One evening in January, 1988 I was
on a dilapidated barge chugging south just off the eastern shore of Lake
Nicaragua. It was a part of the country with
no paved roads, where the vast lake served as the main artery of transportation.
Our volunteer construction team had
hired the barge, a rusting hulk with a wheezing, reeking diesel motor, to help
us gather materials for the houses we had gone there to build. I’d spent much of the day in a dim, windowless
warehouse, picking through piles of cement paper in sacks, pulling out the ones
that hadn’t been turned into bricks by rain leaking through the roof, and
loading them into wheelbarrows. Nicaraguans
then wheeled the cement down the street and out to the end of a rickety pier,
where they lowered it into the canoe that ferried it out to the barge.
When the cement was shipped, we
rode on a flatbed truck to the outskirts of the village where some Swedes had
set up a sawmill. We loaded the truck
with lumber and drove back to the pier, where we moved it, board-by-board, out
to the barge, in the same laborious manner.
It was late afternoon by the time we had put out from San Miguelito, and
we had gone less than half of the ten or twelve miles back to our work site in Morillo
when a belt broke on the engine. The
pilot cut the motor and we drifted for a while in anxious silence, as he
struggled to tie a length of rope tightly enough around the flywheel to serve
as a temporary replacement. Amazingly, it
worked, and as the sun sank behind the twin volcanoes of the Isle of Omotepe,
we got under way once again.
It seemed to be a rule of life in
Nicaragua that any vehicle on land or water that had space on deck or in the
cargo bed was required to take on passengers, and a spontaneous party broke out
among them in celebration of the ingenuity of our captain and the beauty of the
evening. In the prow where I was
sitting, a man in a floppy wide-brimmed hat of faded army green and matching
shirt pulled a half-pint bottle of cheap white rum out of his bag and offered
it to me with a smile. I took a swig and
handed it back. He pointed to a golden pearl
of light high above in the darkening sky.
Calling Spanish “basic” would have been doing it too much credit, but I’d
had enough Latin that I understood “la diosa del amor”—the goddess of
love. So we drank again to Venus, and from
there we made our best effort at carrying on a conversation. As was often the case in my time in Nicaragua,
the topic came around to the question of why my country was attacking his. I did what I could to explain my understanding
of Cold War geopolitics, and he looked me intently in the eye and said, “They
say we are Communists, but we are not. We
are Christians.”
I think of that man and our conversation
this morning because today is Pentecost.
Today is a celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit that came to the
disciples of Jesus of Nazareth on Pentecost Day. What makes that gift the enduring life-force
of the Church is not the memory of an ecstatic experience, a sound like a rush
of wind and a vision of tongues of fire.
Neither is it the miraculous
ability to speak to a crowd of people from every land in their native languages. If you’re like me, these things have never
happened to you, but this is still our story.
Because the sound is just the means to gather the crowd, and the flames
are just the sign of the authority to speak, and the languages are just a means
to deliver a message. And it’s the
message that is the real gift of Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is what empowers us
to speak and to hear a message, and the message is not very different from the
one that man gave me on the barge in Nicaragua.
“Language is not a barrier, to us being able to understand each other. Neither is nationality, or politics. We live on the same Earth, under the same
stars. We ought to be able to trust each
other and live in peace.” And the second
part of the man’s message is also the message of the Holy Spirit—“the means to
this peace, the bond of this brotherhood, is Christ.”
Sometimes when people talk about reuniting
the human race, they seem to have a dream of getting everybody to speak the
same language, or believe the same doctrine, and line up behind the same
centralized plan. But this is the
project of the tower of Babel. It is the
dream of the empire and the totalitarian state. At its heart is the fear of death and disorder,
and a spirit of rivalry, even rivalry with God. But the Holy Spirit at Pentecost has a
different kind of dream. The tongues of
flame are distributed around the circle of the disciples, where each one receives
his or her own anointing with the authority to teach. The Spirit does not teach those Jews from all
over the world to speak the same language; but it teaches the apostles to speak
the variety of languages that make a multicultural community. And Peter interprets the event to the crowd in
terms of Joel’s dream of the Spirit poured out on all flesh, so that sons and
daughters, young men and old, and even slaves, have the power to speak the
truth about God.
The Gospel of John says plainly
that God will send us this Spirit of truth.
But it is not a philosophical truth.
It is not something esoteric or abstract or otherworldly, but it is a
truth that is available to everyone, because it is revealed to all in the life
of Jesus. The message of the Gospel, the
message that is kindled into flame at Pentecost, is that the truth about God is
a human truth. It is manifest in human
words and human works. They are words of
forgiveness, and reconciliation, and peace.
They are works of healing, and feeding, and setting free, of seeking,
and saving, and serving even unto death.
To say the same kind of words, and
do the same kind of works, requires no special knowledge, and no higher
authority than the life and death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. No matter who we are or where we come from we
can understand this story. We can grasp
what kind of person Jesus is. And if we
love him, says the Gospel, and model our own actions upon his, and pray to
become like him in our own peculiar way, we have the Spirit of truth. The Spirit that was on him, that anointed him
to speak good news to the poor, and recovery of sight to the blind, and release
to the captive, to let the oppressed go free, and the coming of the year of God’s
favor, is also with us and in us. And as
bearers of this message, we are all members of one body, no matter what
language we speak, or what country we come from, no matter how the architects
of Babel might try to keep us apart.
Today we begin the story again at
the beginning, with the water where Jesus was baptized with the Holy
Spirit. Today we welcome another
companion into his way of freedom and truth, in the person of little Mackenzie
Anne. And we pray that the Holy Spirit will
give her grace to recognize the power of the gift she has been given, that from
this modest beginning, she may be able to go all the way, and lead others to
the abode of heavenly peace. Beginning
again where the apostles began, gathering on Sunday to pray and to remember
Jesus, may this congregation be empowered to hear and to speak the message of
the Holy Spirit in the languages of our own day. From this modest beginning, may the truth
about God’s reconciling love for every human being lead us to become that royal
priesthood of every family, language, people and nation that the Spirit intends
us to be.
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