Pentecost
Texts: Acts 2:1-21, John 7:37-39
Our readings from Acts and John today bring us into two of the three main harvest festivals of Judaism, times when those who were able gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate. The three harvest festivals were the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Festival of Booths. It’s hard to tell from the portion of John we read today, but Jesus was in the temple in Jerusalem celebrating the Festival of Booths when he made these statements.
At their beginnings, these feasts were simply about harvests. The Feast of Weeks, also called Pentecost, which was 50 days after the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, These two feasts were always linked. The Feast of Weeks marked the end of the spring harvest season. Over the course of 50 days, the crops had grown up and been harvested. The Festival of Booths was the end of the fall harvest. In Israel, there were two growing seasons, and both ended with festivities. However, as the people grew in their understanding and worship of God, they linked these festivals to the story of the Exodus. You can hear the connection most clearly in the name of the first festival, the Feast of the Unleavened Bread.
The Feast of the Unleavened Bread was directly after Passover and eventually they became one celebration in two parts. The first part, Passover, celebrated when God’s Spirit passed over the people of Israel, sparing them from the final plague that led to their release from slavery in Egypt, the death of all firstborn sons. They were passed over and freed from great tragedy by the sprinkling of lamb’s blood on their doorposts. The Feast of the Unleavened Bread was the celebration of the Israelites actually leaving Egypt, quickly making unleavened bread for the journey as they packed up to go. They were then able to cross the Red Sea into freedom.
They moved quickly from Egypt to Mount Sinai, where they camped for some time. Moses went up the holy mountain to talk with God. Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, became a celebration of the giving of the law to Moses at Sinai, that sacred time when Moses and God were in direct conversation with each other and a covenant was formed between the people of Israel and God. This was a celebration of covenants and oaths, vows made between God and the people.
Finally, months later, after the fall harvest, there is the Festival of Booths, a time when Jewish people still create temporary dwellings and stay in them to remind them of the journey of the people of Israel through the wilderness, a time to look forward to the promised land.
These three pilgrimage festivals were markers in the Jewish calendar, time to stop, remember, and reflect. The first two got directly mapped onto the Christian calendar, given new meaning and purpose in our faith. But even the last plays a role in our understanding of Christ.
Our reading from John today is a snippet of a conversation between Jesus, scribes, and Pharisees within the Temple. It’s helpful to pull back and see the full context of the chapter. Jesus had been getting into hot debates with the Jewish authorities, as he was always doing in John. He had just walked on water and given a long talk about how he was the bread of life. Those in leadership were none too happy with Jesus. So he went back to Galilee for a while to let everything simmer down. His time had not yet come. But the Festival of Booths was coming and Jesus’ brothers asked him if he was going to Jerusalem to celebrate, as they were supposed to do if possible. Jesus told his brothers he wasn’t going, but after they left he secretly went too. However, he wasn’t too secretive as soon as he came to the temple. Halfway through the festival, Jesus arrived, came into the temple, and began to teach. He shared quite openly that he came from God. What we read today were the final words of this discourse, the words that made some believe he was truly the Christ.
“All who are thirsty should come to me! All who believe in me should drink! As the scriptures said concerning me, Rivers of living water will flow out from within him.” (John 7:37b-38)
Now Jesus isn’t quoting directly from scripture here, there’s no chapter and verse we can go back to, but he is alluding to a well known story of the people of Israel in the wilderness. When the Israelites came to Meribah in the desert, they had no water. They cried out to Moses to do something. No one can survive that long without water. God instructed Moses to hit a rock with a staff and water gushed forth, not just enough for the day, but a stream of water that nourished the entire community and their animals as long as they stayed there.
Jesus was saying that in the midst of their current wilderness experience, their current wanderings, he was the living water that could sustain them. This is still early in the Gospel of John. The people weren’t sure who Jesus was or what he was about, so he used the context of the festival to explain. He was the source of the Spirit, the living water that will quench their thirst even when they are wandering lost and alone through the wilderness. They were not forgotten by God. They were not abandoned. They were loved and provided for, even when things seemed very bleak. They could strike the rock and drink. Jesus was the way out of the desert and into the promised land.
At Passover, Jesus died. But it took me until this week to realize that the feast we were keeping at Easter was the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. After the Passover sacrifices of lambs, the community moved pretty quickly into the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, into the celebration of coming out of bondage into freedom. As I said earlier, Passover and the Feast of the Unleavened Bread had combined into one festival in two parts. Just as the people of Israel came out of bondage in Egypt into freedom, at Easter we are released from death to life, from sinful systems that corrupt into ways of living that bring healing and restoration. The feast we keep is the feast of freedom and healing.
