Spirit Movings (Pentecost 2016)

Spirit is a very special word, in the multiple languages of the church, anyway  . . . in Hebrew, it’s Ruach . . . that acccch  on the end is a consonant found only in the semitic languages, and it gives a breathy, almost whispery sound to the word . . . it’s a word that’s onomatopoeic . . . it sounds like what it means, and what it means is breath, it means wind it means spirit . . . Can it be a coincidence that it’s found in the very first scene of the very first book in Scripture?  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, while a spirit, while a ruach from God swept over the face of the waters.”

And what does this spirit do?  What does this breath make?  Order out of the deep, out of the roiling, rolling anarchy that was there before creation . . . and without that order, without the particles being organized in regular and useful configurations we call matter, humankind cannot exist, it cannot live, it cannot sustain itself . . . and so this spirit that swept across the waters, across that ancient metaphor of unrest, creates the very stuff of our being, the very order that keeps us alive . . .

And there’s another face to the metaphor . . . ruach means breath, and breath means respiration—res-pir-ation, itself made of spirit—the stuff of life . . . all of life, plants and animals, takes in oxygen and through a kind of combustion, a kind of fire, a kind of burning that produces heat, life motive force, it's motivated.  This force is nothing less than stored energy, in the form of ordered matter, that life needs to power itself, that it needs to function . . . and I hope you’re beginning to get the picture, I hope you are beginning to understand the depth of our spirit-metaphor, and why it is such a rich source of poetic force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Breath, spirit, ruach is the stuff of life’s existence, the power that makes us go . . .

And although it’s more romantic in Hebrew, more primitive and elemental, in Greek it’s no less meaningful . . . in Greek it’s pneuma, from whence we get the term pneumatic, of course, air-powered, air-filled, filled with the breath of God . . . and so the apostles gathered together on that first Pentecost encounter living metaphor, actualized experience of ruach, of pneumatic force rushing down upon them, an exquisite embodiment of what was happening to them . . .

Of course, they weren’t gathered there by accident . . . the apostles were gathered together for the Jewish festival of Shauvot, one of the three great pilgrimage festivals of the Hebrew people, traditionally calculated as fifty days (thus the “pente” in Pentecost) from Passover.  And although it originated as a festival marking the beginning of harvest—of the first fruits of the harvest—it had gradually, over the centuries, come to commemorate the founding of the Jewish people in the giving of the Torah, the law, the force that bound them together as a nation and a people.  And can you see where we’re going with this?  Can you see where we’re headed?  On Pentecost, on Shauvot, on the very day the Hebrew people celebrate their formation as the people of God, the spirit of God, the breath of the Lord, comes down upon the apostles, like the rush of a violent wind, and fills the entire house where they were sitting.

And every time I see read this image, every time picture this in-rushing of the respirative ruach of God, I think of a tornado, and all of those reports of people who have survived them . . . what did it sound like?  They are asked, and invariably what they say is that is sounded like a rushing wind, like a freight train . . . and so the tornado of the Lord, the freight train of the holy spirit, the breath that gives us life as a people, came barreling down upon them, rattling the windows, shaking the eaves, raising the roof . . . but unlike a tornado, unlike some F5 monster from the plains of Texas or the depths of the Mississippi Piney Woods, it is not destructive, but creative, and it entered them, it powered them, it gave them respiratory life . . . it made them a people.

On the very same day that the Hebrew nation celebrates their people-hood, their coming together as a nation of the children of God, the apostles experience their own formation, and so . . . a new people is born, a new identity is forged . . . on Pentecost we celebrate the formation of the church and—mark this well—it is all dependent upon that rushing wind, that freight-train ruach, the holy spirit promised by Christ.  Fifteen hundred years later, Calvin would use an apt metaphor about the spirit, he would say that it binds us to Christ—just as the Law does for the Jewish people, just as respiration does for the cells of the living universe—it binds us to Christ and thereby to each other.  Without the breath we would not be bound together as the body of Christ.

