The Rev. Noah Van Niel
Christ and St. Luke’s
June 5th, 2022
Pentecost (C): Acts 2:1-21; Ps 104:24-35, 37; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, 25-27
(You can view the full service here. The sermon begins at 23:55)
As you can probably tell by now, Pentecost is never your typical Sunday. True to its origins as recounted in the second chapter of Acts, there’s always a lot going on. That’s because the Holy Spirit has always been multifaceted; hard to define and yet hard to deny. It’s symbolized by wind and flame and dove. It creates and comforts; guides and guards. It gives us strength and courage, as well as wisdom and understanding. That’s a lot of ground to cover. And just for good measure we’ve thrown in baptisms, baked goods, and a whole lot of red! This holy excitement is befitting a day known as the birthday of the Church. But Pentecost also brings something else, something a little quieter, something that I pray does not get lost in all this holy commotion because I think it is perhaps the Spirit’s more essential gift, especially for us, right now: hope.
When the Spirit shows up for the disciples, it is inherently future oriented. It inspires in them that holy imagination for how the world could be and gives them the strength to try to make it so. It’s not just about what is happening in the moment of its arrival, it’s about what new thing The Holy Spirit is calling into being, what new reality it is initiating. It is about “what is to come.” And what was to come from that day, was the Church—communities of Christians living and loving and praying and serving by the grace of some power that, they would be the first to admit, came from beyond them, and called them beyond themselves. The Holy Spirit can be an amorphous aspect of our Trinitarian God, but anytime you find yourself with dreams, with visions for the future, with hope, that is the Holy Spirit at work in you and in your life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately. Probably because it feels so hard to come by right now. Weekly outbursts of mass violence across the country using weapons whose sole purpose is to cause maximum destruction and death; a merciless war with no clear end in sight; water that keeps rising along with the temperature; a viral epidemic that just won’t quit, shadowed by an epidemic of loneliness, anger, and despair; and meanwhile a shameful inability to muster enough collective will to do anything of much consequence about any of these problems. With such hope-lessness all around, it’s only natural to wonder, where then is hope to be found? Where are we to locate the hope that Pentecost promises, hope for any sort of future, let alone a future that is brighter and better than our perilous present reality?
Whenever I find myself tipping more towards hopelessness than hopefulness, there is always one thing that saves me: children. My children, certainly, but all children really. Children embody hope. They are all about the future. And in that way they are harbingers of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul knew this. He writes in our passage from Romans today, that one of the primary gifts of the Holy Spirit is to turn us back into children, the children of God. “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are children of God,” he writes. “[We] have received the Spirit of adoption, and we cry out in that Spirit, ‘Abba’” – which is the Aramaic word for “Daddy!” He continues, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our Spirit,” “that we are children of God.” The Spirit returns us to that state of pure hopefulness, that of a child calling out for a parent, and welcomes us into a family; the family of God to feel loved, and cared for, and guided, and hopeful.
Children don’t need to return to that state of pure hopefulness, they live it every day. They are so absorbed in what is possible, so full of that holy imagination for what could be that they call us out of our present circumstances. They pull our gaze up from the ground to the horizon and call us to journey there with them because there might just be something beautiful or exciting up ahead. I can still remember like it was yesterday, when I would stand there rocking my boys in my arms, being met by this overwhelming feeling of hope for them and for their future. They were just little bundles of possibility. I remember asking them, “Who are you going to be? What are you going to do?” The future lay open before them wide as the sea, inviting them to a life of possibility and promise. In that moment, I felt an expansiveness of hope that I will never forget. I realize this may sound trite or cliché but then again, cliches are cliches because they are true. The fact that we even have children is an act of faith in the future, a symbol of our hopefulness for the continuation and improvement of existence.
In return for this great gift of hopefulness that children give us we are tasked with but one thing: to provide for their wellbeing. One of the primary ways we show our hope and practice it, as individuals and as societies, is how we protect, support, and love our children. When we fail in that responsibility, not only do they suffer, tragically, but we are also robbed of the very thing that gives us hope for the future. It’s a double catastrophe. And right now, we are failing our children. The particular tragedies of Uvalde, or of the 27 other school shootings that have taken place so far this year[1] are acute, awful examples of this failure. But so are the increasing reports of deaths of despair among our young people. So are the failing schools and ignored neighborhoods; so is the desperately uneven distribution of opportunities and resources we give them. This is not just sociologically or psychologically damaging, it is spiritually inexcusable. By allowing such buds of possibility to be mowed down, or by allowing them to languish, we are destroying the very Spirit that not only gives them life but gives us hope. Such a reality is nothing less than a desecration of the Holy Spirit. For if it is true that a society’s hopefulness can be measured in how it treats, protects, supports, and loves its children, then a society that sacrifices their children for their own rights or power, has no hope. They are prisoners of the present, slaves of the self. And nothing could be more antithetical to life and witness of Jesus Christ or the movement of the Holy Spirit.
That’s why today, we have surrounded ourselves with children. This morning we have our choristers singing; we have a young voice reading a young people’s translation of our scriptures, and in a few moments, we’ll be welcoming in our children’s chapel members to come and watch the baptism of little Nora. Nora was born in the middle of a pandemic and will inherit from us a world whose future is cloudy at best. But my goodness, you should see her smile. When I met with her parents, Adam and Maddie, she was nothing but light, and laughter and love. She knows only joy, delight, and hope. And so even though we grown-ups are going to be the ones praying that she receives the Holy Spirit on this, her baptism day, I think we’ve got that backwards. We should be praying that we receive the Spirit she is already bursting with: a Spirit that cannot but be hopeful. What better way could there be to mark the day of Pentecost than by steeping in such hopeful energy, which is the very presence of the Holy Spirit. There is no better balm for our broken hearts, no better way to heal our hopelessness. And in return for the gift of their presence with us today, may we pledge ourselves anew to the protection and nurture of these harbingers of hope, these bundles of possibility. And not just these children, but all children. If the winds of hope are really going to blow through our world on this day and enliven our hearts with the visions and dreams of the Holy Spirit, if we are really going to be people of hope, there could be no holier work for us to do. May the Spirit not only give us the will to do it, but the courage to accomplish it, for their sake, and for our own. Amen.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1101050970/2022-school-shootings-so-far