Pentecost: Getting Our Hearts Around the Corner

Many years ago, when I was teaching in a Catholic high school in Oklahoma City, one of my co-teachers, Maxine Stank, had a wonderful 7 or 8 year old son, Tommy, with bright red hair and freckles. Maxine told the story of asking Tommy to wash his hands before dinner one evening, telling him that was necessary so that he didn’t get sick. Begrudingly, Tommy went and washed his hands, and when he returned, Maxine asked to see them, upon which Tommy was sent back to wash them a second time. His exclamation was: “Jesus and germs...that’s all you hear about in this house, and you can’t see either one of them!”

This was, I think, the similar long-standing attitude of the Church regarding the Holy Spirit until about 40 years ago when the Charismatic Movement became popular, and sort of helped many of us Christians to rediscover a personal, as well as a community, dimension to our relationship with the Spirit of God.

At the Last Supper Jesus promised the disciples: “...I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth...You know him, because he abides in you...” The Greek word used for Advocate/Counselor/Encourager is parakletos, i.e., someone who appears on another’s behalf; an intercessor; a comforter; a helper. Those terms are somewhat general and can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.

In the past, missionaries in foreign lands often found it difficult to translate the Bible into a local dialect because of the frequent lack of equivalent terms and expressions. A story is told that among the Miao, a hill tribe in western China, the translation of John’s Gospel was delayed because no word for comfort or Comforter existed. Then one day a missionary heard a tribesman say that he was going to visit a woman who had lost her son. He said he was going to help her to “get her heart around the corner.” And so, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, was then translated as “the One who helps you get your heart around the corner.”

In Luke’s Gospel passage read on the feast of the Ascension this past Thursday, Jesus declares: “I am sending upon you what my Father has promised…” Jesus not only promised to send the Advocate, the Spirit: He delivered. “When the day of Pentecost had come,” says today’s first reading from Acts (1:1-21), “they were all together… and…all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit...” The name Pentecost derives from the Greek pentekoste = the 50th day, or seven weeks, after Passover. The Jewish Pentecost was called the Feast of Weeks, then one of Judaism’s three great feasts. It celebrated the gifts of the first fruits, as well as the gift of the Law to Moses. For followers of Jesus, this Jewish feast became the occasion for an outpouring of the Father’s first fruits: the gift of God’s Spirit. Through the gift of the Spirit, God empowers Jesus‘ followers to speak his Word to all people and to be understood by them. 

The Acts of the Apostles notes that, through the Spirit’s inspiration in St. Peter’s preaching, a sizeable community of faith, “about three thousand persons”, it says, came into being. It was a permanent group; Luke says they devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers. He says further that they shared a common life, sharing “out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed...”, and that their witness “made a deep impression on everyone.” 

To us, the spiritual descendants of that first community of faith, the Father, through Jesus, has given the gift of God’s Spirit, our Advocate and Comforter, the one who helps us “get our hearts around the corner”. The secret of a good gift is that it’s practical, something which the receiver can put to immediate use. Jesus‘ gift to that first community of faith transformed people: they became people who began tohelp others get their hearts around the corner: supporting one another in faith, telling the story of the Good News, being sensitive to human needs, sharing gladly and generously, continually praising God, and making a difference in their local communities.

You and I have been given the Spirit-Gift in Baptism and Confirmation. Maggie Daniels, a friend of mine, many years ago shared with me one of her lovely poems, called Transparency. It describes the faith, hope and love with which the Spirit of God clothes each of us in Baptism and Confirmation, like a transparent coat: 

What does it mean

to wear a transparent cloak?

and love like a veil

and faith like invisible wings.

To kneel

hidden and revealed

at the same time

Before the Face of One

who sees.

And how is it that

when the cloak’s edges

fall on the grass

It does not hide the grass

And when it lays on a root,

It does not cover the twistings

But is itself

susceptible to snags and tears?

What good is such a cloak?

of what use is it?

And why?

A transparent cloak

is the loveliest cloak of all

Because it wraps

the treasure without hiding it,

Covers without duplicity,

Avoids familiarity without rejection.

Enhances without falsifying.

And one thing more:

When it enfolds a gift

it grants the receiver

the pleasure of beholding

without denying him

the delight of unwrapping.

It is good for a [person]

to wear such a cloak,

woven of rain and mist,

spun with threads of sun.

