Pentecost is the fiery exclamation point on Easter. The entire season is an uprising: the early church set aside all fifty days from Easter to Pentecost as a season in which there was to be nothing that could look like groveling: no kneeling and no fasting on any day of the week. It is a green-blades-rising season. As the green blades rise at Easter, so too do the sparks and flames of Pentecost.
Both the beginning and end of the fifty days are originally rooted in the earth. (The name of the festival comes from the Greek word for “fifty,” referring to the fifty days after Passover/Easter.) Passover, as we noted in the Easter preaching reflections, is a festival that “has roots in an early barley harvest and in a migration to spring pastures, with both events proclaiming the goodness of the earth both here (barley harvest) and there (migration to spring pastures).” Pentecost, fifty days later, was a wheat-harvest festival, Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, which also commemorated the giving of the law at Sinai.
The earthy and elemental themes are poured out over us on this day:
Fire
If Pentecost had long commemorated that Moses went up on the fiery mountain to receive the law, then in the event in Acts it is as if each believer is a holy mountain, each of them crowned with flame, joined together in the Spirit’s power. I once heard a child say after a mass action for justice, “I felt like a spark in a bonfire – so tiny and yet so powerful.”
Linda Gibler, in her wonderful book, From the Beginning to Baptism: Scientific and Sacred Stories of Water, Oil, and Fire (Liturgical Press 2010), offers a mystical-scientific-ecological account of fire:
As a consequence of human domestication of fire, the light of the Sun, which is impossible to look at directly, shines in the single flame of a candle that draws our gaze. Early humans never knew, and scientists only learned a few generations ago, that we also glow like candles. The same processes that cause a candle to burn enable respiration within our cells and the cells of all living beings. The air we breathe and the food we eat mix in our cells and release energy. Like a candle flame, we radiate light every moment. (76-77)
Humans and other mammals are not the only beings that glow with respiration. All beings with nucleated cells have mitochondria, which oxidize sugars and release energy. Even plants respire. The sugars they produce through photosynthesis are later oxidized to provide energy for the plant. Not only humans, but all living beings share in the same luminous process as the flame of a candle. (85)
Water
Psalm 104 is a panorama that stretches from the rains coming down from heaven finally out into the sea and into the depths, celebrating the Spirit that renews the face of the earth. The psalm imagines the entire earth as a watershed flowing with God’s goodness, with humans taking a modest place in the system. With all the other creatures we recognize our nature: “All [creatures] look to you to give them their food in due season. You give it to them; they gather it; you open your hand, and they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth.” (Ps 104:27-30)
We might typically think of the Spirit as breath upon the water, but the alternate Gospel text of John 7:37-39 images the Spirit as water. Jesus – referring to the Spirit – promises that “rivers of living water” will flow from the believer’s heart (though the Greek is probably better translated “belly” or “womb”). Living water for the thirsty: an ecological image for reimagining ourselves at Pentecost.
Wind-spirit-breath
The Acts account of Pentecost describes how “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like a rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” In the primary gospel text, “Jesus breathed on the disciples and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” The concept of breath in Hebrew scriptures joins humans together with creation: “everything that has breath.” The Spirit that renews the face of the earth in Psalm 104 is the same Spirit that first hovered over the water in Genesis, that Jesus breathes on the disciples, that fills the lungs of diverse creatures, and that rushes through our assemblies with power. On today’s festival of the Spirit, the linguistic and textual connections that make wind-Spirit-breath into one overlapping, organic conceptual family should not be missed by preachers.
All things: Pentecost economics
Finally, we should be honest about where this is all headed: not only to shared testimonies and hymns of praise, but to shared possessions in a revolutionary economic change. The economic conclusion to Peter’s Pentecost sermon, not included in the lectionary texts this Sunday, nevertheless is part of the renewal of the earth still so fiercely needed today: “Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:43-45).
Blessings in your proclamation at Pentecost – may it be part of the sending of the Spirit to renew the face of the earth!
Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart
Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart serves as Pastor to Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Two Harbors, Minnesota, and as Distinguished Affiliate Faculty at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. A recent migrant to Duluth, Minnesota, Ben is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy and contributes to its Ecology and Liturgy Seminar. He is author of A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology (2011). A former village pastor to Holden, he now serves on the Holden Village Board of Directors.