Pentecost
- St. Aidan's
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Pentecost C: Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, (25-27)
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
June 8, 2025
You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth.
- Psalm 104:31
Good morning, St. Aidan’s. Welcome to Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Eastertide, the celebratory close of this season in which we have been walking with the risen Christ, even as Christ has come among us. All through these days, we have heard stories of his coming among the disciples, among us, opening our eyes to resurrection reality. Christ showed himself to Mary Magdalene at the tomb (John 20:14-18); to the disciples gathered in fear in the upper room (20:19-27); to another grouping of those followers fishing on the Sea of Tiberias (21: 1-14). Christ has gathered us as a shepherd (10:22-30), has called us to love one another just as he loves us (13:35). Along the way, as Eastertide made its way toward this day, Christ’s voice in our gospel readings has been preparing us for the coming of the Holy Spirit. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you,” we heard two weeks ago (John 14:26). Last Sunday and in the week leading up to it, we observed the Ascension, the further rising of the risen Christ from our earthly, historical context to the right hand of God the Parent. As Luke’s account of the Ascension situates us, we have been waiting “until you [or we] have been clothed with power from on high,” anticipating the coming of the Spirit in all her glory (Luke 24:49). Finally, today, it happens. The power of new creation, of God’s renewing freedom, flows upon and among us, making us new.
We hear this story iconically in the Acts of the Apostles. Appropriately, we hear it vocalized by several people, in multiple tongues. That simultaneity, even its cacophony, is important to hear in addition to the particular languages we may understand. For even if in the story everyone is able to hear what is being spoken in their own languages despite the fact that this should not be possible, there is something else they notice. It is described as a “sound like the rush of violent wind,” a sound that not only startled the gathered disciples but also drew a crowd from beyond the walls of their house (Acts 2:2). This sound in its strangeness, together with the unexpected ability to comprehend what was being spoken across expected barriers of language and community, was crucial to what was unfolding. We too are invited to hear it in the oddity of this overlap in voice and language. And what was this strangeness? It was newness of life, new creation. God the Holy Spirit rushing among them, re-creating them as surely as the breath of the Spirit had given life to the planet’s first creatures. It was the audible reweaving of community unbound by the barriers of their death-dealing imperial Roman context. It was the sound of a people being set free in order to be sent out into the world.
As part of this transformation, they were also, importantly, inhabiting another earlier story. In response to the strange sound and the unexpected understanding of language, the reaction of its witnesses was varied. “All were amazed and perplexed,” we hear, asking “what does this mean?” Some answered with reflexive dismissal sneering, “they are filled with new wine” (Acts 2:12-13). The apparent intoxication of this unruly group was an embarrassment ripe for mockery. But in response, Peter invites his listeners to open their imaginations through the words of the prophet Joel. Joel had declared, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17; Joel 2:28). What would the effect of that outpouring be? The liberation of their imaginations. All of them, old and young, would be given a prophetic imagination. Their own voices would be unleashed to open up and share the story of God’s renewing Spirit calling all into liberation. That Spirit was not subject to the classifications, the imprisonments, the rules and orders by which humans keep one another in line, under the boot of the powerful. Even those who were enslaved would be caught up in the vocalization of the Spirit’s rush (Acts 2:18; Joel 2:29). As Paul wrote to the community in Rome, the Spirit was bearing witness in and through them precisely not to bind them but to set them free, adopting them into a family of deep belonging, always being made new (Romans 8:15).