That brings us finally to the feast we celebrate today, Pentecost. Fifty days after the Feast of the Unleavened Bread the people celebrated the end of the spring harvest and the giving of the covenant at Mount Sinai. All the people who were able to gathered in Jerusalem. Jewish people from all across the diaspora came into the city to celebrate Moses’ time on the holy mountain with God and the covenant God made with them.
God used that moment to create the people of the new covenant, to begin the sparks that would become the Christian Church. The apostles, the sent ones, were suddenly filled to the brim with God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. It danced like tongues of fire upon their heads. They were able to speak in a variety of languages.
This ability to speak in all these languages was emphasized and highlighted in this story for good reason. The entire book of Acts is about how a movement that started in Jerusalem was able to spread across an empire filled with people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. It spread because this new covenant isn’t one based in laws or regulations. It isn’t about building a nation. It is about a relationship with God. It spread because people were able to take it and put it into their own languages, to use their customs in new ways, to adapt what they knew into something that could honor God.
One of the dangers the Church has always faced is that this adaptation, this way of working with cultures to enhance our understanding of God in our time, our place, our location, and our language, has been stifled. There are people from all denominations and backgrounds across the world who try to make the Church look and act like a particular culture’s understanding of the Church rather than letting the Spirit lead them into relationships that allows them to adapt and form Churches that speak their language. This is where tragedies like the boarding schools for Native American children came from. White people from a variety of denominations including our own Episcopal Church took children away from their families and tried to force them to dress and act like white American people because they thought their white American cultural adaptation of Christianity was the only way to be Christian. They tried to strip children of their culture and language rather than letting them use their culture and language to help them relate to Christ. In my preacher’s Bible study several of my friends have started using the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament in our time of reading and reflecting on scriptures together. Being able to see the New Testament through this culture’s lens is illuminating. I have begun to realize how much my own cultural background influences how I read a text which originated in a different culture entirely. Jesus’ culture is foreign to our culture and yet we find God in the Bible and the Church. The Holy Spirit helps us see Christ in our contexts. It helps adapt our worship of God into our own languages. Nowadays in The Episcopal Church, we are working to repent from the sins of trying to force English-American culture on indigenous people, of removing children from their families and the horrors that happened at Christian boarding schools. The Niobrara Convocation, an organization by and for Native American Episcopalians, has been gathering and supporting each other each summer since 1870. We still have much work to do, but we now try to listen and follow Native Americans’ lead as they help contextualize our Church into their culture. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, a work of relationship, not a work of customs, rules, and regulations.
The beauty of the Church is that at its heart it is formed in this covenant of relationship with the Holy Spirit, alighting on each one of us and using our own cultures, customs, and unique personalities to help enhance our relationship with God. The struggle of the Church is that we also have structure and order. We live in this tension between having regulations, routine, and order, which help the Church endure for generations and link us to our ancestors, and having a freedom found in individual relationships with the Holy Spirit. In the best version of the Church, the structured organization helps one learn about and enhance their relationship with God both on a communal and individual level. We temper each other and help each other shine. The feasts, the history, the way we organize ourselves, all work to enhance our understanding of who God is.
The reality of the Church is that it’s a mixed bag. Sometimes cultural customs that aren’t necessary become enshrined in the Church and we get stuck in a place that pinches and prods and tries to force people into a certain way of being that not all of us are meant to inhabit. That can cause immense damage. It risks the future of the Church. But most dangerously, it reduces our ability to hear the Holy Spirit in our own day and age. We must always put our relationship with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that helps us see God in our own contexts, first. Structure, routine, feasts and festivals then all adapt to help us relate to the Spirit better. We don’t have to abandon the structures and routines. They are immensely valuable. But they are secondary to the Spirit.
The Church, the people of God who gather together in worship of Jesus Christ, was formed and is still being formed by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit takes our feasts and festivals and turns them into life changing moments. The Spirit works in and through us both individually and on a communal level to help bring about Christ’s work on earth. The Spirit helps us accomplish that which we could not do on our own.
The Spirit has always been around, it helped bring cultural adaptations and customs which brought three simple harvest festivals into times of reflection on the journey of the people of Israel out of Egypt into reflections on how Jesus Christ coming to earth changed the human story. We can find the story of Christ spiraling out to the rest of the world, being enhanced by different cultures, customs, and languages as we contextualize the Spirit for ourselves. Different understandings of Christ, given by the Holy Spirit, can help us come together and see the depth and breadth of the mystery of God. None of us know God completely, but together we can help each other see different aspects of the divine.
So may we seek and find the Holy Spirit within ourselves and our contexts, helping us to live out our journeys as people of faith in this day and age. Amen.
