Pentecost: The Spirit of a Movement

Today is Pentecost, the day on which we remember the giving of the Holy Spirit to the apostolic community and, through them, to the Christian community.    It is frequently thought of as the “birthday of the church”, as it is considered that the gift of the Spirit is what constitutes the church as a community, it is what binds its members together and what provides the continuing experience of the divine presence in the church’s life.   It is the Spirit that continually renews the Christ Event in the experience of the community, making it not simply something that happened in the past but which continues to be experienced in the present.

There are two very different stories of the gifting of the Spirit.   The one that receives the most attention is from the book of Acts, and is the familiar story in which tongues of fire — representing that Spirit — light on each of the apostles, they are heard speaking in different languages (not, it should be noted, secret spiritual languages that sometimes characterize charismatic iterations of Christianity, but actual recognizable and spoken languages).      Or, more precisely, as the apostles speak of the grace, love and mercy of God as encountered in the Christ, each person hearing them hears what they are saying in his or her own language.   It is a loud, dramatic, public and flamboyant happening that appears ready made for Hollywood.

The other story — which we tend not to think about so much, and which is not always read on Pentecost (as it is not this year) — is from John’s Gospel, chapter 20.   In that story, Jesus appears in the midst of the apostles who are gathered privately.  This is not a public event.    He invites them to receive the Spirit, and imparts it to them by breathing on them.   This story is powerful in its own way — it is the giving of the Spirit in a very intimate way.   But it lacks the drama and spectacle of the story from Acts.

As I consider this feast of Pentecost and the stories that inform it, I must admit to something of a lack of enthusiasm.   I suppose it is because I am not very enthusiastic about the church these days, and Pentecost is very much tied to the coming into being of the church.   Having been made to live on the outside of the church’s life these last four years, I have come to see the church as institution very differently than when I was inside it.    I guess the cracks in that institution are easier to see from outside.

However, realizing this has also made me realize that Pentecost is not really about the church as institution.   It is really about the church as a movement — a movement which, over time, became an institution with all the advantages — along with all the compromises and corruptions — that entails.   

The stories that relate the giving of the Spirit, however, come from a pre-institutional time.   These stories were born in a church that was still very much a movement.  And, certainly, a movement of the Spirit.   

One of the remarkable features of early Christianity — which our institutionalized and culturally privileged iteration of church forgets — was the fact that anyone could become a part of this movement.   When the movement was born, religion was very much a matter of culture and family.   People didn’t choose their religion — it was given to them.   But once the Christian movement separated from Judaism, and until the time it was adopted by imperial Rome, there was no cultural or family tradition allied to it.   And so, increasingly, Christians were people who chose to enter the movement.   And most of them chose to enter it because they had, for various reasons, become alienated from the traditions of their cultures and families.   And the church would welcome anyone, in the same spirit as these Pentecost stories, where the Spirit is gifted to anyone and everyone willing to receive it.   And so, for its first decades of life, the church was a community chosen by people who were no longer at home — or no longer welcome — in their culture- or family-based traditions.    There was a kind of freedom and democracy to the movement that was remarkable for its time.    And it was a community made up of people who came from different backgrounds, which made it unusually diverse.

And that is something worth celebrating and remembering today, even as we become disenchanted (and often rightfully so) with the institutional church that exists today.   

Whether the Spirit shows up wildly and dramatically as the book of Acts would have it, or quietly and intimately as John’s Gospel would have it, the truth of the Christian movement is that the Spirit does show up — for anyone and everyone willing to receive it.   Which means it matters not where one is from, how one grew up, or what is one’s identity.    As Jesus sought to make clear over and over again, there is a place at the table for everyone.   As St. Paul (who often got things wrong) got stunningly right in a truly inspired moment, in a community gifted the Spirit, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”   

In our time, when we are increasingly tempted to stick with “our own kind” and shun or denigrate those who are different from us; when we are increasingly tempted not to allow people to claim their own identity and be truly themselves; and when we are increasingly tempted back toward enforced cultural homogeneity — remembering the character and make-up of the early Christian movement inspired by the Spirit is of vital importance.   For that movement is the movement which the Spirit seeks to bring alive in and among us.