But it is difficult

to wear well

for many reasons.

Only a [person] in love

can bear it. 

The gift of God’s Holy Spirit to us is eminently practical and usable: it’s a gift of peace, of knowledge, and of power. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom. It means perfect well-being, which is to say God; therefore, it’s God’s presence: complete harmony, such as exists when you and I are right with ourselves, with one another, and with God. There is only wholeness, no fragmentation. St. Paul says in Romans: “...to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:6)

The Spirit also enables us to know, to discern, our purpose, our direction in life. Paul again, in 1 Corinthians, reminds us that “...we have received...the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God...” (1 Corinthians 2:12) Moreover, God’s Spirit enables us not only to have Christ’s peace, but to become senders of the Spirit to others, beautifully summarized in The Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...” 

In the New Testament, the greeting of peace, uttered by those whom Jesus sends, is also a word of power. Jesus was conceived as “the power of the Most High”. Jesus is the Word of the Father: God’s presence and power embodied, and spoken inside people’s hearts. The disciples on the road to Emmaus describe Jesus as “mighty in deed and word before God and all the people”. Jesus’ words and deeds bring Life to people. The gift which the Father and Jesus send at Pentecost is, according to Luke, “like the rush of a violent wind”; all are “filled with the Holy Spirit”. Once empowered, people are gifted to preach, to witness, to heal, to be hospitable, to take others in, to teach, to be discerning, to show mercy: and all of this is for one purpose: “...to equip the saints for the work of ministry,” as Paul says, “for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ...” That’s a description of how we help one another, by the presence of the Spirit within us, to “get our hearts around the corner”.

Gertrud Mueller Nelson, in her book To Dance with God, describes it like this:“In the mystery of Pentecost, we await the gift of tongues -- the ability to hear and speak the word, each as we come to know it, understand it, and proclaim it in the uniqueness of our personhood. The gift is to interpret the meaning of Christ’s mission as it unfolds in our human experience, and through it we discover a common language. Meaning is what our waiting minds perceive and love, the word each heart understands....”

Ephrem: Harp of the Holy Spirit (c. 306-373)

Ephrem came into the world at Nisibis in Mesopotamia; some say that his family was Christian, while others claim that it was pagan. He was baptized at the age of 18 by Bishop Jacob of Nisibis, became part of his household, and likely accompanied Bishop Jacob to the Council of Nicaea in 325, which formalized the Nicene Creed. Ephrem was ordained a deacon rather late in life, and from then on was often referred to as "Ephrem the Deacon". 

When Jovianus ceded Nisibis to the Persians in 363, Ephrem and many other Christians moved to Edessa, where Ephrem lived a very ascetic life in a cave. There he completed most of his writings: exegetical works, many poems, polemics against heretics, and some 400 hymns -- over 1,000 works in all. Many of his works are difficult to translate because of their complex structures, images, wordplays, and parallels. Ephrem wrote in Aramaic and his works were translated into Latin and Greek, even while he was still living. The great St. Jerome wrote no small accolade of Ephrem: "I have read in Greek a volume of his on the Holy Spirit...I recognized in it the sublime genius of the man." Ephrem has often been called the "Harp of the Holy Spirit" or the "Harp of the Faith". Noting that the heretics of his time used songs to convey their erroneous teaching, Ephrem turned the tables and set orthodox words to the same tunes, eventually winning over the minds and hearts of people. Ephrem defended the faith against Gnostics and Arians, particularly, and against specific people, like Bar-Daisan. The last line of his Hymn Against Bar-Daisan is a real zinger!

"And if he thinks he has said the last thing
He has reached heathenism,
O Bar-Daisan,
Son of the River Daisan,
Whose mind is liquid like his name!"

Ephrem was very devoted to Mary, the Theotokos, and wrote profoundly in praise of her, and was equally eloquent in honoring the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Sacrament. His descriptions of heaven and hell are said to have inspired Dante.   

In the winter of 372-373 Ephrem voluntarily ministered to the hungry, the needy, and those sick from a plague in Edessa. In doing so, he himself became a victim of the plague and died in his cave on June 9, 373. 

Columba, Apostle of Scotland (521-597)

[III 19] How the brightness of angelic light was seen shining down on St Columba in church, one winter night while the brothers were sleeping in their chambers, by Fergnae, a young man of natural goodness, who by the will of God later was the head of this church that I too, though unworthy, serve.

