Let us pray.  Breathe on us, breath of God, Fill us with life anew, that we may love what thou dost love and do what thou wouldst do.  Amen.

     Recently, I’ve become intrigued with the work of a man named Bernie Krause, who is a naturalist, an artist and, most important perhaps, a sound engineer.  What Dr. Krause has done since the late 1960’s is to go into the wild to record the sounds there.  He’s recorded in Borneo, in the rainforests in the Amazon and in the American West.  The discovery that he has made which is so fascinating to me is that from listening to individual creatures in the wild, which is intriguing in its own right, he moved gradually to listening to whole ecosystems – small ecosystems in the wild – and he found that in any given sub-ecosystem, everything has its niche.  The frogs, the birds, the insects, the mammals – each one makes a sound such that it can be heard in the chorus of the whole.  No one creature drowns the others out; each has its place, and each harmonious chorus of this kind can be identified in the small area indigenous to it – its own habitat.

     It even seems that it is not just animal life that is singing or sounding.  More recently, NASA engineers recorded the sounds of the southern polar lights – that is the Antarctic equivalent of the Aurora Borealis.  Human ears, of course, can’t hear at those frequencies, but the lights do make a sound, and when the sound is slowed way, way down by sophisticated technology, it seems that the sound is the same sound that the seals make in that area.

     For me, learning about this ecological chorus evokes a kind of a wonder, as if one might say with the poet George Herbert: “Lord, who has praise enough?”, and perhaps we might be saying it with all of those beings too who are singing, or croaking, or chirping or vibrating as light.  Who has praise enough for the wonderful works of God?

     But along with wonder, my response to this learning is also grief – for since Bernie Krause started recording habitats, a full 25% of those choruses have ceased to exist, driven into extinction by human noise and habitat destruction.

     This day is Pentecost, the festival when we praise and ponder the Holy Spirit – the divine wind – the breath of God – the Spirit that erupts with profligate energy in creation, which broods over and broods in all life, the Spirit who is still wildly creative, even playful, whimsical.

     Our psalm for today has a great line that inexplicably got left out of what we sang.  It says: “Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living things too many to number, creatures both small and great.”  Then it goes on; it says: “and there is that great Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it.”  Just for the sport of it – for fun you have made the great Leviathon.

     On this day we honor the Spirit as the life of all worlds, the life of the great whales, of the soft moss underfoot, of the swirling galaxies, the butterflies, the giant sequoias, the cougars and the slow-moving mountains, and the life of human beings – all human beings.  We honor the Spirit as the life of the universe, the source of our primordial oneness- as we will sing in a short while, to a wonderful tune that David has set- “life in whom all lives begin.”

     In this praising of the Spirit on Pentecost, we are also called to be converted more deeply, to be opened, to ponder what the Spirit is calling us to in our own day, what we need to repent of and learn anew, so that we too may both praise and participate in God’s wonderful works.

     The Pentecost story tells of this immense divine creative energy coming upon and into and among human beings, Jesus’ disciples.  Luke tells us that they are all together in one place, waiting, wondering what to do after his departure.  And then something happens to them that can only be told in images.  It was like, we hear, the “rush of a powerful wind”, and “tongues of fire appeared and rested on each of them individually.”  They each were touched by this breath, this wind, this power, this fire of the Spirit.

     Interestingly, this happens at the time of a Jewish festival which celebrates a theophany on Sinai – the giving of the law to Moses in wind and fire, and the creation of a new community through this numinous encounter with the Holy One on the mountain.  It’s because of this feast that there are devout Jews from every part of the known world in Jerusalem.  And so Luke tells of the coming of the Spirit, and the imagery moves from tongues of fire resting on their heads to a miracle of tongues – a miracle of these disciples speaking the wonderful works of God, and also, the strangers, hearing in their own languages.

     They hear in the wind and the fire and the voices of uneducated Galileans the story of God’s love, of God’s presence in Jesus.  They also hear the story of human sin, for Peter will preach to them: “this Jesus whom you crucified has been made both Lord and Christ”.  They will hear of resurrection and healing and the possibility of redemption.  And they will be profoundly, intimately, transformatively pierced to the heart, and they will take action.

     It’s worth noting that these events are transformative not only for the hearers, but for the speakers as well.  The Spirit’s movement doesn’t fit into human control.  The ones who hear in this first Pentecost are all Jews, but even in this story the ground is laid for a wider and deeper inclusion.  Not very much later in Acts, while the Gospel is preached, while the apostles are still debating who can be in and who can be out of this fledgling new community, the Spirit will fall on the Gentiles, on the outsiders, on those who were previously considered to be totally outside the sphere of God’s interest or God’s grace, and they will be shown to be integrally part of what the Spirit is doing.

     The tight boxes of thought and imagination will be completely shattered – the Spirit’s coming releases wild possibilities.  I wonder if this aspect of the Spirit’s coming is part of what Jesus is trying to communicate to the disciples in the Gospel for today as they struggle with his words about how he must leave them.  Philip says, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied.”  And then Jesus asserts a profound identity with God: “Whoever has seen me, Philip, has seen the Father.”

