Homily for Pentecost Sunday
May 23, 2010
For those of you who have lived at some point in New York City, you know that watching the alternate-side parking schedule (which tells you when you don’t have to move your car) is practically a religion. I was touched that, for Ascension Day the Thursday before last, they suspended the rules; I mean, I had almost forgotten it was Ascension Day.
Last week, the rules were suspended on both Wednesday and Thursday, so, unsure of why, I looked at the NYC Department of Transportation website and learned there that it was … the Jewish Shavuos. I love how, in the City, you learn about other religions’ holidays - you learn about your own religion’s holidays - through the alternate side parking rules!
But this is one I really should have known because the Jewish Shavuos is the basis for our own Feast of Pentecost, which we’re celebrating today. Shavuos is the Jewish festival of the first fruits of the harvest, and also the celebration of Moses’ receiving of the Law on Mount Sinai. It takes place fifty days after the Jewish Passover, which is why Greek speaking Jews, of whom there were many around the time Jesus lived, called it “Pentecost,” meaning fifty. (Obviously this is exactly where our own Easter and then Pentecost seasons come from, right down to the chronology.)
And, important for us, it’s this holiday that the apostles, in our story from Acts, had gathered together to celebrate when they Holy Spirit came down upon them in the form of wind and fire.
Because the story of Moses receiving the Law on Sinai gives some helpful background to this story from Acts, let me just summarize that briefly. It comes from the Old Testament book of Exodus, which begins with the story of the Israelites’ captivity and then exodus from slavery in Egypt. Once they get out into the wilderness, they find that they need to set up a form of government to guide them through those wilderness years. So Moses goes up Mt. Sinai, probably somewhere just over the Egyptian border to the north (though we’re not really sure), where he stays for forty days and forty nights, and receives the two tablets of the law to bring back down the mountain to the Israelites. And actually, he receives there much more than just Ten Commandments – were it so simple! The whole second half of the book of Exodus contains all of the laws Moses received up on Sinai.
Anyway, it’s not so much an emphasis for the holiday of Shavuos, but what comes after that gets especially interesting. While Moses is up on the mountain receiving the Law, the Israelites down below decide to throw a big party, where they do all the bad things their priests have told them not to do: drink, dance, laugh, watch movies, play cards - whatever they did back then. And unfortunately they don’t time this too well, because when Moses finally comes down the mountain, he catches them right in the throes of their reverie, which causes him to lose his temper, and throw the two stone tablets of the law at the people, smashing them up into little bits.
So, that’s the story from Exodus (!). And looking at our story from Acts, you can definitely see parallels between the two - the disciples in the Upper Room receive a revelation from God in the form or wind and fire, like Moses up on the mountain, who also encountered God in wind and flame. The disciples move down into the street to take that revelation to the people, like Moses moved down the mountain to take his revelation to the Israelites.
But after that, the story kind of diverges in a particularly important way. In the Moses story, once he gets down the mountain, he punishes the people’s reverie; whereas in this story, once they get down to the street, they join in the reverie – actually, they incite it.
Pentecost is the Birthday of the Church, and maybe the message here is that, at its core, what the church should be is what we get here in this story: a community a community of joy and celebration, not of doom and gloom and guilt. Yes, I know this might sound like an Episcopalian excuse to party (because that is what we’re known for!), but I hardly need to add that joy often takes work, especially in families or communities of people where negative thoughts and habits easily take hold.
In fact, perhaps that’s why the call to rejoice might be the most persistent and recurring commandment to God’s people that we get in the whole Bible - including in today’s story from Acts.
I talked last week about the English custom of marking the boundaries of the parish on Ascension Day, whereby a church marked out its sphere of moral obligation. This week, I read of another interesting English custom on Pentecost (which the English, by the way, sometimes called Whitsunday after the white baptism gowns that people traditionally wore on this day).
The custom on Pentecost or Whitsun was to sell ale to support the operating budget of the church - and I swear I’m not making this up! In fact, it became so popular and widespread for a while that different churches became known for their different ales. I even found a little ditty called “Exaltation of Ale,” written in the 18th century for the occasion of the English Pentecost that I thought would be a nice thing to leave off with:
The churches must owe, as we all do know,
For when they be drooping and ready to fail,
By a Whitsun or Church-ale up again they shall go
And owe their repairing to a pot of good ale.
We don’t have ale, but we have a great potluck to look forward to in a moment - and so many reasons to be joyful.
Amen.
