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 5th-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.
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