The Story in Our Flesh

Today we enter into the wild story of the birth of our Christian church: the culmination of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection being made manifest in our lives and our lungs. But like most Christian holy days, Pentecost has morphed and emerged from our Jewish siblings’ sacred celebrations. It comes from Shavuot—the story of when Moses received the commandments from God. A remembrance fifty days after Passover, when Spirit passed over Jewish households and led them to liberation.

And it is in the wilderness of their liberation, on Mount Sinai, where God creates a covenant with them—commandments of right relationship, or rather, a law of love. A story Jews remember, recite, and revere every year during Shavuot, every week on Sabbath, and every day by binding these commandments—literally—around their arms, hearts, and heads in the prayerful practice known as Tefillin.

Our Christian story takes this remembrance of liberation, this fulfilment of Spirit and laying down of law, and adds a new dimension: the wildness of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. An event that culminates in the gift of the Holy Spirit, who transcends all boundaries and comes upon all bodies. For here is where the Christian Church is birthed: during the celebration of Shavuot, where Judeans from across the nations gathered.

And it is in this context where a sound like the rush of violent wind fills the space, and divided tongues, as of fire, appear among them—resting on each of them as they begin to speak in one another’s native languages. Some were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” while others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Enter Peter. Yes, that Peter—the same Peter who, only a few weeks earlier, denied Jesus not once, not twice, but three times. And somewhere along the way, this shamed Peter is now living into Jesus’ prophecy of him: that he, of all people, will be the rock on which Christ’s church will be built. And in this first gathering of church, he preaches his first sermon, using the words of the prophet Joel, addressing both the perplexed and the pessimistic about how Spirit will pour out upon all flesh—indiscriminate of any division or duality.

A radical notion during a time when societal, economic, and political systems relied on the division of genders, young and old, slave and free, Jew and Gentile.

This is wild.

There is no room for division amongst an indiscriminate Spirit who transcends any and all of our boundaries, dualities, and labels. For this is the same Spirit that liberated our ancestors and is now coming to us—and I mean all of us—now. The same Spirit that hovered over the dark void before creation; the same Spirit that called a trepid Moses through a burning bush; the same Spirit that separated the waters of the sea to lead God’s people into liberation; the same Spirit of cloud and consuming fire that met Moses on Mount Sinai as laws of love; the same Spirit that revealed to Elijah that God’s fearsome power is sometimes best heard through a still, small voice; the same Spirit that bore God’s son in Mary’s womb, moving her to prophetic singing of joy and justice; and the same Spirit that descended upon Jesus in his baptism and guided him in his life, death, and resurrection.

This is what our Pentecost story is inviting us into—a moving forward into new, yet ancient, ways of being where boundaries are broken and God’s love breaks us open, gathers us in, in all our diversity so that Spirit might fall upon our flesh.

But just like the amazed and perplexed who gathered in that place, we might ask: What does this all mean? In a subdued and sceptical society and church, how does this story of God’s wild Spirit actually make itself manifest in the mundane moments of our modern lives?

When I first moved to Australia, one of my first jobs was with Jewish Care, where I worked in a department that offered health care services to survivors of the Holocaust. It was here that I heard first-hand accounts of Auschwitz and the toll of displacement on those who found their freedom in the furthest country they could think of. But it was through travelling a calendar year with them—watching how their story of covenant was lived out through their holy days, Sabbath gatherings, and through wrapping God’s commandments literally upon their flesh—where I saw the power, or rather, the chutzpah, that these words had in their lives.

Despite the terrors they had endured, this chutzpah came from being able to locate their identities, their faith, and their place in their covenant with God—a covenant they retold every year, every Sabbath, every day. They knew who they were and to whom they belonged because of the power of this story. And boy, does it have power.

Remember the Roman Empire? Like a cancer, its rule and oppression spread across territories, persecuting the Jews for centuries. And yet, it was the Roman Empire that fell—and this small group of oppressed people who survived. In fact, as one survivor told me, this is the Jewish story echoed through most of their holy days:

Chanukkah—when the Jews weren’t killed by the Greeks.
Purim—when Haman’s plot to kill the Jews was foiled by a young Jewish girl, Esther.
Passover—when the Jews weren’t killed by the Egyptians.
Yom Kippur—when God decided not to kill the Jews for worshipping a golden calf.
And Yom Hashoah, observed only a few weeks ago—a remembrance of those murdered in the Holocaust, and a celebration that again, Judaism did not die.

And this is what my Jewish colleagues and clients told me time and time again: it was because they had God’s covenantal story beating in their blood, breathing through their lungs—every Shavuot, every Sabbath, every second of the day.

Now hear what I’m not saying: I’m not saying these stories privilege the state of Israel. And I’m not saying these stories of survival justify the eradication or genocide of any other people. Just as stories have the power to bring God’s love into the world, the wrong re-telling can warp a story as pure and holy as love and communion with God into the worst kinds of evil.

But what happens when we don’t embody our story at all? When we don’t let its wildness sweep through our bones, our beings, and our breath? When we isolate the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection from the embarrassing strangeness of Pentecost?

What happens is we lose the ability to hear, to see, to dream, to prophesy, and to be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we lose the ability to be church.

Yet Pentecost is our remembering of what it means to be church. It is a re-enacting of God’s covenanting that wildly moves beyond any boundary we create. It is a re-telling of the covenant that moves and breathes in us, begging to break our hearts open so we might join in the raucous joy of God’s law of love embodied in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—an event that has given us this church and will continue to move across culture, time, and space, and any and every other boundary we create.

In other words, Pentecost is the culmination of our Easter season, where we are now invited—through the power of the Spirit—to commune in this wild kingdom of God not in a world far away, but here and now, upon all flesh.

A kingdom that invites us to turn from our tools of division and toward God’s wild diversity. A covenant beckoning us to join the same story the saints, angels, and ancestors are all wrapped up in—even, and perhaps especially, as the church dwindles. Even, and perhaps especially, when we deny Christ again and again and again.

This is wild.

And it is in the wild power of this remembering and reciting—of opening ourselves to its ramifications—where God’s Spirit of prophecy, visions, and dreams can still fill rooms, loosen tongues, and break down the walls that divide. This story still has power to come alive and breathe new life in and among us, even in this broken world, even in the Uniting Church, and even here at Whitehorse—through the outpouring of these gatherings, through the projects you support and will share about after service today, and through the outpouring of your love in this community and the world around you.

So recite it—every year, every Sabbath, every day. Write it on your arms, your head, and your heart.

For this is our story, living and breathing in us and among us: the Church, where Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are being made manifest in our lives and our lungs.