Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
May 27, 2007
The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday
The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Acts 2: 1 - 11
Psalm 104
1 Corinthians 12: 4 - 13
John 20: 19 - 23
"Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit."
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
I want to start this morning with a question. What is
it about Pentecost that makes it such a well beloved feast for
us? Well for one thing, the special effects and the pyrotecnics
are just terrific. You get a house shaken to its foundations,
you get the rush of a mighty wind, an appearance by Jesus, a
descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of tongues of fire, a
supernatural simulataneous multilingual translation system, and
a cast of thousands. What more could we ask for?
It’s all very dramatic, and that certainly makes it
appealing, but more importantly, it’s extremely rich in
theological content and if you ask me that’s the thing about it
that draws us to it: it has a deep personal meaning for us. We
see ourselves in the description of that first Pentecost.
What is its meaning? What is the meaning of Pentecost?
Well, surely one of its key meanings is that it’s about
community life--life in common, our life together. Pentecost was
not an individual miracle but a group miracle. There’s nothing
in the story about the tongues of fire or about the Holy Spirit
coming down on only one person. Not at all. The Holy Spirit
comes to all of the disciples. And the story would not even be
possible without lots of other people; lots and lots of diverse
people from many different countries, and ethnic backgrounds,
and economic situations.
So Pentecost is very much a community celebration.
What kind of community was created at Pentecost? Well,
today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, gives us
at least part of the answer. It was a community where each
individual heard the good news but heard it in her or his own
language. It was a community therefore of unity because they ALL
heard the good news, but a community were diversity remained. So
it was a community of both unity and of diversity--all at the
same time. Now that’s a pretty amazing kind of community!
Our second reading--from First Corinthians--tells us
more. The Pentecost community contained a rich variety of gifts,
individual gifts: “To each was given the manifestation of the
Spirit for the common good,” is how the Bible puts it.
So even now after two thousand years, Pentecost is very
much a celebration of who we are as a community. It’s a sort of
birthday party for us: a joyful, exuberant, Spirit-filled
celebration of who we are in all our diversity and with all our
individual gifts.
We are a community where we have all heard the same
good news that God in Christ has loved us and always will... but
at the same time we’re a community where each one of us remains
who we are, with all our own personal quirks and individual
talents.
We have all heard the good news, and so it follows that
we are a community that is focused on a common purpose. That
common purpose--audacious as it may seem--is to return God’s
love, by loving one another and by loving the world. We want to
do this by sharing with each other--and with the world--the
gifts each one of us has--and by asking nothing, absolutely
nothing, in return.
Now you may say that this is an overly idealized
picture of what community life in the church is really
like--even in a marvelous community like ours. Even though we
may all have been baptised and even though we may all have
received the Holy Spirt in confirmation and even though we may
all have heard and accepted the Gospel, aren’t we at the end of
the day still just ordinary human beings and for that reason
full of selfishness and egotism and pride just like everbody
else?
Well yes, we are.
And no, we aren’t.
If we stop to think about it, on the deepest level we
really do think of ourselves like the community that is
described in the Bible. We see ourselves as a Spirit-filled
community --not as the members of a club, not merely as members
of an institution, but as a people claimed by God in baptism and
gifted and enabled by the Holy Spirit to seek and serve Christ
in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
We know that we’re not always successful at that, but
that remains our goal and we are determined to try and to try
again and whenever we fall down on the job, we are committed to
asking for God’s forgiveness and to brushing ourselves off and
to going forward. Moreover we know how to do that: by continuing
in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the
bread, and in the prayers, and by striving for justice and peace
among all people, and by respecting the dignity of every human
being.
What a calling! What a community! What a gift! What
more could we ask for indeed?
This is the sort of community that was created on the
first Pentecost. And, yes! This is the sort of community that
continues to exist in the daily life of the church and thank God
it does. This is the community into which this morning we’re
going to welcome two new members--one a child, one an adult. One
a son, one a mother.
The practice of receiving infants into the community of
faith reaches back to the earliest days of the church. How, you
may ask, is it possible for a little child to enter into a
community when the child doesn’t yet understand it or to make
promises that it can’t yet fulfill? The answer is contained in
one simple word. It is a gift. A gift from God and a gift to the
child from his parents. A gift of welcome from the community to
its tiniest new member. In due course little Gabriel Boone will
become an adult and he will need to accept and affirm that gift
for himself, but for today his godparents and his parents accept
the gift for him.
The baptism of an adult is easier to understand and is
always, I think, a marvelous event in the life of any Christian
community. And so, Kara, all we want to say to you this morning
is congratultions and welcome! We are so happy and privileged to
be able to welcome you into this congregation, into this
particular community of striving for peace and justice; this
community of prayerful celebration on the corner of 28th and
Ninth.
And Tim, our own beloved Tim, whom we claim in a
special way, how proud and happy you must be this day. We all
share your joy.
I had a strange daydream recently about little Gabriel
Boone. It took place in the future--many many years in the
future. He was walking down Ninth Ave. and in my daydream he
came to Holy Apostles with another person and they stopped in
front of the church and Gabriel said, “This is where my mother
and I were baptised and where my father served.” And then they
went inside the church and it was full of people and they were
singing one of the same hymns that we sang this morning:
Hail this joyful day’s return
hail the Pentecostal morn,
morn when our ascended Lord
on his church his Spirit poured!
Alleluia!
You who did our forebears guide,
with their children still abide;
grant us pardon, grant us peace,
till our earthly wanderings cease.
Alleluia!
Alleluia and Amen.
