Pentecost 2024
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In a moment, I saw God not as a character in a book but a present, active reality. Kansas had served up a signature Spring day. Strong winds sped vast cumulus clouds across the blue sky and bowed the trees. Leaves fluttered in the air, and as the gusts threatened to knock me to the ground, I wondered about God. I had no notion that God produced the wind with some cosmic box fan; I watched Nova. But the wind symbolized something — unseen yet powerful. I never had religion forced on me, but after that I could never entirely dismiss the thought of God.
God is like wind, unseen, yet heard and felt as it bends the world. Like communion. We can’t see Jesus in the gifts of bread and wine, but we feel him and hear his word. With God, the unseen supersedes the seen. The invisible wind visibly bends the trees, not the reverse. But, if God is like wind, we have a relational challenge: we can’t see God. So how do we know what’s invisible?
My problems are visible. I ask God to take my fear and pride, to protect and favor those I love, and to realize my desires. I ask that wars cease, persecutions end, and every human being experience justice, peace, truth, and freedom. Do you hold such prayers? I’d be surprised if you didn’t, since the whole world is begging God to act. As Paul says in Romans 8, we groan with the whole creation, awaiting the redemption of our bodies, of all we can see. We groan with questions: Does God do anything, or is it all left to us? Does God act on our prayers, or is prayer just a way to cope?
Paul argues we don’t even know how to pray, at least, not as we ought. The wind tosses our prayers away like wayward Wal-Mart bags because they aren’t rooted in reality. For some, God has scant to do with reality, but for Christians, nothing is more real than God. For us, God is fundamental Reality, the Reality that holds our prayers. Still, prayer can break from the Real, even, say, the Lord’s Prayer. Because when Jesus and I both pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we almost certainly have two different “Thy Kingdoms” in mind. So I don’t think God’s mind changes when we pray. Instead, we change, lest our prayers crash against the cliffside of heaven. Praying is aligning with God’s everlasting will. But, if God is infinite and perfect, and I’m one inch short of six feet tall and always five minutes late out the door, can I ever pray a prayer rooted in that God? Within my broken self within our broken world, can I ever grasp Reality?
I can’t, but for the Holy Spirit. This Spirit, Paul says, prays for us perfectly, with “sighs too deep for words.” While we labor to climb word on word to heaven, the Spirit moves into our depths, to who we are, to the Foundation of everything, and sighs. It’s a quiet sound, but a life sign. God prays to God in the depths of our reality — and hears us.
This is how we know the Holy Spirit. In God’s Son Jesus we see the Father primed to adopt us. But in the unseen, a movement lifts our eyes to see the Father and opens our lips to confess Jesus as Lord — with the breath of a sigh. It feels like we’re the ones who see and speak, but the movement doesn’t come from us. Something in us makes us long for something past the edge of what we know. We long for God, and who knows longing better than God — God is love. So God in us makes us yearn for the Father and the Son, and that is God the Holy Spirit.
But of all the Spirit could do, why sigh? But, why does anyone sigh? I sigh when I regret, when I see what is and wish it were different. I sigh when releasing painful tension. And, I sigh when I long, or when I long for love. So sighs the Spirit. The Spirit knows our brokenness and sighs with longing for redemption, and the Spirit knows our pain and sighs with longing for consolation, and the Spirit knows our longing itself, and longs for us with a love exceeding love. The Spirit’s every sigh is a sigh of longing, for the Spirit is God, who longed for us before the world was made. So the Spirit always prays the hope of our redemption, for our adoption to the Father to be complete.
So, my siblings in Christ, we have hope. Pentecost is hope, because as it says in Romans 8, we have the firstfruits of the Spirit, and as Paul says elsewhere, the same Spirit has poured the love of God into our hearts. We are the staging ground of the great invasion: the landing of the love of loves on our broken shore. Before, we loved and hated within the scope of human ability; at Pentecost, love takes on the power of the eternal. If God is the wind, love is the trees bending. Love is the evidence of the invisible God, it’s the satisfaction of our groaning, it’s the pentecostal gift, overcoming the walls between peoples, nations, and tongues to proclaim the glory of the Risen Lord.
Jesus, sending the Spirit at Pentecost, begins to make the world new from the inside. That is, inside us. As the Spirit lifts our eyes to the Father, so the same Spirit wipes the scales from our sight to reveal the one Jesus called our neighbor. Who is our neighbor, but the person closest at hand? That special person – not in the good sense – sitting within striking distance, is first your neighbor, and though your partner is to you your partner, in Christ they’re first your neighbor. And if you walked past someone on the street while coming into this church, that person was your neighbor. And if, as we pray for those who hurt, you remember a desperate woman from the news, she is your neighbor. When your actions or inactions touch the life of one unknown, you help or hurt your neighbor. And when you look in the mirror and form a judgment of who you see, you judge your neighbor. And if the Spirit made the disciples speak in tongues so they could love their neighbors with the good news of Jesus Christ, what will the Spirit not do so you can love your neighbor? It’s good that God should hear the Spirit sighing in your being, but even better if it’s heard by your neighbor, and, if you hear your neighbor’s sigh, you may be counted with the saints. Yet, how can we get so close as to hear the sighing of a soul if the Spirit doesn’t press us to that intimacy?
The One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is intimacy. If the sigh within us is longing, intimacy is its satisfaction. So God prays to God within the human person; right now, in you and me. If the prayers we speak are heard, it’s because they’re tutored in the breath within our being. O the mercies of this day! We do nothing, and God does everything. We wait for Pentecost, and God within us prays a new creation into being. We who have the firstfruits of the Spirit are the visible sign of the invisible future, that is, God’s kingdom is seen within our love. For as God speaks to God in the center of ourselves, our love becomes God’s love, our mind God’s mind, our will God’s will, our days God’s everlasting day, in which all our pains and questions find completion in sabbath and we lose our sense of delineation between the human and the Highest.
But, should this love of God within you manifest and your life be bound to God, what would happen if you then bound your life to your neighbor? And if you and several neighbors bound together in that grace turned to the world in love, what would happen to the world? We cannot tear the mystery of the church and its mission from Pentecost. The world groans in labor pains, and we have induced it. The winds of longing crash upon the earth, bending all things east to the coming of Our Lord, in whose reign love will triumph forever. So where will we let the Spirit triumph in us today? Where will we cease to brace against the gusts of holy desire and run with the wind at our back? Will we let our lives evince the love of an unseen God? Will we speak half-formed words to ourselves and to heaven or let the Spirit’s sighing bring us to Pentecost? Amen.