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Pentecost Eve
H o
m i l y G r i t s
The Vigil of
Pentecost: Whitsun Eve
Year B - June 7-8 , 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup
- permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Amighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race
and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this
gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may
reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives
and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.
or this
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by
sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same
Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in
his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Genesis 11:1-9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord
confused the language of all the earth
or Exodus 19:1-9a, 16-20a; 20:18-20 Do not let God speak to us or we
will die
or Ezekiel 37:1-14 Mortal, can these bones live?
or Joel 2:28-32 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall
be saved
Acts 2:1-11 It filled the entire house where they were sitting
or Romans 8:14-17, 22-27 All who are led by the Spirit of God are
children of God
John 7:37-39a While Jesus was standing there, he cried out, "Let anyone
who is thirsty come to me."
Psalms and Canticles:
Psalm 33:12-22 Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord
Canticle 2 or 13 Benedictus es, Domine
Psalm 130 De profundis
Canticle 9 Ecce, Deus
Psalm 104:25-32 O Lord, how manifold are your works!
¶ Lutheran Book of Worship
All as above, with this collect:
Almighty and ever-living God, you fulfilled the promise of Easter by
sending your Holy Spirit to unite the races and nations on earth and thus
to proclaim your glory. Look upon your people gathered in prayer, open
to receive the Spirit's flame. May it come to rest in our hearts and heal
the divisions of word and tongue, that with one voice and one song we may
praise your name in joy and thanksgiving; through your Son, Jesus Christ
our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now
and forever. Amen.
Saint John Chrysostom (i.e., "Golden Mouth", his nickname) the great
preacher and Bishop of Constantinople in the fourth and early fifth
centuries, spoke of Pentecost as the "capital city of holy days" and "the
metropolis of the Christian year." All the other times are only towns and
villages, neighborhoods and precincts, compared to this great one.
Others may be larger, more populated, more fun, even, like a Dickens of a
Christmas, but they do not in fact have the flaming power and might, or
the dignity of the capital city, where greater things take place than
anywhere, and where, like every capital city, there is such variety.
Pentecost too has its embassy row, where in many mansions all the peoples
of the oikoumene--the inhabited world--are represented, where at each a
different flag is unfurled, a different language spoken. In a capital
city, there are many ethnicities and tongues, many cultures honored, art
and music and food and clothing to honor and please the taste of all the
families of the planet. In the city of Pentecost, no embassy is under
siege, none has ben shuttered or its families sent away by an imperial
rescript or a secret order from Homeland Security. Not a doorstep has
been vandalized or spray-painted with insults or taunts, no one has been
declared persona non grata. It is the place all places are meant to be,
the end of diaspora and of exile for all, the lost traveller's dream
under the hill.
Luke says those at Pentecost were seated at table--as guests, to receive,
to pass the dish, to share. They do not stand apart from one another,
and only the flame of the Spirit's fire divides itself so that each heart
may be warmed, each brow and brain burnished with the windy fire. It is
this resting of the fire, this measuring out in portions of a firestorm,
that enables each to be bold and to articulate each in a unique charism.
Pentecost is not a creamatorium in which the identity of all is
incinerated, it does not overwhelm like a fanatic Führer at a Nuremburg
Rally or a slaying spirit at a fundamentalist frenzy. Instead it is a
hearthside where everyone can cozy up and be warmed and have a cup of
cheer. Pentecost people are from every nation
under heaven--and when the Scriptures say "nation" they do not mean the
modern nation-state, armed and dangerous, a menace to its neighbors who
are all customers at the Empire's Bomb Store, but they mean families,
tribes, and ethnic groups,
real people who can truly be spoken of as the family of humankind. It
includes the Kurds, the Palestinians, and the Iraqis, none of whom has
now a country with borders of its own. The New Delhi writer Arundhati Roy
wrote recently (1) that "Now the ownership deeds are being signed. Iraq
is no longer a country. It's an asset. It's no longer ruled. It's
owned." The U.S. and Britain are now the Mid East's realtors on behalf
of multinational corporations. But the Day of Pentecost is not yet fully
come.
Its fires will burn out the Shock and Awe of the Bush fires.
