The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Pentecost
May 19, 2024
In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.
I had the great fortune recently to hear the Metropolitan Opera's inaugural presentation of John Adams's opera El Nino. The opera is the story of the Holy Child, Jesus, but really it's the story of Mary, his mother. It tracks Mary's story through the announcement of the angel Gabriel through Joseph's anxiety over her inexplicable pregnancy to the childhood of Jesus himself. Invoking fantastical apocryphal sources, the libretto tells of Jesus's kindness and gentleness to dragons--and how even these fierce beasts bowed before him. Three wise men arrive to honor Jesus's birth, bringing gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and the king Herod, portrayed as an exploitative despot in the developing 2/3 world, tries to commandeer their mission to seize and destroy the infant Jesus. Joseph and his family flee to Egypt, and the slaughtered infants of Jerusalem bring the constant driving machine of Adams's musical heartbeat to a slow resolution.
The sounds were intensive, rhythmic, relentless. The colors were intense--of a palate of pantone colors only seen in the tropics, foreign to anything New England could ever imagine. The images of Mary were saturating--Maris Stella, star of the sea; Regina Caelorum, queen of the heavens; a Mary of the islands, with a girl child Jesus; and a Mary of the Central Americas, with the boy Jesus at her breast.
My friends who had heard staged performances before during the previous 20 year life of the work were quick to claim their prior knowledge of Adams's work; but the Met staging was a spectacle—bigger, grander, wilder than anything in the opera’s past two decades. This fantastic production is John Adams as maximalist, not minimalist. It was beautiful. It was thrilling. It was overwhelming.
After two and a half hours of driving rhythms, sonorous harmonies, color saturation, and joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the music began to slow; the Holy Innocents sang and brought the work to its conclusion; and the whole crowd leapt to its feet in thunderous applause.
We had shared an experience together; our hearts had been beating as one; we were hearing and seeing the same things. We’d become a community on an adventure—entering into Mary’s story, the story of Jesus, God’s own story of breaking through again into God’s beloved Creation.
We’d shared an experience. We’d become a community. We went away, into the night, talking about the spectacle we’d been a part of—the wonder we had witnessed. We went away talking about it.
Friends, that feeling of a shared experience—of becoming a community together—is something like what the Apostles experienced. Forty days after Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus’s apostles had seen him ascend, and they’d returned home, with no little trepidation, to the room where they were staying in Jerusalem, and they prayed. And on this day, as Jesus promised, fifty days after Passover, Jewish people from all over had gathered in Jerusalem for the Festival of Weeks, Shavuot. And in that place, in that city, in that moment, the Holy Spirit swept through town—and they had a shared experience—a common adventure. The apostles spoke, Peter preached, and everyone, no matter where they were from, understood what they were saying—they understood the urgency of Peter’s preaching, the words he was saying, the truth he was telling—the truth that God had come in the person of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus was risen from the dead.
In that moment, in that shared experience, the community expanded from that band of twelve to so many more of those that heard the story in Jerusalem. The listeners asked Peter what to do, and he replied, repent and be baptized. And three thousand people were baptized and added to the community of followers of Jesus on that day.
A shared experience. An expanded community.
And a shift—a shift in the narrative. Consider this:
Fifty days after Passover, Pentecost, is the Festival of Weeks, or Shavuot. If Passover is the celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, then Shavout marks not only the wheat harvest but also the giving of the Torah, the law, to Moses at Mount Sinai. There’s a shift at Shavuot. God has done something. At Passover in Egypt, God has done the delivering. But at Sinai, God has invited the Israelites to do something--to join in relationship with God, through the gift of the Law. The Torah is God’s gift, God’s revelation to Israel, a description of what relationship with God looks like. And it invites a response--a relationship in return--a relationship with God.
There’s a turn, a shift, from Easter to Pentecost, as well. If Easter is about God’s triumph over death--about the empty tomb, about life conquering death, about the incarnate Son of God dying and rising and ascending to sit at the right hand of God--to fill the whole world--then Pentecost is about our response to that news, that knowledge, that great gift of resurrection, of life, of hope. Before Pentecost, Jesus is the primary storyteller. He invites his followers into relationship. He heals the sick and raises the dead--he shows them what the kingdom of God looks like--he shows us that the kingdom of God has come near.
But after the ascension, in our passage in Acts--even after the resurrection, in our gospel passage from John--the Johannine timeline is a little different--Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to be with his followers. And things change. Instead of Jesus doing the talking, suddenly his followers--his disciples--his apostles--start talking about Jesus as a revelation of God--as the messiah, the anointed one.
At Passover the community, the followers of Jesus, are empowered by the Holy Spirit to take up the testimony—to tell the story themselves, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is speaking through them. And God is speaking through us.
And what is it that God is saying? What is it that God is speaking, through the Holy Spirit, through Peter, through the gathered community, through you and through me? God is speaking Hope.
All creation is groaning, Paul says, to hear that word of hope. To hear that life triumphs over death, that love is stronger than hate, that the ruler of this world has been judged and found wanting, as Jesus points out in John’s gospel today. All of creation is groaning to hear that Jesus is raised—and that he has ascended to fill all things.
And it is now the job of this gathered body, this Body of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to tell that story.
In fact, Andrew McGowan suggests, it is exactly the behavior of that gathered community that the world is judged against. Because we know Christ’s resurrection, because we have known him, because we know that the Holy Spirit, the advocate, has judged the ruler of this world and found him wrong, we know what the kingdom of God looks like—and we can live, together, in that new life of resurrection.
Folks, the world should be able to look at the Church and discern something different—something of the kingdom of God—in the way that we live, the way that we love, the way that we treat one another and all of Creation. The world is groaning to see that hope.
We are sharing an experience together; we are in the auditorium, in the arena, in the world itself together. We have known Jesus, and now it’s time to tell the world about Jesus’s resurrection, with our words—and with our deeds.
Come to the altar today to be filled up with the presence of Christ.
Remember you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in your baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.
And empowered by the Holy Spirit, go out into the world to share the story of that love—but also dare to live differently, collectively, together.
We are that crowd gathered in Jerusalem. We are the baptized. We have received the Holy Spirit. Empowered, comforted, assured, supported, and convicted by that same Holy Spirit, let’s go out and tell the world.