The Reverend Kirk Berlenbach

May 23, 2010

Pentecost, Year C

This year I had a milestone birthday. But it was not a numeric milestone but an emotional one. No, on the day I turned forty one I got out of bed and did not feel the least bit of excitement or anticipation. On the contrary, I was completely and utterly apathetic to the occasion. “It’s my birthday, big deal!” But the cause was not, as you might suppose, because I was somehow pining for lost youth or lamenting my ever more creaking knees… no I felt like that birthday was a non-event because so much other stuff was going on in my life at the time that I simply didn’t have the energy to care. My mother was recovering from a stroke, my father was in the hospital with a serious infection and I was feeling swamped by work and domestic duties. And so while I knew that I was supposed to be excited, I frankly just didn’t care.

Maybe you’ve felt that way once or twice. Or maybe you feel that way more often than not. What does it mean when our birthday’s cease to become the occasion for celebration and instead simply get overlooked because we are just too busy or too tired to take the time? But if we let this become a trend… if we stop treating our birthdays as a time of celebration and instead simply let them pass by unnoticed, we lose something important. For as much as they meant to be a time to gather with family and friends and celebrate the gift of life, birthdays are also an occasion for reflection and evaluation. Are our lives turning out the way we hoped? Are we meeting our goals and expectations? Another year has passed. Are we satisfied?

Today we celebrate a different kind of birthday. Today is the feast of Pentecost and it is the birthday of the Church. It marks the occasion when the disciples received the Holy Spirit and even two thousand years later, it recalls us to origins as a community of faith and to an examination of our reason for being. Yet, most of us let the day go by virtually unnoticed. In terms of significance it has become only a pale shadow of what it once was raking right up there with the likes of Arbor Day. Yet this change comes at a very real cost for in overlooking Pentecost, we miss out on the chance to stop and see where we are and where we would like to be going.

In order to understand the legacy of Pentecost, we have to first examine what happened. There are two different accounts, John and Acts. They are very different in both their timetable and in the recounting of events. In John’s Gospel Jesus comes to the sequestered disciples one week after his resurrection. In Acts, which is the continuation of Luke’s Gospel, many others beside the disciples witness the events. John’s account is quiet and intimate. Luke’s is dramatic, filled with fire and crowds of onlookers. In spite of these variations, they share one critical commonality- the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.

Now the identity, nature and role of the Holy Spirit is a very complex issue and deserving of its own sermon. What gives us insight into the meaning and purpose of Pentecost is how the Spirit is transmitted. In John, Jesus breathes on the disciples. In Acts, there is a mighty wind coming from heaven. In both cases, wind or breath evokes the image of the creation of humanity in Genesis 2, in which God breathes the breath of life into the newly formed Adam. That is why Pentecost is so important in the life of the Church.

On this day, we mark the beginning of our life as a community of believers. Through baptism, we share in Christ’s death and resurrection as individuals. But today, we recall and celebrate our recreation as a new entity, the Church, the Body of Christ on earth. Jesus breathes life into us that we may in turn bring that life to others. The bestowal of the Spirit on the disciples echoes Psalm 104, “You send forth your Spirit and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth.” And it is we, the Church, that arises as this new creation.

So what does it mean to be the Church? As the Church, we are Jesus’ continuing presence in the world. John makes this connection self-evident when Jesus says to the disciples, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Over the course of his gospel, John has made it clear that Jesus as with the Father’s authority. Indeed, Jesus and the Father are one. Knowing that he was returning to the Father, Jesus empowers his followers by bringing them into this divine unity. The community of Jesus’ followers is to serve the world as Christ himself would serve it. We are called upon, not just to continue Jesus’ work in imitation of Christ, but to actually be Jesus’ hands and continue his work of healing and reconciliation in our world.

And that is why Pentecost matters. It is the Church’s way of formally recalling both the tremendous responsibility Jesus imparted to us and of reminding ourselves of the great gift which he left us in order to accomplish it. For just as God once reached out to the world through Christ, he now reaches out through us.

That is one heavy responsibility and it helps us to understand why Pentecost is so important. Today is our collective birthday after all and what time could be more appropriate to ask ourselves, “How are we doing? Are we doing a good job in continuing Jesus’ work?”

The answer is sobering. For many centuries the Church has been the predominant cultural and political force in the Western world, in fact even into the 1980’s we were still a thriving and growing part of American society. But now things are different. The Church as a whole and the Episcopal Church in particular is shrinking, both in numbers and in significance. And if we just look at the surface of things… if we just look at the membership numbers and the money then it will be awfully tempting to just crawl back into bed and pretend like the day doesn’t matter.

But apathy is not the answer. It is hard to face up to the stress of our situation, but it is not impossible. For we are not in this by ourselves. Indeed more than anything else that is the essential message of this day. In teaching the disciples to prepare for his departure Jesus declares, “I will not leave you orphaned. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:18-19) The Spirit is the continuation of Christ’s presence. Only through the power of the Spirit are we able to face up to the difficult reality of our current predicament and not give into to despair… only through the Spirit can we find the creativity and the courage to take a hard look at what the world needs in order that we might again adapt ourselves to covey Christ to them.

Today is Pentecost. We are the Church and it is our collective birthday. But rather than lamenting the fact that as a church we are not aging all that well, we have a choice- a choice to continue to wallow in a pity party for ourselves or to get up and see that our decline is also an opportunity- that there is once again the chance to reach out an evangelize, not just a few, but a growing mass of people of feel little or no connection to the Church or to religion of any kind… the chance to counter the message of so many thinkers who have declared Christianity to be not just irrelevant but actually destructive to the good of humanity.

This is no easy task but the Church began in far more hostile circumstances and it managed to grow from a handful of believers living in an insignificant province of the Roman Empire to become a global faith that is embraced by billions. By taking the time to remember just how it all began we are given the chance to recapture some of the excitement and energy that so defined the Church in its earliest days so that we might find a new and better way of spreading the Gospel to a world that desperately needs to hear it.