May 24, 2026

         Today is the Feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.  Over the centuries, Christians have come up with all sorts of gimmicks to commemorate the occasion. In the Middle Ages, many churches had mechanical doves that would descend from the ceiling on Pentecost. It’s common among Episcopalians to wear red on Pentecost. There are those who love to say “It’s the birthday of the church!”—No, it’s not. I once participated in a reading of the Acts passage in different foreign languages. If you think Parthians, Cappadocia, and the like are difficult to pronounce in English, imagine what those words sound like in German.

         Our scripture readings today offer rich and varied images to help us think about the Holy Spirit. There’s the reading from Acts, which tells in dramatic fashion the descent of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire on the disciples gathered in the Upper Room and the miraculous gift of foreign languages that allowed them to preach to the international crowds gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of Shavuot, the feast of weeks. If any of you have ever struggled to learn a foreign language, you’re probably rather envious of the disciples’ sudden fluency.

         There’s the reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, written to a community that valued the gift of tongues above all others. But in this case, the gift was not miraculous fluency in foreign language but ecstatic utterances that were incomprehensible to others. For Paul, such utterances were not necessarily a sign of greater faith, but only one of many possible gifts of the spirit. In a sense, he is democratizing the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It had been a source of controversy in the Corinthian community, with those who expressed these ecstatic utterances asserting their superiority over other members of the community who did not experience them. Paul’s use of the metaphor of the human body is an attempt to stress the importance of unity among the diversity of gifts and to assert the equal importance of all members.

         And then there’s the gospel text for today, which presents a very different understanding of the coming of the Holy Spirit and its importance to the emergent community of Jesus followers. It takes place on the evening of the First Easter, rather than 50 days later as Pentecost. In addition, the mood is much more contemplative, quiet. In place of the miraculous tongues of fire and the gift of languages, or even the ecstatic speech experienced among members of the Corinthian community, here we have Jesus himself imparting the Holy Spirit on his disciples. 

         But in these few sentences are powerful ideas. Drawing on themes we have been seeing the last several weeks, first of all there’s the implication of identity of Father, Son, and disciples: As the Father sent me, so I am sending you. Shared identity, shared mission, propelling the disciples out of the locked room in which they were hiding into the world. 

         The disciples are also given a unique power. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven, if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” In Matthew that power, the power of the keys was given to Peter; here it is bestowed on all of the disciples. It marks them as a community of reconciliation and redemption and I think it is an extension of the emphasis on love that we have already seen expressed in the gospel readings over the last several weeks. 

         Finally, and for me this may be the most inspiring; there’s a verse in the Psalm that I have always found appealing and a key to understanding the exuberance of the Holy Spirit: 

         there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.

         And later: 

                  You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; *
and so you renew the face of the earth.

There’s a sense that the wondrous diversity and beauty of creation is a product of God’s playfulness, something I don’t think we often appreciate fully. We’re prone to take our religious lives, and God, for that matter, a bit too seriously some times. So to imagine creation as God’s playground, if we’re created in God’s image, we should enjoy it just as God does.

         All of these texts illuminate different aspects of the Holy Spirit. But I think there is one important theme to consider. It has become common to think, since the Pentecostal movements of the twentieth century, that the Holy Spirit is primarily an individual gift, proof of one’s faith. Alternatively, and equally prevalent is the idea that individual religious experience, whether it’s the sort of ecstatic experience alluded to in I Corinthians, or simply an overwhelming sense of awe and majesty in the presence of the divine—what the 20^th century Religious Studies pioneer Rudolf Otto talked about in his groundbreaking “The Idea of the Holy” is what the Holy Spirit is all about.

I don’t think that’s the case. In Acts, in John, and in I Corinthians, the gift of the Holy Spirit is first and foremost a communal gift, not an individual one. As Paul says, we are all members of one body. It is a communal gift and it is a gift to the church. But there’s a danger there, too. The Holy Spirit has too often been confined to the workings of the institutional church, to support its structures, and there’s no better example of that than our gospel hymn, a version of which is always sung at ordinations in the Episcopal Church. The orderly laying on of hands, the apostolic succession of bishops, are efforts to channel and limit the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit disrupts as well as builds up. It blows where it will and leads us into new territory and new opportunities. As Jesus says to the disciples in John: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And as we see in the reading from Acts, too, above all, the Holy Spirit is about mission, going out into the world beyond the confines of this building and the narrow patterns of our lives. It sends us out to connect with others, to share the good news, to spread God’s love, to enjoy the breadth, diversity, and exuberance of God’s creation, and to imitate that breadth, diversity, and exuberance as we build community together.

On this day, as we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are invited to discern its working in the world and in our lives. We are called to embrace its power and to let it do its work, to expand our horizons, to follow its lead, to share it with others. May it empower us to build our congregation and to imagine new ways in which God is calling us to be God’s people, and to share the good news, spreading Christ’s love in our community and the world.