feared, for they built the tower, built the city, because “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth,” as reported in the New Revised Standard Version.
It is a myth, but it was a myth that helped them explain for themselves tribal and linguistic differences. This is the last myth in Genesis before the Abraham story, for without the splintering of humankind into tribes, into factions, there is no need for a Chosen People, no need for a God that is universal but who preferences one tribe over all others.
And here Pentecost. And you have no doubt seen it before, but it is worth noticing again. This is the un-Babel. The people who are divided into factions and tribes, who speak many languages, all hear the good news. God’s love, the power of God is not about division, but instead washes over and washes away the human differences, neither Jew nor Greek, as Paul would write, but all one in Christ.
Whether you are inclined to the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo in which I so optimistically believe or you are skeptical and secular, this is a good story, this idea that there is a word that can be heard by all, a word about the triumph of love.
And we need such a word right now. We need a way to speak good life saving news to those who seem to speak a different language. We need the sort of spiritual fire that cleanses rather than the actual fires that are the languages of the hopeless and the desperate.
We need science to deal with SARS-COV-2, but science is not going to erase the lines that have been drawn in the blood of the innocent nor will it tear down the walls of us vs. them that have been so carefully constructed. But the Holy Spirit cares little about walls. Holiness does not care about locked doors or closed borders. The language of the heart, the heart breaking and the heart soaring with love, is universal.
Let us learn to speak in tongues, so that like the prophets of old, we can announce the good news of justice for the oppressed, freedom for the captive, food for the hungry, love, God’s love, for all that are lonely and scared. Give us tongues to speak this good news, and the hands and hearts and holy imaginations to make it so.
Amen.