Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The Feast of the Pentecost,
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

She was a serious Episcopalian in her thirties in the hospital giving birth to her first child. When she had first become an Episcopalian, she had learned about how Anglicans approach things—how they think about what has authority in their lives. She learned that Episcopalians pay attention to Scripture, tradition and reason. (She loved the part about reason.) She had her own Prayer Book and had even brought it with her to the hospital.

She and her husband had been in the labor room for a long time. They had decided on natural childbirth and were practicing the breathing techniques that were supposed to help you focus and ride the waves of the contractions.

The clock on the wall ticked. Time passed. Minutes turned to hours and the contractions came and went, growing more intense. The doctor came in, did an exam and it was off to the delivery room to push. After four pushes, the baby came forth with a gush.

It was at that moment that she cried out and uttered words that shocked her. They were words she certainly did not remember ever hearing in any Episcopal Church she knew. They were words she had never heard coming her own lips.

“Praise the Lord!” she shouted in a loud, rapturous voice. “Praise the Lord!”

Today we remember another kind of birth accompanied by ecstatic, uncontrolled utterances. Today is the birth of the church—a time when, according to Scripture, a small group of dispirited individuals were transformed into a new community with a fire in the belly that came from on high after the Ascension Day departure of the one they had looked to for inspiration and support.

Luke describes the scene like this: the disciples and others are together in one place when a sound like the rush of a violent wind comes upon them and fills the entire house. Within this experience, what appear to be tongues of fire come and rest on each, and each begins to speak in a different tongue about the mighty and saving acts of God in Christ. These words and these acts are then understood by a group of devout Jews from every nation who speak the languages that are being uttered.

And so the birth of the church is about a people being given a new identity and a new ability to proclaim the saving acts of God in Christ in a way that is more accessible to others.

Out of this comes an astonishing numerical growth and a vital common Christian life anchored in the sharing of meals in joy, the practice of sacrificial generosity with one another, the healing of the sick and when necessary, the willingness for leaders to go to prison as a result of spreading the word.

“Praise the Lord!” the Episcopal woman said, much to her embarrassment as her new baby came into the world. “Praise the Lord!” she shouted as a new spirit overtook her just as she was receiving a new identity.

In a few minutes, we will baptize Iris Kiran Hochwalt and “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and she will receive a new identity. We do not know yet if she, like the Episcopal woman or like the disciples and the others present at the Pentecost event, will cry out in an ecstatic and uncontrolled utterance as this happens to her.

But whether she does or not, the same Holy Spirit that came upon the disciples to bind them together into a spirited community, the same Holy Spirit that excited the tongue of an entirely reasonable Episcopalian as she was giving birth, will come upon Iris and upon all of us as we are bound together in God.

For that is one of the many things that the Holy Spirit does—she comes upon us at times when a new identity is being conferred. She pours herself out upon us or flames up within us like fire, she rushes around us like the wind, making us feel disoriented and chaotic.

But within that disorientation, we can trust that she is also working on our transformation. She is weaving and knitting and binding us to one another in God until we are all a part of a new and unified body that can do marvelous things, a new and unified body like some kind of wonderful patchwork quilt made and remade to expand and include this person, these people, this group as it grows.

And, of course, this is where the work is and continues to be. For there is always a stretching and a readjustment that comes in the newness, always an entirely new creation when one new person is added or subtracted. This is something that the new Episcopalian mother would discover. This is something that John and Nisha have surely discovered.

The Spirit’s binding us to each other and the new identity we receive in this is ecstasy---word-defying and heart-warming. But it is also a lifetime’s labor in love. We celebrate both these dimensions this morning as we baptize Iris and as we remember our own baptisms.

But even this is not broad enough, for today is Pentecost, the birth not just of the Episcopal Church but of the Church, a church made up of many traditions, a church made up of the living and the dead. And so as we pour the water over Iris’s head in a few moments and as we feel the cool water of the Asperges upon us, let us remember the massive patchwork quilt woven and rewoven by the Holy Spirit of which we are a part, a quilt made up of countless individuals and traditions and made up of the living and the dead, who have all been given a new identity in baptism and who have engaged and are engaged in a lifetime’s labor in love by being in relation to us and by being a church that is for the world.

It’s a crazy quilt similar to one I bought last summer in Maine. That quilt was made of twenty different red fabrics, all woven together in an abstract pattern, with no two pieces alike. Our church is like that—red because the Spirit who brings new identity comes to us like fire, bringing with her the ecstasy of new life—and in an odd, unfinished-looking abstract pattern, because we have ever been odd and we are never finished—but big and generous enough to warm the places in the world that might be cold and to bring beauty and joy to those who need it.

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

AMEN