What surprises everyone at Pentecost is that differences make no
difference, and the contributions of each are honored and understood as
if all were hearing a simultaneous translation, via an unseen headset,
hearing in our own tongues the inclusive language of a God who acts in
grand and magnificent ways for everyone. This is not the ordinary
experience of language difference in the world away from Pentecost.
Elsewhere than in the Metropolitan City of Pentecost, language
differences are barriers, cultural differences are distances, and the
folks who listen to rock stations don't tune in to the symphony. Basil
Pennington OSB tells the story of a retreat he made some years ago at the
Monastic Republic of Mount Athos in Geece, where monasteries of many
ethnic groups have shared the tiny peninsula for centuries. One of the
monasteries, he said, had excommunicated all the others (like the
overheated African Anglicans are busy doing now to cooler and gayer
heads). The super orthodox monastery hoisted a black flag emblazoned
"Orthodoxy or death!" When Demetrios the patriarch a number of years ago
dared to embrace the Roman Pope with the triple kiss and to name him as
First among Equals of the ancient patriarchs, these Black Flag old style
monks with their "death to the different" mentality raised the flag for
their patriarch Demetrios and excommunicated him too. .This mentality,
this perversion of spirituality, rises like a stench from a theology of
death, a theology of exclusiveness, not of the Catholic way. Pentecost
is not an island, like Jonathan Swift's Laputa, floating like the royal
court high above and only accessible to Gulliver by pulleys. Instead,
it is a mountain, with a splendid view, like Everest on a clear day, of
all the world's variety. It is W. H. Auden's "Land of Unlikeness," where
we will all see "rare beasts and have unique adventures. . . you will
come to a great city that has expected your return for years." We sing
and speak of
a Pentecostal spirit not so much in the metaphor of fogs, mists, or
gases, but of Light and Liquidity, of Brightenss and of Refreshment. In
the 14th century, John Wickliff translated Psalm 65 to read, "Thou hast
visited the earth and made it drunk>" St Paul thought of the Pentecostal
spirit too as such a potent beverage, the one cup of which we have all
been given to drink deeply. This is the One Spirit into which we are
all immersed (that's what the word 'Baptism' means, you see) -- Jew or
Greek, slave or free, male or female, Black or White, Gay or Strait,
Iraqi or Texan--beyond nationalism, sex, class, race, age, or status:
the common good of all is the task the Spirit accomplishes by embracing
the gifts of each. And it is this Spirit into which we baptize at the
Font today. We welcome the neophytes as a new Embassy of God's love, and
we welcome them not as tourists to this place, but as Ambassadors
Extraordinary and Ministers Plenipotentiary from the Human Future. We do
not "baptize babies" but we baptize persons, that is , all that these
present lives are to become, whole persons, adults-to-be, with all the
fantastic and gifted eccentricity and genius, and the ordinary sensible
homebodies, and the wise old men and women, whatever they become in
God's good time--all of that is here baptized today, sanctified, set
apart, dedicated, to living the good news of Jesus in all their lives.
Some of those brought as babes to Baptism, and some of those who walk to
the Font, bring along their Gay or Lesbian lives. Will we refuse to
baptize them now because somebody will forbid them other sacraments in
the future, such as marriage or ordination? Their promises are that
they will serve Christ in every neighbor they meet on the planet, and
strive for justice among all the human beings they will know. All that
starts today. Do we all agree to that? It's not over when the water
stops splashing for Baptism is a process that begins here. In this child
(these children/these adults) we are raising new flags on embassy row,
flags not seen before, and anthems sung that no one has ever heard before
today.
But in each anthem is a word from Jesus, which is Peace. Jesus comes to
us with his Pentecostal peace, invading all the upper rooms in which we
have hidden ourselves away from others. And all our imagined enemies,
made outsiders by our fears, are brought here by the hand of Jesus, the
wounded hand to show that he too has been hurt, but not defeated, struck
down but raised up to join us in solidarity. We can hear him breathing
"Peace, Peace, Peace" and it is the mantra he teaches us, for boldness
and for liberation. Jesus shows us his own wounded hand, and not the
blood of others. St. Cyprian of Carthage wrote that "After the reception
of the Eucharist the hand is not to be stained with the sword and
bloodshed." And Jesus says "Look at my wounds and my side: they did not
make me a ghost." And then he gives us orders to live nonviolently: he
says,
"As the Father has sent me" (that is, on these terms, as a life-giver,
not a death-dealer, as a person who can bleed, not as a person who sheds
the blood of others; in this manner, in this life-style, in this way,
"so I send you." The Epistle to Diognetus, written around 150 A.D.,
remembers this: "He came as Savior to his own, the Way of love he trod;
he came to win us by good will, for force is not of God." Force is not
now, and never shall be, of our God.
