A Tale of Two Kingdoms: Pentecost Sunday (revised)

One of the problems I see most often with Christianity is its domestication, a kind of blunting of its prophetic and counter-cultural character. It is one thing to be comfortable with our faith, to live it gently in every part of our lives, and to be a source of quiet challenge and consolation because we have been wholly changed by it. It is entirely another to add it to our lives and identities as a merely superficial "spiritual component" which we refuse to allow not only to shake the very foundations of all we know but also to transform us in all we are and do. 

Even more problematical --- and I admit to being sensitive to this because I am a hermit called to "stricter separation from the world" which must not be misunderstood as isolating except for the sake of deeper and more extensive engagement --- is a kind of self-centered spirituality that focuses on our own supposed holiness or perfection but calls us to turn away from a world which undoubtedly needs and yearns for the love only God's powerful Spirit makes possible in us. Clearly, today's Festal readings celebrate something very different from the sort of bland, powerless, pastorally ineffective, and merely nominal Christianity we may embrace --- or the self-centered spirituality we sometimes espouse in the name of "contemplation" and  "contemptus mundi".  Another version of this distortion is a Christianity that is allied with the Kingdom of this world. In contemporary life, we see it particularly with a Nationalist religiosity some mistakenly call "Christian." While this religion may have the power to upend established institutions and values, in its own way, it is as powerless and pastorally ineffective as the more usual forms of nominal Christianity in bringing the Kingdom of the God of Jesus Christ. It brings only oppression, marginalization, and unfreedom in its wake. But listen again to the shaking experience of the powerful Spirit that birthed the Church, which Luke recounts in Acts, and hear what we are called to: 

[[When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.]]

Roaring sounds filling the whole space, tongues of fire coming to rest above each person, a power of language which communicates (creates) incredible unity and destroys division --- this is a picture of a new and incredible creation, a new and awesome world in which the structures of power are turned on their heads and those who were outsiders --- the sick and poor, the outcast and sinners, those with no status and only the stamp of shame marking their lives --- are kissed with divinity and revealed to be God's very own Temples. The imagery of this reading is profound. For instance, in the world of this time, coins were stamped with Caesar's picture, and above his head was the image of a tongue of fire. Fire was a symbol of life and potency; it was linked to the heavens (stars, comets, etc). The tongue of fire was a way of indicating the Emperor's divinity.  Similarly, the capacity for speech, the fact that one has been given or has a voice, is a sign of power, standing, and authority.

And so Luke says of us. The Spirit of the Father and Son has come upon us. Tongues of Fire mark us as do tongues, potentially capable of speaking a word of ultimate comfort to anyone, anywhere. We have been made a Royal People, Temples of the Holy Spirit, and called to live and act with a new authority, an authority and status which is greater than that of any Caesar. As I have noted before, this is not mere poetry, though it is certainly wonderfully poetic. On this Feast we open ourselves to the Spirit who transforms us quite literally into images of God, literal Temples of God's prophetic presence in our world, literal exemplars of a consoling love-doing-justice and a fiery, earth-shaking holiness which both transcends and undercuts every authority and status in our world that pretends to divinity or ultimacy. We ARE the Body of Christ, expressions of the one in whom godless death has been destroyed, expressions of the One in whom one day all sin and death will be replaced by eternal life. In Christ, we are embodiments and mediators of the Word, which destroys divisions and summons creation to reconciliation and unity; in us, the Spirit of God loves our world into wholeness.

You can see that there is something really dangerous about today's Feast. What we celebrate is dangerous to a Caesar oppressing most of the known world with his taxation and arbitrary exercise of power depending on keeping subjects powerless and without choice or voice; it is dangerous if you are called to live out this gift of God's own Spirit as a prophetic presence in the very same world which kills prophets and executed God's Anointed One as a shameful criminal --- a traitor or seditionist and blasphemer. 

Witnesses to the risen Christ and the Kingdom of God are liable, of course, to martyrdom of all sorts. That is the double nature of the word "martyr", and it is what yesterday's gospel lection referred to when it promised Peter that in his maturity, he would be led where he did not really desire to go. But it is also dangerous to those who prefer either a more domesticated and timid "Christianity" or a more nationalistic one -- Christianities that do not upset the status quo or demand the overthrow of all of one's vision, or values, to a Christianity that demands the redefinition of one's entire purpose in life. Such a faith is dangerous if one cares too much about what people think of you or if one desires a faith that is consoling but undemanding --- a faith centered on what Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace".  At least it is dangerous whenever its followers open themselves, even slightly, to the Spirit celebrated in this Feast.

A few years ago, my pastor (John Kasper, OSFS)  quoted from Annie Dillard's book, Teaching a Stone to Talk. It may have been for Pentecost, but I can't remember that now. Here, though, is the passage from which he quoted, [[Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.]] Clearly, both Fr John and Ms Dillard understood how truly dangerous the Spirit of Pentecost is.

We live in a world where two Kingdoms vie against each other. That has rarely been clearer in our lifetime or recent memory than it is today. One of these Kingdoms is marked by oppression, a lack of freedom --- except for the privileged few who hold positions of wealth and influence, power and prestige --- and it is marred by the dominion of sin and death. It is a world where the poor, ill, aged, and otherwise marginalized and powerless are rendered essentially voiceless. In this world, Caesars of all sorts have been sovereign or pretended to sovereignty and harmed the powerless and poor with their pretense. The other Kingdom, the Kingdom which signals the eventual and inevitable end of the first one, is the Kingdom of God. It has come among us first in God's quiet self-emptying and in the smallness of a helpless infant, and then in the generosity, compassion, and ultimately, the weakness, suffering, and sinful death of a Jewish man in a Roman world. Today it comes to us as a powerful wind which shakes and disorients even as it grounds and reorients us in the love of God. Today, it comes to us as the power of love that does justice and sets all things to right.

While the battle between these two Kingdoms occurs all around us in the way we live and proclaim the Gospel with our lives, the way, that is, we worship God, raise our children, teach our students, treat our parishioners, clients, and patients, vote our consciences, contribute to our society's needs, and generally minister to our entire world, it is our hearts which are ground zero in this "tale of two Kingdoms." It is not easy to admit that insofar as we are truly human, we have been kissed by a Divinity which invites us to a divine/human union that completes us, makes us all whole, and results in a fruitfulness we associate with all similar "marriages". It is not easy to give our hearts so completely or embrace a dignity which is entirely the gift of another. Far easier to keep our hearts divided and ambiguous. Easier by far to choose accommodation and exclusion over courage and the confrontation of a radically Christian and inclusive love!! But today's Feast calls us to truly open ourselves to this union, to accept that our lives are marked and transformed by tongues of fire and the shaking, stormy Spirit of prophets. After all, this is Pentecost, and through us in the Holy Spirit, God truly will renew the face of the earth.