Pentecost Sunday 2020
There is a perspective in theology that regards the event of Pentecost as the birth of the Church. On this day, the Spirit is poured out on the disciples. They are released from their disillusionments and their fears; they are enSpirited and emboldened to go out and to preach the good news that the life of Christ is more powerful than death, that the self-sacrifice of his love has overpowered the forces of selfishness and suspicion, that the future stretches out beyond us as a constant invitation full of possibility. Our dead ends have become new beginnings; our sunsets have been changed into dawns. Yes, on this day the Spirit overwhelms our timidity, our doubt, our anxiety and sends us forth to become a living sign of the power of God manifest in lives of faith, hope and love.
The Spirit stirs us into life. This is the nature of the Spirit. The Spirit rouses us from our slumber, it breaks us free from our passivity and complacency. As the Reformed theologian, Jürgen Moltmann would put it, the Spirit, “wake[s] us up out of the petrifications and numbness of our feelings. We burst apart the amour of the apathy that holds us in an iron grasp. . . We wake up to the world as it is spread out before God in all its heights and depths.”[1]
This year, we celebrate Pentecost just as our churches are once again stirring back into life. After the somnolence of the last several months created by the historic pandemic, we are gathering again. At first it will be tentative, uncertain. Yet, it is the Spirit who will fan into flame our small beginnings and open up for us a whole new possibility. We are being taken on a journey, the destination of which is not obvious to us, but for which the demands are now becoming more and more clear.
We speak of the ‘new normal’ without quite knowing what this might mean for us in terms of our work and our social life. And yet all of us are intuiting a new way is coming to greet us. It cannot simply be a case of returning to the way things were. Rather, we know we must take something forward from our experience of the last months and allow this to shape the horizon into which we are journeying. Already we are enacting new ways of work; the introduction of new forms of pedagogy and market place arrangements have been accelerated at a pace that otherwise would not have occurred; we are beginning to talk about new architecture for both our domestic and professional situations; we are talking amongst ourselves about a slower, more measured pace of life. For our own leadership in faith we have recognised now both the critical necessity and exciting potential of social media platforms to make available our message not just to those in our immediate circle but to the world at large. Evangelisation now means something quite different than it may have even just a few months ago. Our parish must go forward to developing and sustaining new forms of communication.
The Spirit neither allows us the luxury of going back or of staying where we are. We can neither retreat nor become complacent when the Spirit breathes over us, stirring us, and enflaming us anew. We must go forward, sensitive to possibility. With the intense young Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard ours must be the prayer, “If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.”[2] Pentecost speaks of possibility. Thus, the age in which we live is Pentecostal in that it, too, is pregnant with opportunity.
The opportunity that the Spirit breathes over us, however, is never frenetic. It is purposeful rather than patchy, directive rather than dissipating. It is gentle rather than demanding. It is that which is given to us in those moments of deep quiet when though we do not have the answer, we know everything will be alright. The Spirit is given us when we experience a sense of trust when all the circumstances would normally be making us anxious. The Spirit is given us at those moments when we have a quiet solid sense of purpose even though everything around us seems to be crumbling. This is why Spirit-led opportunity endures and becomes the sure foundation of the future. Whenever confusion moves to peace, whenever fear moves to courage, whenever doubt moves to faith, the Spirit of God is given to us. It is our own Pentecost. It is the Pentecost of 2020.
Jürgen Moltmann writes,
the full and unreserved ‘yes’ to life, and the full and unreserved love for the living are the first experiences of God’s Spirit. . . [This] spirituality of life breaks through [the] inward numbness [to life], the armour of our indifference, the barriers of our insensitivity to pain. It again breaks open the ‘well of life’ in us and among us, so that we can weep again and laugh again and love again.[3]
In this unique Pentecost we open our hearts to the Spirit of God poured out on us. It is the Spirit that renews and re-creates. It is the Spirit that keeps giving birth to the Church. In that Spirit we celebrate what God is doing in us, and what God will always do in us, through us, and for us. In the Spirit, it is never the time for despair. It is always the time to celebrate possibility.
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning: The life of hope, translated by Margaret Kohl, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 83.
[2] Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or, A Fragment of Life,” in The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 45.
[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A universal affirmation, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 97.
