Seeing More

Than Is Obvious

 

Pentecost 2001

 

 

A Story: The Woman and the Boy in the Dungeon

Long ago, a woman was thrown into a dungeon by an evil tyrant. The dungeon, like most dungeons, was a dark, unhappy place, with only a tiny window at the top of the distant ceiling. But there she gave birth to a son. Of course, as he grew, he knew nothing of the outside world. All he knew was dark walls, some straw here and there, and tasteless food passed occasionally through a small slit in the dungeon door.

But his mother was an artist. She had managed to hide in her things a drawing pad and some pencils. She determined to teach her son of the outside world. She did it by drawing him pictures, of birds, mountains, streams running through the hills and people in noisy parades. He was a dutiful boy and he did his best to believe his mother that outside his dark home--all that he had ever known--was a large world--one far more complex and beautiful than he had ever known.

As he grew older however, he came to doubt this wonderful world outside the dungeon walls. His mother drew more complicated pictures, but many days all he would see would be lines and images in lead on pieces of paper. Old paper and lead images drawn by an overly enthused mother.

Finally, it occured to her that for many years he had misunderstood. "But," she gasped, "you don't think that the real world is full of lines made with a pencil?" "What," said the boy, "there are no pencil marks there? How can you know where one thing begins and another ends? You need lines to separate things!" And he became even less sure about what the outside world might contain, or even whether it existed.

For the last couple of Sundays we have been talking about transposition, in honor the sermon by C.S. Lewis which was entitled "Transposition." Lewis includes this story in his sermon to illustrate his idea of transposition. The idea is that representation of a richer medium in a less rich medium inevitably means we will have to use our imagination with the poorer medium to understand the richer one. When we transpose the richer into the poorer, the person with only a wooden imagination will suppose the world is made only of lead lines, or that love is only lust, or that orchestral music is no richer than piano music.

 

What is Pentecost?

Pentecost was the name assigned to the Jewish Feast of the Weeks, which fell 50 days after Passover. Likewise, Pentecost marks the 50th day after Resurrection Sunday.

It is sometimes said that we are in a "postmodern age" in which we have to construct our own truths and our own values. Postmoderns are convinced that what is real is factual, and meaning is human attribution. How does Christianity thrive in such a "postmodern age"? I believe that the answer lies in coming to terms with the feast of Pentecost.

Each year the church relives the story of the Christ cycle through the celebrations of Advent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. As the last feast of the liturgical cycle, Pentecost signals the end of the Jesus-of-Nazareth period and the beginning of the Christ-of-the-church period.

For it is in the sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost that the consummation of the other feasts is realized, namely the establishment of the church.

 

The Skeptic and Pentecost

A skeptic might say, "You've got to be kidding Fr. Crockett! How many churches are there? How many beliefs do they teach? The church? There is no "the church," just lots of competing churches! In fact, the contemporary church is a modern day ecclesiastical tower of Babel! So I am not impressed by the lofty claims associated with your Pentecost festival."

Interesting that our skeptic should see in Pentecost a tower of Babel. In Pentecost, in fact, the confusion of Babel is reversed. And it is in Pentecost the life of the church is to be continually renewed. In Pentecost, the desparate confusion that characterizes so much of the modern era is confronted with the singular message of a God whose love and purpose are changeless.

Our skeptic will respond, "You talk of the spirit of God and renewal in the church while I see division, acrimony, differences. You see divinity; I see humanity. You look into a person's face and see the image of God. I look into a person's face and see genetic material attempting to propagate itself. You see baptismal waters, I see water. You see sacramental bread and wine, I see products of oven and vine--nothing more."

Our skeptic is seeing things from below and seeing from below is our cultural proclivity, especially for those of us who claim formal educations. But, lest we be "by-products of the age," as Lewis puts it, we are going to want to see more than the boy in the dungeon could see when he saw only lines on a page. And the only way we can do is that to trust that our imaginations are guided by the Holy Spirit. Only in the life of the church can our reason be restored to its proper role.

 

Cox and Chaos

Harvard's Harvey Cox in his research on Pentecostalism has written about the movement's capacity to thrive in places characterized by cultural upheaval. He sees this as a result of Pentecostalism's remarkable ability to "lure anarchy into the sacred circle and baptize it." He notes that the deep struggle of the future is the struggle between order and chaos and points out how Pentecostals incorporate this struggle into their worship life.

In Pentecost we incorporate the chaos of our lives into the church. Chaos purges us while God renews us. The devils howl constantly in the abyss, or, as one song puts it, "the wolf is always at the door," but the angels of Christ deliver us to the bossom of the church. Pentecost, in the face of this chaos, celebrates the establishment of the church as the principal evidence we now have that God loves us from the depths of his being, God has made provision for us, and the gates of hell itself will not prevail against us. The devils and the wolves will be put on the run.

In Pentecost, we move beyond seeing just pencil lines on old pieces of paper. Our child in the dungeon will not understand how the world is far richer than pencil lines on a page. Like the dog who looks only at our fingers when we point, the boy can see no further than the tranposed image of what is real. In Pentecost, the church proclaims that we see only hints here of the treasures of God. The things of God are transposed into wood, stone, books and bread and our skeptic will see only from below.

 

The Fires of Pentecost Lift Our Lives

Pentecostalism is thriving in the postmodern world because it undermines the safe assumptions of a world that believes only in lines on paper. It dismantles the post-modern myth of the primacy of fact, of the belief that love is but lust, thought but chemicals in the brain, and people but fancy protoplasm, and replaces it with Christianity's message that God is with us in transposed form.

The spirit of Pentecost is a fire that burns away any pretense that humans are autonomous individuals guided by a powerful reason. Just as glossolalia disconcerts, and claims about the sacraments mystify, on any view from below, the fires of Pentcost lift our lives so that we can see from above the things of God that the skeptic will never see.

It is the Creator Spirit, who brooded over the primordial void, bringing order out of chaos, who enables us to transform and re-create a new world with the advent of the church. Pentecost makes the breathtaking claim that it is that same Creator God who made us the gift of the church. Let that boy out of his dungeon!