Alas, since leaving the Upper Room two millenia ago, the Church has
diminished its discipline and forgotten its discipleship of peace, as a
trade-off for popularity and political power. It is now only ordained
believers who are forbidden by the Church to bear arms. The prohibition
used to apply to all the faithful, including catechumens preparing for
Baptism. Jesus says to all, not only to the ordained, "Peace is my gift
to you" And shows us his hand and his side, evidence of his refusal to
break peace or call upon violence to defend himself. Look at those he
came to speak "Peace" to in the Upper Room. They were a crowd of
cowards, macho braggarts who had run away when he needed them, and some
of them were simpletons who failed after three years to get the point of
his life and teaching. These were they who were going to go every step
of the way with him, but not too much past suppertime. They ate and
ran. They stopped short of the entrance to his Via Dolorosa, his way of
sorrows. Still, Jesus came back to this crowd, with warm breath and the
word and kiss of peace, forgiving us, as he forgave them.
He comes in every Eucharist to give us peace, and there's a lot in all of
us that needs to go back to the Font with the
neophytes this day, for the renewal of our commitment to non-violent
discipleship of Jesus. What irony there is in his promise that if we
forgive sins, they are indeed forgiven, and that if we bind them up they
stay tied to us. Can we continue to believe that we can always let the
laity resort to violence and that we can justify the violence of death as
a deterrent? That it's okay for us to have a hand gun in the house,
"just in case" we have to kill someone so they can't kill us? Can you
imagine Jesus considering this option? Can you imagine his blessed
Mother handing these neophytes a weapon--a club, a sword, a pistol, a
grenade, a missile? Shall we continue to believe that this is a
legitimate discipleship of Jesus? Or sistership to Mary? Did we hear
their proxies answer the scrutiny: "Will you strive for justice and peace
among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?" Jesus
is listening for their answers. Violence is not far from anybody's hand
in what has become the most violent society on the planet, headed by the
most violent men and women (remember Condoleeza is involved) in its
history, who are prepared to destroy it in order to buy and sell what
will be left of it. Our violence, our hatred, our racism--all have got
to go back to the Font for a tub bath, that we may come up with more than
our faces washed and our flags wet.
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1913, reminds the world, and the Church, that we have
abandoned Christ's own departing words of Peace, as we have become the
devil's disciples in death-dealing and drum-beating.
From His eternal seat Christ comes down to this earth,
where, ages ago, in the bitter cup of death, He poured his deathless life
for those who came to the call and those who remained away.
He looks about Him, and sees the weapons of evil that wounded His own
age.
The arrogant spikes and spears, the slim, sly knives, the scimitar in
diplomatic sheath,
crooked and cruel, are hissing and raining sparks as they are sharpened
on monster wheels.
But the most fearful of them all, at the hands of the slaughterers, are
those on which has been engraved His
own name, that are fashioned from the texts of His own words fused in the
fire of hatred
and hammered by hypo-critical greed.
He presses His hand upon His heart; He feels that the age-long moment of
His death has not yet ended, that
new nails, turned out in countless numbers by those who are learned in
cunning craftsmanship,
pierce Him in every joint.
They had hurt Him once, standing at the shadow of their temple; they
are born anew in crowds.
From before their sacred altar they shout to the soldiers, "Strike!"
And the Son of Man in agony cried, "My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken me?" (2)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) from a talk by Arundahti Roy, pre-recorded for the May 31, 2003
United For Peace and Justice teach-in in Washington, DC.
AlterNet Headlines for June 2, 2003 Top stories from the independent news
& syndication service http://www.alternet.org
(2) Rabindranath Tagore, "The Son of Man," collected in Divine
Inspiration, the Life of Jesus in World Poetry, assembled and edited by
Robert Atwan, George Dardess, Peggy Rosenthal, New York: Oxford
University Pres, 1998.