The Day of Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Feast of
Pentecost-Year B
May 19, 2024
When my youngest brother was in
preschool, he and his class went on a field trip to the Diocesan camp for a
picnic. (It was a short drive from our
hometown.) When he came home that
evening, all he could talk about was one event out of the long day: when his classmate Noble Mosby had been
attacked by a wild goose. I can still
see my young brother telling this horror story with his big, round eyes, and
how the most chilling part of the tale wasn’t when poor Noble got attacked, but
it was when the teacher went to pick Noble up, and the goose went with him
because it refused to let go.
I’ve been thinking about this story a
lot this week; I’ll explain more about
that in a moment.
Today is a major feast in the life of
the church: the Feast Day of Pentecost. (The
British refer to it as Whitsunday, so that’s a nod to our Church of England
heritage that we include it as part of the name.) Pentecost was originally celebrated as the
Jewish Festival of Weeks, also known as Shavuot (pronounced “sha-voo-OAT,”)
that occurred 50 days after Passover and represented a sort of homecoming, for Jewish
people to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
This is why there are “devout Jews from every nation” present in our
Acts reading for today.
We
see the origins of the Christian celebration of Pentecost captured in that same
Acts reading today. It’s 50 days after
Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection. The
disciples are once again all gathered together, and the Holy Spirit descends
upon them with the sound “like the rush of a violent wind.” Acts tells us that “divided
tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them”.
And that “all of them were filled with
the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them
ability.” It’s why fire and wind are often associated with the
Holy Spirit and why we wear our flame colors today.
Throughout
the years, other images have been associated with the Holy Spirit. The dove, which descends upon Jesus in his
baptism with the gift of the Spirit, is one image often associated with the Holy
Spirit. In the gospel reading for today,
the word that is translated as Advocate is a Greek word “paraclete” which doesn’t
have a direct translation, so along with advocate, it can be translated as
helper, comforter, or even counselor. The
closest literal translation is “one called alongside.” (Paraclete is only found in John’s gospel and
once in the first letter of John.) We see
this image of Holy Spirit as comforter lifted up throughout this portion of
John as Jesus continues to reassure his disciples that he will not leave them
as orphans, and it is lifted up in our collect for today when we pray: “Grant
us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to
rejoice in his holy comfort…”[i]
It's
a nice image, isn’t it? I like to
picture how when things get challenging for us, the Holy Spirit might wrap us
in a nice, soft throw blanket and bring us a cup of tea for a bit of
respite. And while that does happen occasionally,
when I talked to people about their experiences with the Holy Spirit, it’s not usually
like that at all. They talked about
doing things that they didn’t necessarily want to do but felt moved to do, after
a sort of relentless insistence from the Holy Spirit. They talked about energy and heat, about
creativity out of chaos; others have talked to me about how the Holy Spirit
gives them persistent spiritual taps on the shoulder. They talked about how things come together in
the most unexpected ways.
This
week, I read this quote by the writer Jason Byasee: “Another translation of Paraclete is as the ‘Comforter’…The
image in English is altogether too placid, restful. Celtic Christians have long imagined the Holy
Spirit as a wild goose—loud, demanding, aggressive if necessary, but not at all
calm or quiet.”[ii] (You thought I’d forgotten about the goose,
didn’t you?)
The
Holy Spirit as a wild goose….It’s an image of chaos and disruption, of
persistence and insistence. But geese
are also fiercely loyal and protective.
They look out for each other, and they make good watch animals. (There’s a story in Celtic lore of how a flock
of geese helped foil a Celtic invasion of Rome by alerting the Romans of the
sneak attack by the invaders.) The Celtic Christians even had a saying about
this image of the Holy Spirit: “the
goose is on the loose!” (It’s a little
bit terrifying!)
The
goose is on the loose! Today we close
the door on the Easter season, and we are aware that this seeming end is only
the beginning. The Holy Spirit is even
now at work in our lives, in the Church, in the world. The goose is on the loose in ways beyond what
we could even ask for or imagine:
chaotic, disruptive, creative, insistent. And just like poor Noble Mosby, once that mama
goose gets ahold of us, she will not let go!
I
see it here all the time: how creative
endeavors turn out differently (and often better) than planned. How we have been forced to adapt to a changing
world and culture, and even when it is hard, there comes a vitality in the
wrestling. We see it in how the Holy Spirit
continues to send us new people, people looking for a home, and how we continue
to be challenged to create space for home for others. We see it in an insistent tug to look outside
ourselves, beyond these walls and this property, to dream about how the Holy
Spirit is urging us to share our joy with a needy world, to create a space of belonging,
a gathering place for this neighborhood, this community. (For those who volunteer with children’s
chapel, you see the Holy Spirit very much in that scarcely controlled
chaos. It’s why we clergy always come
back a bit disheveled from that experience.)
The
goose is on the loose!
Where
are the places of chaos or disruption in your life right now? How might the Holy Spirit be insisting that
you move into a new direction? Where are you seeing the goose on the loose here
in this church, and how are you being called to respond?
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