One winter night, this Fergnae was so moved by the love of God burning within him that he entered the church alone to pray while the others slept, and the in a side chapel attached to the wall of the church he devoted himself to his prayers. Some time had passed, perhaps an hour, when St. Columba too entered the Lord’s house. With his arrival the whole church was filled with a golden light shining from the heights of heaven. Even in his shut-off side chapel, where Fergnae tried as best he could to lie concealed, the brilliance of that heavenly light came through the inner door of the chamber, which was not completely closed, and filled the room, causing Fergnae no little sense of fear. In the same way that no one is able to look directly at the sun at midday in summer without being dazzled, so Fergnae could not bear that heavenly brightness, for it was brighter than any light and completely dazzled his sight. Its radiance filled him with fear, so that his strength failed him utterly.

St. Columba prayed for a little while before leaving the church again. But on the following day he called Fergnae to him, though Fergnae was still much afraid, and addressed him with these words of comfort: "O my dear son," the saint said, "what you did last night was well pleasing in the sight of God, lowering your eyes to the ground for fear of the brightness. If you had not done so, your eyes might have been blinded by the sight of that unimaginable light. But you must take care never to reveal to anyone that you witnessed this manifestation of light so long as I live."

So it was that only after the blessed man had passed away Fergnae told the story of this praiseworthy and marvelous event to many people. I, Adomnan, who have written this account, heard it in testimony from the worthy priest Comman, who was the son of Fergnae’s sister. He had heard it first hand from his uncle Fergnae, who had himself seen the event inasmuch as his strength permitted.

(From the Life of St Columba, by Adomnan)

The Pioneers of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil

Bishop Mauricio José Araújo de Andrade

Bishop Primate of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil

Anglican ministry in Brazil began as a number of chaplaincies catering to English expatriates in 1810. The first known parish, St. John the Baptist, was settled in Nova Lima, State of Minas Gerais in 1834. In 1889, when Brazil formalised the separation of Church and state in its constitution, the Anglican chaplaincies began missionary work among the Brazilian people. In 1890 Episcopal Church missionaries Lucien Lee Kinsolving and James Watson held the first service on Trinity Sunday in Porto Alegre. Shortly thereafter, three more missionaries -- Mary Packard, William Cabell, and John Gaw Meem -- joined them in their work. Today we honor these five as the pioneers of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil.

In 1893, the Provincial newsletter Estandarte Cristão was first published. To this day it helps keep the widely spread Anglican congregations in touch with each other. In 1899 Fr. Kinsolving was consecrated missionary bishop in Brazil, and in 1907 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established the missionary district of Brazil, and continued to provide bishops. Some 50 years after the Brazilian Church began, in 1940, the first indigenous clergy person, Athalício Theodoro Pithan, was made bishop. In 1965, the The Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil became an autonomous Province of the Anglican Communion, and, by 1982, had gained complete financial independence from the Episcopal Church in the United States. The two Churches have maintained a strong relationship and participate in common mission efforts to the present.

The Iglesia Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil consists of nine dioceses, each headed by a bishop, one of whom is elected as Bispo Primaz (Primate Bishop), currently Revmº. Bispo Dom Maurício José Araújo de Andrade, who also serves as Bishop of Brasília. The 30th General Synod of the Brazilian Church (July 30, 2006) elected the current primate, elevated Amazonia as the ninth diocese of the Province and agreed on an experimental plan to group the dioceses and missionary districts of the Province into three regions.

A substantial proportion of the priests of the Province are women, but all the bishops currently are men. The president of the House of Clergy and Laity is elected at the General Synod for a three year term. The General Secretary of the Church also appointed at the General Synod for a three year term.

Pope John XXIII (Angelo Giussepe Roncalli) - 1881-1963

There was a man

sent from God

whose name was John,

he was fat

and kind.

We found that very intriguing,

not so much the being fat

but the being kind.

(Brother Denis Wiseman, O.P.)

29 Years -- Deo Gratias!

Photo by my friend, Shelley Dunnigan

Bishop John L. Thompson, of the Diocese of Northern California, received me as an Episcopal priest at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, Sacramento, CA, on June 2, 1982. Having enjoyed 25 years of active service in the Episcopal Church and four years now of retirement, I thank God for all the past opportunities and look forward to whatever further use God may find for me in the future. I would gladly do it all over again. Today I'm thinking of and praying for all those who had a hand in bringing me to that day in 1982, and who have come into my life since then. What a rich mixture of blessings! Thanks to you all, and thanks be to God!  