The self-same breath of God, that created order out of primordial disorder, that self-same breath creates the order that is the church.  And that image has fed a stunningly deep well of meaning over the years . . . in Paul’s vision of the church as Christ’s body, it is the breath of God that animates, that in-spires, in-breathes that body . . . but that’s not the first bodily image of a people . . . remember those old dry bones of Ezekiel?  “I will cause breath, ruach, to enter them,” says the lord, “I will cause ruach to infuse them, to dwell within them . . . Come from the four winds, the four ruachs, and breathe on them, that they might live” . . . and the ruach comes into them, and they live and they stand on their feet, a vast multitude, a coherent people of God.

But there’s another metaphor at work here, as well, and it’s dancing around the Apostles there in the room where they gather . . . “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,” Luke says, “and a tongue rested on each of them.”  And this is where we get that red that’s in our banner and paraments, and in the stole hanging around my neck, and the image is of spirit as a fire that burns within us, that warms our hearts, that powers us like the flames of a coal-fired boiler.

But there’s another, less exciting figure of speech—no pun intended—here . . . tongue of course has a double meaning, we say “tongues of flame” to indicate the flickering, leaping blaze, but tongue has a more mundane connotation, as in a mouth-part, and indeed the next line indicates that that double meaning is in Luke’s mind as well “a tongue rested on each of them,” he says, and suddenly “all were filled with the holy spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”  And the word our NRSV translates as languages is the same in Greek—glossais—as for tongue, so a more literal translation is “divided tongues appeared among them . . . and they began to speak in other tongues, as the spirit gave them ability.” And so this second image, of divided tongues, of divided languages is a quite graphic metaphor of the human tongue, split into multiple languages . . .

And so the coming of the Spirit, here in Acts at least (the Gospel of John has other ideas, of course), this coming of the Spirit revolves around two images, two movements, if you will: one a gale-force wind, strong and loud, which creates order from chaos, it binds us to one another, as the body of Christ . . . but what good is that binding if we cannot understand one another, if we cannot work together because we are so different, because we speak different languages, literally as well as metaphorically?  And so the second spirit move, the multiple tongues, the multiplicity of voices within the body . . . divided tongues, each division speaking a different language, a different dialect of the body of Christ.

But note:  it doesn’t say they all began to speak the same language!  It doesn’t say that everybody started speaking Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew, it doesn’t say they all began playing the same hymns, using the same translation of the scripture . . . all began to speak in other languages, ones they didn’t know, ones they weren’t comfortable with . . . and did they then go their separate ways?  Did those who spoke Aramaic go over here, Greek over there?  Did those who sang 5^th-Century lyre-chants go across town while the ones who played on tambourines stayed put?  No . . . they gathered together and they worshiped together, they respected the diversity and Luke tells us they were astonished at it.

I think there’s a lesson for our situation today . . . when an organization—a corporation, a denomination, a church—is in decline, the human inclination is to circle the wagons, to turn inward, to cling to familiar ways, comfortable ways . . . but brothers and sisters, that’s not the way the strongest churches are, and that’s not the way shown to us by the Spirit.  The fact of the matter is, diversity breeds strength, not weakness . . . the strongest organizations are those with the most diverse interests, for they are the ones that can stand the vagaries of changing context, changing fashion, changing times.  And when those divided tongues—they were divided, people, they had components that were different from one another—danced around the apostles’ heads, and wove in and out of their company, that’s when they were the strongest, that’s when they were the most resilient, that’s when they were the most alive.

But you say “Preacher”—I get called that a lot, you know—you say “Preacher, what’s to keep us from fightin’ amongst ourselves over the diversity?  What’s to keep us from shakin’ apart over what kind communion to do—intinction or in-the-pews?—or where to spend that ten thousand dollars extra we may have—on paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip for the youth—or how often to use guitars in the service.  What’s to keep us from fighting like banshees over these and other questions?

Ah . . . that’s where the breath comes in . . . that’s where that creative force, that wind like a freight train that binds us together in Christ.  The spirit we celebrate is what creates order out of chaos, that sustains that order, that nourishes it and maintains it . . . it’s the infrastructure that maintains the house, the glue that ties us together.  The very spirit that brings on the diversity, that lights us up with with those divided tongues, is the same spirit that can hold us together as a body.  We just have to let it.  Amen.