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Pentecost Sunday

"Pentecost Moments; Follow Through Moments"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

That first Pentecost moment must have been quite something: sounds like a tornado, dancing flames in midair, and Peter and the others so filled with God’s Spirit that everyone who saw and heard them thought they were drunk with new wine! It is hard for us to grasp that from that epiphany, that euphoric manifestation of the power and the active presence of God, the Church was born. From that moment, Jesus’ followers not only grasped, but also were empowered to carry out, the mission that Jesus had passed on to them. They no longer lived for themselves alone, but for him who died and rose for them and for all those beyond them who might come within the reach of God’s saving embrace.

They were forever changed by that first Pentecost moment, and we, and those who have come before us and will come after us, have been significantly changed as well. Our lives would have been very different without that first Pentecost moment. God’s continued active presence in the world and our engagement as those dedicated to helping illumine and welcome and respond to that presence is what we celebrate on this feast of Pentecost.

I say “continued active presence” because we have not a deistic Holy Spirit, who fired up and transformed a small group of first century Jews and then wandered off and left them to work out history on their own! In mostly less dramatic ways, but with no less transforming grace, the Spirit has continued to change people and reveal the Divine presence in other Pentecost moments.Every baptism is such a moment. Certainly marriages and ordinations are such moments. In the course of our everydaylives, we all have such moments when God’s Spirit is more palpably felt than usual.

I am emboldened and strengthened by several such times of grace, ironically or providentially, associated with the actual feast of Pentecost. Twenty-six years ago, at the conclusion of my four-year spiritual odyssey that changed me from a Jesuit priest into an Episcopal priest, I celebrated Eucharist again for the first time in four years – on Pentecost Sunday. And if that was not enough to make a young man “see visions” and act like he had been drinking new wine, I was also privileged at that same service to baptize my first son, Tyler, an indescribable Pentecost moment. Three years later, after serving several years as an associate here at the Chapel of the Cross, the Senior Warden announced at all the services on Pentecost Sunday that I was to be the new rector, another life-changing moment. Now today, over several decades later, on Pentecost Sunday, the anniversary of his baptism, Tyler will graduate from our University’s Medical School and be commissioned and authorized to participate in the divinely associated work of helping to heal God’s people.

Your own more palpable brushes with God might be more or less dramatic then these, but they are certainly no less real and powerful. Such Pentecost moments astound us and lift us up beyond our limited human vision to a divine perspective and strengthen us for the journey ahead. They serve as touchstones into the future, reminders and assurances of God’s love and grace when such tangible manifestations might be less apparent. In the challenges that face us, especially those that have flowed from our perception of God’s call, the memory of these Pentecost moments can keep us confident of and reliant on God’s transforming grace.

In that sense, these rare Pentecost moments yield in importance to all the follow up moments that fill our every day lives. Although any divine epiphanies may be a foretaste of what we will find more sustained in heaven, when we will see God face to face, their role on earth is call us to believe and to respond to God’s love and presence by carrying on the work handed on by Jesus to his first followers and eventually to us. Pentecost moments are invaluable gifts, but they are to lead to what is even more important, the follow up moments. If Peter and the others, whenever the euphoria of that intoxicating liberation of the Holy Spirit had run low, just kept fishing at the Sea of Galilee and sat around the campfire every night reminiscing about how great it was to preach and be understood by thousands in their own language, they would have missed the fuller life God wished to give them and their important role in bringing others to believe. My own call to be a husband and father as well as priest and rector at the Chapel of the Cross was not just for me to sit back and enjoy the benefits of, but to respond with God’s grace by living these responsibilities as fully as I can – on good days and on bad. Tyler’s opportunity to be a doctor is not just a chance to earn a good living and bask in others’ respect, but an invitation to give himself in service to God and others and to help bring abundant life to all God’s people, especially those in need of healing. Your purpose in life, whatever your vocation or age, is not just to accumulate as much as you can and be comfortable and live for your self alone, but to respond joyfully to the God who created you and calls you and sustains you, by loving God through loving others. Margo, Jace, Grant, Christopher, & Oscar, who will be baptized this morning, are not just “getting things right with God” and adding “Christian” to their resume. They are being claimed as beloved children of God and commissioned to return that love to God through loving others and living out their baptismal covenant.

Unlike today’s Pentecost moment for them, which they will not really be aware of or remember, there will be other times for them later on when God’s grace will break through their “ordinary” experience. God’s Spirit will fill them and give them new perspective and vision. “Young men shall see visions and old men will dream dreams.” Those Pentecost moments will be significant and important catalysts in their lives, but of even more importance will be the day to day, week to week, year to year follow up moments, when they live out the visions and the dreams and the grace with which the Holy Spirit has filled them. So too it is for all of us.

Thank God for the first Pentecost, which has affected us all. Thank God for those Pentecost moments that call us to faith and help us to believe. But most especially thank God for those many follow up moments, which stretch us and mature us and empty us out that God may fill us with himself. In the words of today’s psalm, “May the glory of the Lord endure for ever; may the Lord rejoice in all his works.”

Acts 2:1-21 Psalm 104:25-37

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