A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, May 31, 2020, Year A, the Day of Pentecost

Numbers 11:24-30
Psalm 104:25-35
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
Acts 2:1-21
John 20:19-23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

This is how attuned to our “new normal” I have become: as I began to prepare for my sermon on these texts this week, I read the portion of John’s gospel assigned for this Pentecost Sunday and my first thought was What germs did Jesus pass on to the disciples when he breathed out the Holy Spirit?  That was risky behavior!  

And, sad as that was as a “first response” to the gospel, it made me consider the ways in which the Holy Spirit is kind of like a virus.  Think about it.  Passing the Holy Spirit to the disciples was risky behavior on Jesus’ part.  Receiving the Holy Spirit is something of a hazard.  God’s Spirit is a wild fire, and an untamable wind.  And when the God’s Holy Spirit is passed between us, when we accept the Spirit into our hearts, there’s no telling where she might lead, what she might inspire us to do. 

But riskiness isn’t the only thing about the Spirit that could go viral.  I find it awkward and scary during this season of the corona virus to constantly be measuring my risk to others.  I am always aware of how just a breath or a word, a cough or a comment has the potential, however low, of passing on a deadly disease to someone else.  But if each and all of us are possible vectors of the evils of this virus, each and all of us are always possible vectors of God’s life-giving Spirit, too. 

After all, much like a virus, God’s Spirit is meant to be spread.  She dwells within us so that, through communion and communication, she might be communicated, from one human being to another, as far and wide as a global pandemic. 

And that’s what we see happen in that familiar description from the Acts of the Apostles of the day of Pentecost.  The writer of Acts describes a kind of positive pandemic that sweeps through the known world spreading the Spirit of God to all and sundry. 

And it’s not surprising that the power of the Spirit is revealed by the fact that the disciples are able to communicate effectively with the people around them, such that “each one [in the gathered crowd] heard them speaking in the native language of each.”  This, after all, is what we are meant to do with God’s Spirit – to communicate it to others, to be vectors of God’s power and love.  And we can do so only and precisely because that self same Spirit lives within us, enabling us to offer communion to those we encounter. 

As the crowd before the disciples discusses the event that they have just witnessed and participated in, Peter breaks through their confusion and astonishment and preaches the good news.  He quotes the prophet Joel from the Hebrew scriptures who had proclaimed that God would “pour out [God’s] Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…”

Peter preaches from Joel, but he could have likewise chosen as his text the portion of Numbers that we also read today.  Moses, God’s prophet to the Israelites, has been communicating to the people God’s good will for them, and it is tiring work.  When, finally, some elders of the community also receive God’s Word, Moses is nearly jubilant that there are others to share in that ministry.  He cries out, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” 

And though Peter chooses to quote Joel, what happens on the day of Pentecost is just as much the fulfillment of Moses’s wish.  In that moment, with the crowds gathered, hearing the good news of Christ proclaimed in any and all the ways they could understand it, God’s Spirit spreads out like some kind of life-giving virus.

And here’s the thing: it hasn’t stopped.  The moment described in the Acts of the Apostles is still going on, still happening, even today. The pandemic of Pentecost is still spreading, on and on, through the centuries and across the globe. 

We sometimes forget that Christianity is global but the Spirit (like Coronavirus) continues to spread around the world. Perhaps we are dismayed that the number of American Christians is dwindling. But other areas are becoming hotspots of the Spirit’s activity instead of America.  Today statistics suggest more Christians maybe worshipping in China than here in the United States.

But perhaps this is the moment, when everyone is anxious about the days and weeks and months ahead, when so much is lost in miscommunication and division, when we cast about looking for something solid to stand on, some power and truth to which we can cling, perhaps this is the moment in which the Church in America can experience a renewed Pentecost, a rebirth. 

And you and I have a role to play in such renewal.  You might think that’s unlikely, since we’re ordinary Christians; we are not famous or powerful or even particularly loud.  But, the wonderful thing about God’s Spirit is that she is the source of all power.  All we are asked to do is to share her power with others. 

And we can do that with our words, as Peter did on that day of Pentecost two thousand years ago.  But we must also do so with our whole lives.  Indeed, we are already sharing God’s Spirit with others.  Because, remember, the real gift of the Spirit is that ability to communicate effectively, to be in communion with others that they, too, might know of the redemption to be found in God’s love. 

And that is something that, in my experience, Thankful Ones are really good at doing already.  Even now, when we cannot be with each other in person, we are still in communion in so many other ways: in our prayer for each other, in how we continue to communicate with one another, in our continued giving – within our own parish family and through our various outreach partners, in our concern and care for all others through simple actions like wearing masks or staying distant.  These, too, are ways in which we can and do communicate God’s Holy Spirit.  The viral pandemic does not and cannot stop our fulfillment of Christ’s mission because we are powered by the pandemic of Pentecost, by the Spirit of God that spreads through us to all. 

Thus, we, too, are God’s prophets: our lives are the prophecy of God’s love for God’s people; our actions are our prayers, that God may “shed abroad this gift [of the Holy Spirit] throughout the world […] that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with [the Father], in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.” Amen.