Waiting For the Power

Ever wonder why doctors’ clients are called “patients”?? If you’ve ever sat in a waiting room you catch on pretty quickly that patience is a virtue.


Waiting is frequently associated with something out of the ordinary, a significant event: birthday, graduation, wedding, discharge from the military, or retirement. People have various ways of marking the time, of waiting for the “big day”, often by literally marking off  the days on the calendar.


Sometimes people wait to receive something, either in the mail or by telephone: news of a big win in the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, a letter from a loved one, of acceptance to college, news about a new job, the results of a medical test, or a refund from the IRS. We all know the mixture of excitement or dread that goes with such waiting. Will they call? Will the letter be in the post box? Will the news be good? And if our expected news fails to arrive, we begin waiting another 24 hours and wonder: Will it come tomorrow?


Hospitals have special rooms where family members and friends wait for someone to come out of surgery, and there are other rooms near intensive care units where people wait to see or to hear news about others for whom they love and care. There’s always a story attached to our waiting, and such rooms, if they could speak, would tell us of the joyous and hopeful ones, as well as the many anguished and sad ones.


When people end up together in such waiting, often a sort of community begins to develop. People who’ve been perfect strangers become comrades, if not friends. They support and pray for one another, cheer each other on, and perform small, random acts of kindness. They share stories about their lives, their struggles, their hopes, their fears. Once their personal crisis is resolved, they go separate ways, and most will never see one another again. Yet in their waiting they’ve awakened the possibility of a special kind of caring for others.


Jesus’ disciples had been through a lot together. They’d been called from all sorts of backgrounds and circumstances. They’d followed Jesus of Nazareth and waited with Him as He spoke profound words and did astonishing things. They’d glimpsed a hint of His greatness and began to believe that the waiting would surely end in glory. The only problem was that the glory came in the form of a cross, outside Jerusalem’s walls, and what kind of glory is that!?


As Jesus talked to the disciples about the suffering He would soon face, they heard Him pray that they would be one. But it seemed to be asking far too much to make them wait for this in the shadow of an instrument of execution. Instead of being one, as it turned out, they one-by-one abandoned Jesus, never really understanding.


Three days afterward, the Cross changed from a sign of shame and defeat into a symbol of victory. Jesus was raised from death, and appeared to them even as they waited in near-despair. It began to look again as though the waiting would, after all, end in glory. Jesus, they thought, would now establish the kingdom he’d often talked about, and guess who would be there when He did -- going in at the head of the line!


After a short post-Resurrection time together, Jesus did a strange thing. When they questioned Him about restoring the kingdom, Luke says (Acts 1:6-7), Jesus told them: “It isn’t for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set...” And just like that, Luke continues in v. 9, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight...”  That, of course, isn’t to be taken literally: as some sort of a divine “elevator” trick! Given his view of the world, this was Luke’s way of visualizing and expressing for his readers the powerfully true meaning of Jesus’ return to the Father, which we traditionally call “the Ascension”. 


Notice that the focus in Luke’s narrative in Acts isn't heavenward, but earthward: “...why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” Jesus had just (v. 4) “ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father...” He assured them that the Spirit would “come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” So much for their fantasy of the “glory kingdom”!


Post-Ascension...Pre-Pentecost...waiting. Uncertainty as to what’s going on; powerlessness; questioning. They were fragmented as a group, since one of their 12 was gone. The only thing they now had to go on was a set of impossibly dark (from Good Friday) and impossibly ecstatic (from Easter and the Ascension) memories. That and Jesus’ reassuring promise that He would send the Holy Spirit to empower them to witness to the crucified, risen, ascended, and reigning Lord, in the midst of an unbelieving world. What does one do, though, in the time in between: the time of waiting?


In His farewell talk to them, in John 17:1-11, Jesus tried to teach the disciples (and us) the true meaning of “glory”, which He calls “eternal life”.  Jesus says that it isn’t about cashing in on a “grand reward” later on in heaven, reward attained through success, possessions or power. “Eternal life” is what our being, our existence, here and now is all about. “This”, Jesus says, “is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent...” And it's not academic knowledge -- “knowledge of”, “knowledge about” -- but knowing, in the sense of “identification with”, “intimate relaltionship with”. It’s a knowing of one’s whole being: body, mind, and soul, which simply can’t help itself but to act.