     This identity is to be found in the works of love that Jesus has done, in his words and acts that reveal God’s very presence.  But then he invites the disciples into this loving unity through the coming of the promised paraclete – which is John’s word, hard to translate, for the Spirit.  Paraclete means at once comforter, advocate, sustainer, defender.  And Jesus says the one who is to come is the Spirit of truth who leads into all truth, who will lead you into truth you cannot bear yet, who will be the presence of Christ in the very depths of these disciples and in their very midst.

     They will know this Spirit as love, as presence.  They will know the Spirit in sharing Jesus’ purpose and mission, in doing and praying and believing “in my name”, as Jesus says.  And by the Spirit they will be sent out, even as Jesus has been sent by the Father.  The Spirit is within, beyond; she is intimate, she is other.  And then Jesus says something very startling: he says “the one who believes in me will do the works that I do, and greater works than these.”

     We struggled with this at the Bible study this week, talking about a world in need of so much healing, of such works that we, in our very human frailty, don’t seem to be able to do.  But, perhaps the greater works that Jesus speaks of involve the ongoing leading of the Spirit.  Perhaps they speak of situations unimaginable in Jesus’ day.  Perhaps they challenge us to keep our minds and our hearts open, to let ourselves keep being stretched, to keep learning, to keep growing.  Also, to let ourselves keep being converted, for Jesus will go on to say that the Spirit comes to convict the World – to show the ways that we are wrong in our lack of love, our pettiness, our small mindedness, our judgments about who is in and who is out.

     Pentecost becomes a call to imagine, to share in the creative power of God in the wonderful works of reconciling the world. I calls us to ground ourselves not in ego, but in this mystery of the divine breath that is in us, in the life of God that is blowing through our lives.  Paul, writing to an early community of very difficult Christians, those quarrelsome, egotistical Corinthians, combines something of these other images that we’ve already seen in the Pentecost readings.

     He speaks of an organic and intimate unity, rather than an individual way of being grounded in Christ.  We are a body; we are a community, and that community is the living, ongoing presence of the Holy One, infused with the mystery of the Spirit.  Paul calls the Corinthians to inclusion, especially of those who might be overlooked or left out.  He says there are varieties of gifts, but there is the same Spirit, and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates them all in everyone.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good – that is to say, for the praise of God’s wonderful works and for the reconciling of all things in God.

     Here too, there is a remarkable ecological vision of the whole – of the parts that fit together in harmony.  I dare say Paul didn’t see all the implications of his vision.  He, after all, lived in a world that included slavery, a world that subordinated women – he certainly didn’t see the many, many ways that this vision of the Spirit might push the Church and all of us, throughout the ages, to greater and greater inclusiveness.

     For the Spirit continues to urge us on, to urge us to catch the vision of the common good, here in our own community of Holy Apostles, in our community of the Episcopal Church, to ask: What is the common good for our whole human family?  For the non-human others?  For the living Earth?  Paul teaches us that we each have individual gifts, that each of our gifts are needed, and that we are all parts of Christ’s body alive with the divine life, for the sake of the whole.

     This, then, is the vocation and vision and invitation of Pentecost.  It is a calling to justice, to healing, to communion, to an ecological unity.  And the Spirit comes, not just once, but again and again and again – to challenge us and renew us and energize us, to shatter the prisons in which we box ourselves in – to stretch our hearts and to urge us on.  She comes as fire and wind, and sometimes she simply speaks in silence.

     Last week, on retreat, I lay on a rock on the bank of a creek in the midst of a canyon in south Utah.  Night fell, and the stars gradually began to come out, and I fell into a kind of a reverie – looking up, out, down, into that twinkling vastness. And I began to feel as if someone, something, was looking back at me.  Was there a conversation?  Not in words, not in human words…but if I had to try to translate what had happened I would say that it was something like “You are welcome here.  You are loved.  You belong here.  You are part of this glorious whole.”

     Then it was as if there was a kind of a dance in the twinkling stars, and a movement in the cells of my body, and a sense somehow that we are in the same dance.  And it’s the truth, you know.  Every bit of our bodies is star-stuff, and we are part of that great whole.

     So, on this Pentecost morning, in the restless and tender urgings of the Spirit, I have these questions for us, as individuals, as community – questions for myself and for you.

     To whom do you need to listen?  Is it a part of yourself that you have disregarded?  Some human that you have thought of as an adversary or as other?  Is it to the world that is other than human?  To whom do you need to listen?

     To what do you need to give voice?  What is your gift for the good of the whole?  What is your gift of wonder, lament, challenge and love?

     Finally, what is the vision of the common good that is stretching your imagination?  That is opening your mind and breaking your heart with love?  How are you called to join in creation’s song of praise?

     Amen.