Pentecost

A feast looking for a host

I’m getting ready for the Day of Pentecost. It’s one of the three great feast days in the Christian year, along with Christmas and Easter. But Pentecost doesn’t get nearly the attention the other two festivals get.

Could it be that, for many of us, Christianity has become a religion about Jesus, instead of the religion of Jesus?

The brief Gospel reading for Pentecost tells about Jesus, raised from the dead, breathing on his disciples and giving them the Holy Spirit. He is breathing his life into them. Just as God breathed life into Adam at the beginning of creation, so now Jesus breathes new life into the disciples. And then he tells them he is sending them out just as God sent him. Now they can forgive the sins of anyone and everyone. As he told them earlier, “You will do greater things than I have done.”

In other words, we have enormous power with each other. Jesus is sending us out to live the life he lived. Christianity is not a religion about Jesus; it is the religion of Jesus.

And lest we doubt the importance of this distinction, we should remember that when the people in Jesus’ day tried to make him a king, he quickly got out of town. When Peter wanted to enshrine Jesus on the mountain with Moses and Elijah, Jesus said it was time to go. Because Jesus knew that one way of avoiding our responsibility to claim our own divine power is to worship someone else as the only bearer of that divine power. If we say, “Jesus is divine so let’s make him king,” then we can avoid our responsibility to claim the power that he gave us.

It’s so much easier just to let Jesus be responsible for everything.

So, we make a much bigger deal of worshiping Jesus in the manger at Christmas or trumpeting his resurrection at Easter. And on the Day of Pentecost, when we are supposed to take stock of the fact that the Holy Spirit has been given to each of us here, and that we are expected to live as Jesus lived, … on this day, we are not so enthusiastic. We’re mostly thinking about school getting out and maybe going on a vacation.

The Book of Acts describes the gift of the Holy Spirit in a different way from the Gospel of John, but the message is the same. It says that when the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, the disciples all started speaking in tongues, speaking in other people’s languages clearly, so that foreigners lit up with recognition. There is something compelling about suddenly hearing your own language when you are traveling in a foreign country, isn’t there?

And I think the lesson is this: receiving the Holy Spirit means that we are now able to speak the language of people who are very different from us. Because everybody understands the language of the Holy Spirit.

It’s the Spiritual lingua franca—the language deeply imbedded in human beings of all races and cultures across time and space; the language we sometimes speak with a smile, a hug, or a kiss; the language that does not mock or denigrate; the language that bears the fruit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23)—this universal language of the Holy Spirit is the language of love and forgiveness.

We all know and respond to this language. And with it, Jesus said, “you will do greater things than I have done.”

“God is love,” the Bible says (1 John 4). All human beings are made in the image of this Love. Love is the language we all know by heart, precognitively. Infants know this language, and people struggling with Alzheimer’s disease know this language. Iraqis and Iranians, Chinese and Americans, we all know this language; and Pentecost reminds us that we have received the gift of tongues, the ability to speak the spiritual lingua franca wherever we are.

Maybe the Day of Pentecost is reminding us that our religion is meant to be the religion of Jesus, not just a religion about Jesus.