Luke says that in their waiting the disciples did act, in two ways: 1) “they devoted themselves to prayer...”; and 2) they did so “with one accord...”, together, with one mind. We really don’t know what the mood and content of that prayer was. But in light of what happened later, namely, their restoring of wholeness to the group of 12 by choosing Matthias to replace Judas, and their dramatic experiences of the the coming of the Holy Spirit, we can surmise that their prayer likely consisted of a number of elements:
- a frank and honest confession of their common powerlessness, of their fragmented unity and diversity;
- an appeal for guidance as to what steps they should take in faith, given who they were and the available human resources they had;
- and, finally, a plea for the gift of God’s Spirit -- not so that they would be made comfortable, or go forth to preach having all the answers, but so that they might humbly learn how to reach out to others who have an endless range of diverse needs, to “know” them even as they were known by the Father and Jesus.


Any company of Christians at any time, even a parish, can fall victim to post-Ascension, pre-Pentecost waiting. It’s a kind of paralysis caused by feeling trapped between two apparently irreconcilable realities: on one hand, the incredible grandeur of the reality of Resurrection and Ascension, and the Risen Lord’s invitation to bear witness to these events; and, on the other, the sort of global inertia we feel of things as they are in this world and in the Church, together with the seemingly meager and fragile inner and outer resources we each think we have.


The Holy Spirit who came at Pentecost healed this paralysis among the first disciples and gave them a new desire and energy to go forth preaching and teaching the Good News of Jesus. Were the disciples around today, they’d no doubt be amazed at the numbers of those who call themselves followers of Jesus, and at the extent to which the Gospel has been spread over the world.


But two questions constantly nag at us: 1) What kind of witnesses are we? and 2) What is it, exactly, to which we’re to bear witness? A brief look at church history can make us shudder. Self-serving alliances with power and privilege, neglect of the poor, persecutions, crusades, religious wars, sectarian quarrels and divisions -- both within and outside the Church, the often mindless celebration of cheap grace, and the trivializing of the Gospel in other ways -- all these can throw thoughtful followers of Christ into a prolonged post-Ascension, pre-Pentecost mood. Where do we find the resources to confront ourselves and the world, to come alive in our faith, to overcome our disunity, and to give credible witness to the crucified, risen, ascended, and reigning Lord?


Luke's narrative in Acts suggests that the true Church is marked by unity in prayer. O. Wesley Allen, Jr. observes that, “The church, like the rest of society, can hardly agree on anything. We argue about the nature of sin and salvation, economic justice, who God is, military policy, worship styles, sex, inclusive language, and so forth...But by God, or better, through Christ, we ought to be able to pray together...” Together we’re called to confess our common powerlessness, fragmentedness and unfaithfulness; to pray for guidance to take the next practical steps we can, in faith: where we are, as we are, with just the resources that are now available to us. Finally, relying on Jesus’ promise, we need to pray that we may accept the gift of, that we may know, the Holy Spirit of love.


Throughout history God has answered such prayer by raising up faithful witnesses: folks not conspicuous either by their numbers or by their successes, or by running around putting “Christian” tags on everything. Nor are even God’s most faithful witnesses exempt from their own blind spots and, at times, stupidity. The remarkable thing about them has never been their splendid perfection of character, but rather the unimaginable excellence and saving grace of the One whom they know intimately, and to Whom they bear witness. The power of God’s Spirit to genuinely “be my witnesses...to the ends of the earth” is something which any one of us, or any parish, can dare to pray for with all confidence.


Walter Brueggeman notes: “In the church’s reckoning of time, the church awaits [from the feast of the Ascension] ten days for Pentecost. It waits those ten days without power...What matters is that the church waits under promise for the gift of power that it can receive from no other source...This is power from heaven, inscrutable, irresistible, power like the wind, power that gives energy, freedom, courage, authority, and healing, power to transform the world. There is an odd, dramatic slippage between the departure of Jesus and the invasion of God’s Spirit...the moment between Ascension and Pentecost. It may also be the in-between moment of the contemporary church. The church has only the promise. That, however, is enough!”