Scriptures: Acts 2:1-4; 12-21
John 20:19-23
This Friday the second movie version of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian opens. For those of us who love this series – and it really isn’t a children’s series, as you know, although I think it would be most accurate to term it that rarity among literary works: something that is both a children’s and an adult series – this is a welcome occasion. Prince Caspian is the second of the seven books Lewis wrote in this series, but I’d like to focus your attention on this Pentecost Sunday on what was the sixth book to be written but the first chronologically in the story’s time-line: The Magician’s Nephew. Toward the end of that book there is a scene of creation – of Aslan (Lewis’s stand-in for God or Christ) singing the world into being. After Aslan sings the beasts into existence, he pauses. And then: “The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again: a pure, cold, difficult music….. every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying” ‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake.’”
At other places in The Chronicles Aslan uses his breath to aid the child-like protagonists – as in The Silver Chair when Eustace Stubbs falls of a cliff and the lion blows him to a safe place; later, he does the same with Eustace’s companion, Jill Pole, with a gentleness that surprises her: “She had been setting her teeth and clenching her fists for a terrible blast of lion’s breath; but the breath had really been so gentle that she had not even noticed the moment at which she left the earth.” Or in The Last Battle when Emesh, an enemy of Narnia, meets Aslan and comes to accept that he is greater than the god Tash whom he had been worshipping. Emesh says, “Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs and caused me to stand upon my feet….. And since then…I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound.”
Lewis clearly understood the significance of breath and wind as characterizing God’s Spirit. Remember how two weeks ago in talking about Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones we spoke of the Hebrew word ruah, which can mean “breath” or “wind” or “spirit”. God told Ezekiel to tell the people that God’s spirit was breathed into human beings in creation, and it was like a mighty wind.
In the gospel lesson that we read from John the resurrected Christ appears before the disciples, and after he has greeted them with the gentle “Peace be with you”, what does he do? He breathes on them and in so doing asks them to receive the Holy Spirit. By so doing they find that their sins are forgiven, and even more wonderfully that they can forgive the sins of others. I wonder if this passage is what C.S. Lewis had in mind when he has Aslan breathe on the beasts and invite Narnia to come awake – to, in effect, receive God’s Spirit into all the land.
Now, here we are on the day of Pentecost – and what happened on that first Christian Pentecost when the disciples all came together? “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” (As a sidebar, I’m not quite sure why the NRSV felt it was necessary to use the word “violent” to describe that wind; the RSV says “mighty”, and the New English Bible uses “a strong driving wind” – both of which seem to me to convey the force involved without all the unnecessary baggage that the word “violent” implies.)
What happened to the disciples that day was very much like the experience of the beasts in The Magician’s Nephew or Eustace and Jill in The Silver Chair or Emesh in The Last Battle – God comes to them both with a gale-like blast and with the gentleness of a soft breeze. This is how we experience God the Holy Spirit: as that which shakes us up and that which calms us down. This dynamic is captured wonderfully in the contemporary hymn whose refrain goes like this:
Spirit,
Spirit of gentleness, blow through the wilderness,
calling and
free.
Spirit, Spirit of restlessness,
stir me from
placidness,
Wind, Wind on the sea.
The wind can be a gentle whisper that rustles leaves on the trees; it can lift kites into the sky; it can be a gale roaring across an ocean, sending waves crashing against the shore; it can be but a puff of wind igniting a flame from a smoldering coal. However we feel it, the wind blows unseen, yet we know its presence and its power. We see the wind only through what it does. We know the wind because of its effects. While we are able to use the wind’s energy, we neither create it nor control it. All we can do is cooperate with it – or resist it.
When we experience the Spirit of God blowing on us as it did upon the disciples on that first Pentecost, things change. They change inside us, and they change in the way we view the world and God’s relationship to it. In the materials on the lectionary passages for today there is a line that identifies the theme or the thought for the day: “When you are caught by the winds of change, look for the rustling of God’s Spirit.” I really like that word “rustling”. It catches up both the power of a mighty wind and the gentleness of a breeze wafting through our lives. One of the definitions of “rustling” I found in the Thesaurus where I looked it up was “to move quickly and energetically”. That’s what the Spirit of God calls us to do. That’s the kind of energizing the Spirit gives us when it blows through us. That’s the sense of urgency we now have: to move, to act, to find our place of service. The last verse of that hymn I quoted earlier says it well:
You
call from tomorrow, you break ancient schemes,
from the bondage of
sorrow the captives dream dreams,
our women see visions, our men
clear their eyes,
with bold new decisions your people arise.
And now, Samantha and Amanda, here is where all this comes back to you. One of the main reasons churches like to do confirmations on Pentecost is because it is a day when bold new decisions are made. The questions you answered, the vows you made, the support of this community of the faithful that you felt, the dance which helped you to know that the light of peace was truly upon you in this place, the anthem which invoked the Holy Spirit to come upon you like the wind and like a dove – all of these things are here to bolster the bold new decisions you two have made which bring you to this time and place.
The day of Pentecost is a day of new beginnings – for the two of you and for all of us. Remember I said a week ago that the day of Ascension is a way of preparing us for the mission that we receive on Pentecost. Jesus told his disciples when they saw him ascending, “’But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’” You will be my witnesses – in Las Vegas, in junior high school and high school, where you go to college, and in whatever ends of the earth you may some day find yourselves.
The Spirit is blowing among God’s people: kindling faith, breathing life into the church, inspiring and empowering us for mission. Like the wind, the Spirit itself remains hidden, unseen; yet its works are visible through their effects. We see the Holy Spirit through what the Spirit does in and through us, in and through God’s people gathered together as the church. Like the crowds on Pentecost, the Spirit can catch us by surprise, shaking us up with new expressions of God’s love. The Spirit blows anew among God’s people, stirring us to renewed vision and hope. The Spirit infuses us with the mission to proclaim the good news of God. The Spirit sends us out into the world to serve in the name of Jesus. With the whole church, we pray, “Come Holy Spirit. Breathe into us, set our hearts afire, and empower us for lives of witness and ministry.” Amen.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
May 11, 2008