On Thursday of this week, I read the news that the Biblical scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann has died at the age of ninety-two.[1] We have spent a good deal of time with Brueggemann’s work here at St. Aidan’s over the last several years, both before and especially during the early months of the pandemic when we read his seminal book The Prophetic Imagination.[2] In that book he writes of the call of the prophets to transform the imagination of the people.[3] In contexts of empire and exile, in times of despair and overwhelm, the prophetic vocation names injustice, the minds and hearts of God’s people pouring themselves out through grief and lament. In naming what is wrong, lifting our hearts to God, they, we open our hearts to perceive and join in the new things God will do. This joining with God is a process that Brueggemann refers to as energizing amazement.[4]
In a passage about the prophet known by scholars as Second Isaiah, Brueggemann notes how the prophet wrote from “a newness of time, a time in which all the old certainties were becoming unglued.” He explains, “Babylon was going and Persia was coming, and this poet knew precisely what time it was.”[5] In this context, this strange temporality, the prophet wrote from out of what Brueggemann calls “the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom.”[6] We can hear this freedom in the prophet Joel, quoted in our Acts passage, as the people are unleashed to prophesy together with the divine Spirit breaking through the strictures of their world. But Brueggemann’s observations about God’s radical freedom go further. The liberation expressed by the prophet confesses God’s “freedom not only from the conceptions and expectations of [God’s] people but from God’s own past actions as well.”[7] God’s freedom is truly wild, strange, unexpected and new. Behold, I am about to do a new thing (Isaiah 43:19). I make all things new (Revelation 21:5).
What do we do in response to, in anticipation of such freedom, such wildness, such strange newness? As God takes the hinges off the very doors of our expectations, we are invited into perplexity followed by amazement, awe, wonder. Brueggemann speaks of this reaction as doxology, the practice of giving glory to God.[8] Offering glory joins God’s energizing creativity. In moments such as this one where perhaps like me, you may wonder how we can sing such songs, I appreciate Brueggemann’s question, “It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in empire.” Against empire. In response he insists that doxology allows compassion to emerge, “for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given.” And then he continues, “Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.”[9] To continue with a longer Brueggemann quote: “The hope-filled language of prophecy, in cutting through the royal despair and hopelessness” – a feeling we may be experiencing right now–
"is the language of amazement. It is language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate. The language of amazement is against the despair just as the language of grief is against the numbness [of what Brueggemann calls ‘the royal consciousness’]. I believe that, rightly embraced, no more subversive or prophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets us before the reality of God, God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed [that God] had fled."[10]
Fear and its ally weariness, born of worldly monarchical stupor, are meant to be shattered, transformed into energizing hope. Our call, our Pentecostal vocation, is to prepare our hearts, to open them to be prophetically shaped. To name our fear, opening it to radical metamorphosis. In this process, we begin to collaborate with God’s in-breaking, in-breathing Spirit. We begin to take our own place in the open-ended story of God’s dream.[11]
We step into that story in this place, among one another, week by week here in worship. We do so in our daily lives, in our relationships with our neighbors, friends, families of choice and/or of origin. And we step into this story among strangers as well, people we have not yet met. I saw this kind of connection, opening of hearts and unleashing of imagination here in this space on Friday evening as we gathered to make posters for Pride Month and for the No Kings March coming up on Saturday. Together we ate pizza. And we were not only from St. Aidan’s but from other congregations around our deanery and wider diocese. We were not only Episcopalians but people of other traditions and none. With an incredible array of glitter glue and vibrantly colored paper, with rainbow hues and markers, we joined God’s own always-unfurling creativity to push back against the stultifications of that “royal consciousness” as Brueggemann names it, which is unfolding in so many different forms, even in our news just this week. This morning I particularly lift up and invite you to join me in prayer for the people of Los Angeles pushing back against ICE raids and the imposition of the National Guard. Pray for the people of Los Angeles.[12] In this Pride month and in this moment in our history we are called to collaborate together in the glorious power of the Holy Spirit which unfolds in our midst in so many different words and images, as we celebrate the lives, the beauty of LGBTQIA+ people. May we lift up particularly trans and nonbinary people amid such targeted oppression. Together our invitation, St. Aidan’s, is to participate in God’s in-breaking work, to join the breath of the Spirit renewing creation, to be a participant – each and every one of us – in the energizing work of God, breaking through despair, embracing the metamorphosis of fear. May it be so.
[2] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination. 40th Anniversary Edition (Fortress Press, 1978, 2018).
[3] A favorite passage (p. 40): “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophets to keep alive the ministry of imagination.”
[4] Brueggemann, 78-79
[5] Brueggemann, 68
[6] Brueggemann, 68
[7] Brueggemann, 67
[8] Brueggemann, 18, 67-68, and throughout The Prophetic Imagination.
[9] Brueggemann, 18
[10] Brueggemann, 67-68
[11] The language of God’s dream, as always, is inspired by Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: a Call To Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1991).
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