May 23 Pentecost
“In the hills, neighbor is a verb.” So stated the little framed print on the mantel at the lake house some kind people offered to our family for a weekend. “In the hills, neighbor is a verb.”
Stumbling upon a phrase like this is a real joy for an English major still looking for ways to put his education to use after all these years. Because grammar is what makes the phrase interesting. Grammar’s what gives the phrase its bite. It’s thrilling, really.
But consider this: When was the last time you used neighbor as a verb?
Neighboring isn’t something we do. Neighbors are things that we have. I rent an apartment or buy a house or pitch a tent on a campground, and I get neighbors. I’m here. Somebody’s there. We’re neighbors. In our world neighbor is a noun.
But it hasn’t always been so, at least not everywhere. A couple of years ago Bill McKibben wrote an essay that he subtitled “A Declaration of Dependence.” And in it he suggested that we’re the first people in human history whose day to day lives really wouldn’t be impacted if meteorites eliminated all of our neighbors one night. Now he doesn’t mean that we’re heartless. It would be a bummer if Mrs. Whats-her-name wasn’t there to wave as she picks up her paper each morning or if that strange guy two doors down wasn’t ever out cutting his grass. But nothing of substance in my life really depends on their lives at all.
The morning after the meteor shower I’d get in my very own car and go buy my very own food at the supermarket to fill my very own refrigerator. I’d turn on my very own television for my very own entertainment, or maybe give my very own friends a call on the telephone or send them an email or a text message which would find them just as easily if they happen to be in Timbuktu rather than right next door.
It seems that if we do need our neighbors we need them only in the way we need flower gardens and street lights. They make life in our houses more pleasant, but actually needing our neighbors just means we’re irresponsible, doesn’t it? If I have a proper job, insurance policy, and pension, my neighbor shouldn’t have to be bothered with my needing him. There’s nothing more American than independence, which means that in our lives, neighbor is probably just a noun.
But Bill McKibben wonders if forgetting how to need one another is the peculiar sickness of our time.
Now there weren’t any neighbors at all mentioned in the readings for the Feast of the Pentecost. So why did the preacher have to launch into this cheery little wondering about meteorites obliterating the rest of the block?
Well, we’re often taken with the pyrotechnics and special effects of Pentecost. The tongues of fire resting on the heads of the disciples, the sound like a rushing wind, the gift of speech in foreign languages. It’s all really cool stuff. But what we can miss is that the story isn’t just about the powers God gave to these people in Jerusalem. The story is about God’s Holy Spirit giving these people each another. A people spread out and foreign to one another was formed by God into a community who needed one another faith.
After the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in the year 70A.D.—and most scholars believe the book of Acts was written after this event—after the destruction of the temple, the Jewish feast of first fruits, or “Pentecost” became a celebration of the gift of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Cool things happen to the message bearer in that story too. Moses catches a glimpse of God’s glory, peeking out from his cleft in the rock, God speaks the sacred name “Yahweh”, and Moses lives to tell about it all.
But more than Moses’s personal encounter with the living God, it’s the gift of the Law itself that Pentecost celebrated. It was the gift of a covenant. The gift of a way of life with God and a way of life with each other. In the Torah, we might say, covenant is a verb. And it applies not just to the people in the houses nearby, but to the land, the livestock, the slaves, and the aliens.
Torah is a declaration of interdependence.
So the fact that it’s the feast of Pentecost that’s being celebrated when the Holy Spirit blows through in the second chapter of Acts is not to be ignored. It signals that this is a Sinai-like event. This Pentecost is a covenantal event. And covenants are useless to individuals.
God’s covenant with Israel established a community. And so did the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts. The gift of tongues wasn’t a divine party trick. The gift of tongues served a very particular purpose: Through this gift a disparate and disconnected people were given not just the presence of the Holy Spirit. They were given one another.
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia… and Luke’s list goes on. He names the places people came from, because that Pentecost in Jerusalem wasn’t a special hospitality day or diversity celebration in which the followers of Jesus were to be tolerant or inclusive enough to let a few strangers into their church. The day of Pentecost is the day the Christian Church was constituted. These foreigners weren’t welcomed by the church. These people were the church in its making, and the apostles with the flames above their heads were swept into membership in this community as much as anyone.
Pentecost, then, is Babel’s reversal. At the tower of Babel humanity was scattered, made alien from one another as the ability to communicate was taken away and clans and countries each learned their private languages and learned to have no need of each other. Pentecost is Babel’s undoing.
Both stories still ring powerfully true today. We now see that a community can become a Babel without even scattering. If we have no need of our neighbors, why try to understand them?
But the story of Pentecost also rings just as true. Communities can still learn to speak languages that have become foreign. The Spirit can still undo the scattering forces of our Babels. It’s happened right here.
Some of you were at Christ Church a decade ago. I wasn’t. But from the stories you tell, it seems that this parish was losing something. It was losing the language of children. It wasn’t through anyone ever pushing or wishing the children away from this place. But for some reason it seemed that many of them had scattered.
But Christ Church didn’t pretend not to need new life, and a Holy Spirit moved in a new way in this place, and something like a Pentecost began. Then five years ago Christ Church called a woman named Susan Payne to turn her attention and her gifts directly to ministry with children and their families. Because you understood that to not need children is the deadliest kind of independence.
So under Susan’s leadership we began to grow into a place that admitted its need for the ministry of children and young people. A place that couldn’t do without them. And as the children began to come, Susan helped us see that children aren’t the future of the church. Children are part of the present, part of the right now of the church. Right now we need their feet thumping around in Bowen Hall and padding down to Children’s chapel. Right now we need their voices singing these songs, reading the scriptures, asking their questions and sometimes just shouting out for joy right in the middle of church. Right now we need their hands carrying gifts to the table, torches to light the gospel, and crosses for the rest of us to follow. Right now we need the young and the old and the everyone in between to be the church.
We’ve still got more growing to do. But in giving these years near the end of her professional ministry to the formation of young people, Susan Payne helped us as a community remember. She helped us begin to remember how to speak and to hear the language of children again. And what once was scattered and foreign is being drawn in and made part of this community once more. That’s a Pentecostal experience.
In a few moments you will see some of these young people come forward and give Susan their gifts and their prayers and their blessing as she moves on and into a different phase of ministry. And perhaps it is the story of the return of these kids, and the miracle that we are slowly learning to speak and to hear the language of the young once again, perhaps this story is part of the good news that God would have us tell the world.
The forces of Babel are strong, making strangers even of neighbors. But so are the forces of Pentecost. So is the force of God’s Holy Spirit, still drawing people together against the odds, teaching us to speak the language of the person we need. Making the church that needful community which declares her interdependence clearly, and hasn’t forgotten that in God’s good kingdom, neighbor has always been a verb. Amen.