The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Day of Pentecost
May 31, 2020
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit in tongues of flames on the disciples. This is the day the Church as we know it was born, a Church where there is “no longer Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” “male and female.”
By this gift of the Holy Spirit, Christ promised to send peace into our hearts, a peace that passes understanding, a peace the world cannot give. In the words of Veni creator spiritus, the medieval Latin hymn you heard just a few minutes ago, “Thy blessed unction from above / is comfort, life, and fire of love. / Enable with perpetual light / the dullness of our blinded sight.”
That is the song we sing this day, as saints have done for centuries throughout the world. But as that hymn makes clear, the Holy Spirit isn’t a happiness dispenser meant to make us feel good when things look bleak. This is the Spirit, Jesus says, who “will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” When the Spirit comes, as Peter notes in our reading from Acts today, quoting the prophet Joel, there are “portents in heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist.” This is the Spirit who has “spoken through the prophets.”
The prophets aren’t known for being a cheery bunch. They’re known for telling the truth. And it’s no wonder: the Spirit who comes down at Pentecost leads us into all truth, and the truth shall set us free. But the truth often hurts. That’s what happens when we build what we think is a magnificent house—or a community or a nation—but build it on sand: the rain falls, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat against that house, and it falls—and great is its fall.
It can feel embarrassing and shameful to realize we’ve been building our houses or communities on sand all along. Maybe some of us knew the thing wasn’t really built for everyone; maybe most of us didn’t. The fall is frightening, just as frightening as the events taking place over the past few days in our nation. Our houses and communities are unstable. They are built on the sands of racial inequality. Once we realize they’re built on sand, it’s no surprise that there is no peace—that there is violence and destruction in our borders instead, some premeditated, much of it instinctive, all of it waiting to be aggravated depending on how we choose to respond to it.
If there were ever a day to cry out for peace however it might come, it would be today, when the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, descends to fill our hearts with peace. And to be clear, peace is exactly what we ought to ask for: peace that the world cannot give, peace that can come only from building our houses and communities on the rock—that is, on Christ. That is the peace for which we pray. And that peace is more than the absence of fire or looting; it’s the presence of God in our hearts assuring us that God is with us as walk through the fire and as we go through the deepest valley.
But it’s tempting all the same to confuse that peace of the Holy Spirit with the peace of man, enforced by violence and complacency. I’m sure most of us mean well if we’re hoping to return to a normalcy that never was—to houses re-built on the same old sands—but God is calling us to more: God is calling us to build on Christ, who is the solid Rock.
Calling for peace without justice makes us like those who oppressed Israel in Babylon, especially on this day of Pentecost. Of these, the Spirit speaks in the Psalms, “they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Sion.” But “how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” It turns out it’s hard to sing the Lord’s song when you’re someone like George Floyd, who was one of our brothers in Christ, and is, even now in death. It’s hard to sing the Lord’s song when you’re facedown on the asphalt with a knee to your neck and three men on your back. It’s hard to sing the Lord’s song when you watch as another black man dies for nothing while a familiar storm of impotence and rage swells upon the streets and in our hearts. How long, O Lord, how long?
Those who insist on peace without justice, on returning to whatever normalcy there was before, bring to mind the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who surely spoke by the Holy Spirit: “From the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ where there is no peace. . . . They shall be overthrown, says the LORD.”
By contrast, what God wants for us is this: “Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”
Friends, I say this to you all just as much as I have to say it to myself every day when I’m tempted to think otherwise: Christ is the good way, Christ is the ancient path, in whom we will find rest for our souls. Sure, we need better laws and better regulations, more training and more diversity. Sure, we need less income inequality and more wage parity, more educational opportunities and fewer pipelines to prison.
But underlying it all, we have to own up to a simple reality: we live in a world under the dominion of the evil one. “Our struggle,” as Ephesians puts it, “is not against enemies of blood and flesh,” or at least not primarily against them. It’s not against mere laws or norms or issues that can be neatly solved by one political platform or another. Our struggle, we read in Holy Scripture, is “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” and these forces infect our lives individually and collectively.
We have to recognize the corrosive effects of these forces of darkness within ourselves—the strongholds where they reside. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” But Jeremiah reminds us that “the heart is deceitful above all things,” and we must all ask God to destroy the piece of our heart that is stony and indifferent, to give us in its place a heart of flesh.
This God who replaces hearts of stone with hearts of flesh is the way out of our spiritual darkness—the physician of our souls, who for our sakes took on human flesh, who was cruelly and unjustly murdered, who endured the grave and was raised again, who ascended into heaven and sent forth his Spirit to renew the face of the earth. Christ Jesus has bound up sin and death, not only that we might live forever, but we might live as God has called us to live here and now.
If we want practical steps to take to address what’s going on around us, we need look no further than his example. Follow Christ, who as God nevertheless emptied himself and humbled himself, putting his trust not in his riches or his strength, but in God. Follow Christ, who met and knew his neighbors and understood them and loved them—especially people on the margins: women and strangers, the poor and the sick, those unable to walk or see or hear, tax collectors and prostitutes—even centurions. Follow Christ, who shed tears and wept in the face of suffering and death. Follow Christ, who was emboldened to intervene in the face of cruelty and violence to save souls and lives, who spoke of God’s decrees as he stood before kings and governors and was not ashamed. This, along with Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, was the work that made God’s forgiveness in Christ real and open to us—and this is only bought at a price: our lives as we know them.
In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, “cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
What we seek—what the Holy Spirit calls us to—is costly grace, grace that flows from repentance. This, Bonhoeffer says, is “costly because it condemns sin” and “grace because it justifies the sinner,” “costly because it costs us our lives” and “grace because it gives us the only true life.”
Don’t be deceived. It doesn’t take martyrdom at the hands of the Third Reich to strive for that costly grace in the face of racism and violence. All of this is possible, in different ways and to different degrees, for each of us. Sometimes it involves standing up in certain ways. We don’t have to stand outside the White House as protestors; we just have to disown or confront abuse or racist language when we face it, not with like-minded abuse or self-righteous zeal that makes us feel good about ourselves, not when it’s easy to do on Facebook from the comfort of our homes, but with the knowledge that human dignity is what’s at stake. And more than that, striving for costly grace involves actually doing things for other people, not just saying the right words. Let’s try to follow Jesus in the ways I mentioned. Let’s come to conclusions with humility. Let’s be open to our neighbor’s needs and stand ready to meet them out of love for them and for the God who made us all.
The Holy Spirit empowers us to do this work, and the Holy Spirit calls us to do this, not merely so we can get rid of bad things in our communities and societies, but so that we can build up good things in their place. And if we do these things—if we turn from evil and do good, if we seek true peace and pursue it —our work will be like a house built on the rock that is Christ, guided not by the will of the flesh or by the will of man, but by God. That and that alone will bring us “peace at the last,” peace between us and God, peace between us and our neighbors, peace between us and our own souls.
Lord, send forth your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth. Amen.