Pentecost: Stories of the Spirit

Acts 2:1-21; John 20:19-23

While the Revised Common Lectionary seems at first glance to offer a bewildering array of possibilities this week, the Acts reading about the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21) is the most likely to be heard, given it is an option both for the first and second readings.¹ This is the case each year of the three-year cycle, even though the alternative OT and Epistle readings and the Gospels change, meaning this might be the story that occurs most often or most regularly in the whole RCL.

While the John 7 passage is wonderful, I suspect John 21 with its own version of a Pentecost Holy Spirit story is the more likely to be chosen for the Gospel. If so, we have a sort of Luke-John conversation, as last week with the Ascension. Luke (Acts) gives us the expected and foundational story, and John’s creative take (or re-take) on the giving of the Spirit offers a complementary perspective.

Common understandings of these familiar passages, or rather of the Holy Spirit generally in the Church—I have western Anglicanism primarily but not exclusively in mind—mean we may need to obtain some critical distance.

The Spirit has been the poor relation among the Trinity, often neglected or viewed via caricatures. For much of history she was viewed as institutionally bound, reduced to the rationale for forms of ecclesial power through holy orders, confirmation etc., or constrained to sacramental efficacy and little more.

More recently however ideas left behind by the Charismatic movement of the late 20th century seem to hold sway. That movement reminded us that the Spirit is relevant to personal faith and witness, and many people found renewal through it. Yet the debris left in its wake seems more to do with exaltation of personal religious experience, or just subjectivity in general, than with, well, the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit seems often now to be identified with experience or opinion, on the basis that the believer has come to understand (not wholly incorrectly) that they “have” the Holy Spirit. Thus the Spirit is “discerned” in euphoria or in strong emotion generally, as when moving experiences of worship and prayer are deemed more Spirit-filled, or given the dubious credit for opinions dressed up in divine authority—anything from boosting a candidate in an episcopal election to advocating some scheme in a parish or convention that the would-be prophet supports.

Iglesia del Salvador - Seville

You may or may not recognize or agree with this sketch, and agreement is not necessary to what follows. Regardless, I suggest that one thing the Luke-Acts and John stories of the Spirit do not emphasize is religious subjectivity.

In the narrative of Luke -Acts, the day of Pentecost is the occasion when the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in a definitive way, although the emphasis in the passage as a whole is not really just on the Holy Spirit, but on the last days. Consider that after all the remarkable goings-on with language and comprehension, Peter’s interpretive speech is not about the gifts of the Spirit themselves, but what they say about the end of history. The much-vaunted “tongues” story evokes Joel’s vision of divine judgement, a message of both warning and hope.

Luke is therefore not providing a sort of theological backstory to the presence of the Spirit in the Church (as this passage so often seems to be treated), so much as insisting that the Spirit is the preeminent sign of the coming Day of the Lord, a portent of urgency that warns of an imminent judgement, and implies a missional response.

As with the Ascension and quite a few other stories, John seems to move the gift of the Spirit somewhat in time; of course there is no narrative of the early believing communities here in John anyway, but John wants to link the reception of the Spirit clearly with Cross (where Jesus “gives up the Spirit” [19:30], having connected the promise of the Spirit with his departure; see 16:7), and with Resurrection.

While there is no outpouring of ecstasy here, and the sense of end times is not explicit (it is always the end times in John, after all…) again there is a missional demand here connected to judgement: the forgiveness (and retention) of sins.

While the gift of the Spirit is emphasized in both stories, this gift is not individual but communal; for that matter that Church created by this gift is not so much recipient of a commodity or object, as itself drawn into the life of God in a new way. We do not have the Spirit, the Spirit has us. The consequence is above all the urgent proclamation of the Gospel, not a growth in personal spirituality per se, although this should be one part of a renewal that is not merely human but cosmic.

Back to our present and the prevailing pneumatology, then: it’s not wrong to connect the Spirit with joy, or to acknowledge God’s presence in experience. However experience does not interpret itself. The Spirit is also with us in doubt and grief, in the struggle to understand and articulate our faith. Paul—just to complicate matters—reminds us that the fruit of the Spirit is ethical (Gal 5:22-23) much more than ecstatic (cf. 1 Cor 12), which is true of today’s biblical stories of the Spirit too.

The response of the Church to understanding its own baptism in the Spirit is the living missional practice implied by John and modeled in Peter’s speech in Acts. This cannot happen without personal transformations, but they are not its end. The day of the Lord is at hand; all our experience and insight, in which we pray the Spirit is now our partner, are called to the service of the God into whose life we have been mysteriously drawn, by the gift of the Spirit.

1. The site at Vanderbilt Divinity Library goes so far as to rubricize that if Numbers is chosen for the first reading, Acts rather than 1 Cor is used. The Episcopal Church has not carried this rubric into the BCP, but it makes sense.