The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Ephphatha Parish of the Deaf
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY
Have you noticed that most of the major feasts of the Church year each have two or more names? Today is the Day of Pentecost, which is also called Whitsunday. But we also have the Feast of the Incarnation, or the Nativity of our Lord, which in common talk is called Christmas; the Feast of the Resurrection, or Pascha, usually called Easter; and All Saints' Day, or All Hallows, the first of November...and everyone knows that the evening before is called
Halloween. I will get back to this "doubling up" later, but I wanted to call your attention to it as we begin.
Most of us know that Pentecost was originally a feast of the Jewish people. The word Pentecost means fifty days . In Palestine, it was customary to sow grain crops such as wheat, corn, oats and barley, during the week before Passover in the spring. The
men folk would then go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. Fifty days later, the first of the crops would be ready to harvest, and so the first-fruits of the harvest would be taken to Jerusalem and offered in the Temple as a thanksgiving to the Lord for good growing weather and fertile farms. Thus Pentecost became another occasion of going to the Temple to give thanks.
So, it happened that at the time of the Feast of Pentecost, the year that Jesus died and rose again, Jerusalem was crammed with people. Pentecost was one of the Pilgrim Feasts, when all Jewish men who possibly could do so were supposed to present themselves at the Temple and make an offering. At Pentecost, the offering would be the first cuttings of new grain. The streets were filled with Jews who had come not just from Palestine but also from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and all the countries in between to which Jewish people had moved for reasons of their own, or been forcibly moved by
conquerors who deported natives to break up the power of Israel and Judah.
The disciples of Jesus, together with some of the women who travelled with them and provided money, food, cooking and laundry and other comforts, were gathered together in the Upper Room where they had, seven weeks earlier, eaten the Last Supper with Jesus. That room was becoming precious to them. It was in that same room that Jesus had appeared to them on Easter night, and two weeks later, had convinced Thomas that Jesus really lived again. It had become a sort of refuge or center for their activities. and was filled with holy memories. Today, 120 people were gathered there.
The doors were shut and bolted. The windows were shuttered and bolted too, because with the great crowds in Jerusalem, who knew if the Pharisees and Temple leaders might try to break up the little group of Jesus-followers by raiding and arresting, as they had done during Passover? The disciples felt rather lonely; Jesus had ascended into heaven, and told them to go back to Jerusalem, watch and pray, and something he called the Spirit would come to them. Perhaps they wondered what that Spirit might be. Perhaps they wondered how they were going to carry out Jesus' work and the orders he had given them, to go to all the world and teach and baptize in his name, without Jesus himself to direct and explain things to them. So they prayed and waited and probably worried and wondered. Maybe, as often happens with groups kept confined in a small space, they began getting on each others' nerves a bit, too.
Suddenly there was a great noise, the noise of a mighty, rushing, powerful wind. The disciples and women and other believers looked at each other, fearful, wondering what was coming.
It wasn't a typhoon or a hurricane.
It wasn't a tornado or a cyclone, although it must have sounded and felt like one.
They simply had no words to describe it. This monster wind that came seemingly out of nowhere, and blew itself away into who-knew-where, leaving behind the kind of aching quiet that you could feel with every muscle and nerve of your body.
Was it over? Were they all safe?
As they looked around to check on one another, they noticed the fire. Tongues of fire hovering over the heads of each person in the room. Maybe a few remembered the day of Jesus' Baptism, when John had said that he himself baptized with water, but the one who would come after him, the Messiah, would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Could this be the Holy Spirit, this thing that they had just experienced?
Suddenly, they were all seized with one irresistible impulse. They headed for the doors, burst them open, streamed out of the doors, down the steps and into the street. These people who minutes ago had cowered, fearfully, behind locked doors, began preaching on the street corners, preaching to everyone who would listen, not worrying or even caring if they might be opening themselves to arrest and death.
All these people of Israel, most from the back country area of Galilee, mostly unschooled,
preached convincingly and powerfully. Everyone who heard them heard the words in the listener's own "milk language"....the language they had learned along with their mothers' milk. The disciples preached in Aramaic and perhaps in Hebrew, but the hearers heard Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Cretean and who knows how many other thousand languages.
The preaching was powerful and effective. Three thousand people begged for baptism that day.
The Bible does not tell us so, but I imagine that, that evening, the believers gathered again in the upper room. I imagine that they were still on a "high," the result of the happenings of the day, and the powerful results of the coming of the Holy Spirit on each of them. I imagine they may have had a conversation rather like this:
"Wow, wasn't that something! I never felt so filled with power and so sure of what I was supposed to do, ever before, in my whole life!"
"Yes....do you remember, the day the Lord Jesus rose out of his tomb and came
to us here? He said to us then, 'Receive the Holy Spirit,' and breathed on us....I wonder if it's the same Holy Spirit? Does he always come with wind or breathing? Is that the same Spirit of God that God breathed into the body of Adam, on Creation Day? I wonder..."
Well, that's just my imagining and nobody really knows. We will find out, sometime, when we get to heaven, and can ask the Spirit for ourselves. But I think that may be the reason the church choose the record of that Easter evening meeting for today's Gospel.
St. Augustine was fascinated by the question of: why TWO givings of the Spirit to the disciples? After much thought, study and prayer, he suggested that there could be two possible
answers. He thought one answer might be that we need the power of the Spirit to fulfill our duty to God and we also need the power of the Spirit to fulfill our duty to other people.
Augustine's second thought was that the Spirit is the Spirit of Love, and we need power from the Spirit to love God by obeying some of the more difficult commandments, and also need the Spirit's power to love particularly difficult people.
Again, we don't and can't know if Augustine's answers are the right ones. But they are certainly worth thinking about. How can you and I show forth the spirit of God, who is love, in our lives, to both God and to our fellow humans, in ways and words they cannot fail to understand?
I also wonder if the fact that so many important church days have two names, is a way of reminding us of all this.
Amen.
