Flammable
Acts 2:1-21

May 15, 2005

A thought has nagged me in recent years, though I confess to have done little to investigate it: do Pentecostals celebrate Pentecost Sunday in any special way? Christmas and Easter, despite the pageantry and their significance, can’t hold a candle to Pentecost in its technicolour possibilities. Tongues of flame, impassioned preaching in obscure, exotic sounding languages, yes, a drunken spirit pervading, intoxicated with God.

We note, almost academically, that it is the birthday of the Christian Church and turn to the next hymn. The English still call it Whitsunday when baptisms were the high occasions and the candidates came dressed in white robes - and you know how fast those English can speak, swallowing the final ‘e’. No colour red for us on this day; that would be too ... red.

No rolling in these aisles, either, no stamping of feet and seldom clapping of hands, only a few well-modulated Amens. No one really gives out a down-to-earth and up-to-heaven shout here. Are we missing something? Do we get the point? Should Pentecost bother with us?

The Pentecost we have read about today was one of those busy days when everybody was busy doing something else. This was far from the first Pentecost for it was, on one hand, a festival celebrating the first grain harvest 50 days after Passover. It had also become, on the other hand, a time when the Jews observed the event of the giving of the law on Sinai and thus the formation of a diverse group of Egyptian slaves into the people of Israel. For Christians Pentecost is this one day, the 50th day after Easter, when a diverse group of Galilean and other disciples congealed into the people of Christ’s Church as a consequence of receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Our religious problem, across denominations and across faith traditions, is that we have a very human tendency to reduce certain critical events down to a one-dimensional phenomenon. We prefer not to supersize it, but to make it our size, for easier handling, of course. Pentecost has been lower common denominatored down to a festival of ASCs - Altered States of Consciousness.

That is a relatively new acronym, so don’t worry, you are not that much out of touch. Every culture, every religion has ASCs filling an important role, perhaps minor at times, major at others. The Old Testament is full of them: David’s dancing before the Lord, Elijah’s ecstatic campaigns, Isaiah’s vision of God enthroned in heaven, the whole book of Revelation, the Apocalypse. Other societies have their versions: shamans and medicine men, voodoo and fire walkers, Hasidic Jews and Sufi Muslims, the contemplative mystics of medieval Catholicism, peyote and LSD-induced visions.

John Pilch lists three stages in an ASC that have been identified. First, the person sees various colours, mostly white, taking on certain geometric shapes. Second, the person tries to make sense of these patterns he is seeing in his brain. Third, the brain stops associating in its normal ways and produces all sorts of confusing images. The visionary usually attempts to retranslate these images back into the language and images of the normal world he or she shares with others, but what was going on in his brain can seldom be interpreted in a way that makes complete normal cognitive sense.

Here is one of the most famous incidences of ASC: a group of unsuspecting, yet anticipating apostles and disciples are overwhelmed by the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit and they speak in foreign tongues to the diverse crowd around them. Glossolalia is found in almost every culture - patterned, noncommunicative speech. That is, gibberish that sounds like it means something and it does mean something to those with the complimentary gift of interpreting such speech of the angels.

Many a faith tradition has honoured such individuals who exhibit these ASCs as mediums for God, a little less than God, it can be said. Those who do not experience such visions and ecstatic behaviour are perceived at best as dull spirits, people who barely know who God is. We prefer white to red.

Still, if we speak in the tongues of angels but don’t say a word tomorrow, if God possesses us and compels us to behave in a superhuman way on Pentecost Sunday but we do not help anyone on Monday, is that all the Holy Spirit does? To experience the presence of God for a time, to get a spiritual high for a day, I do not believe advances the Gospel very far at all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these experiences, and certainly most of us do gather at this hour to feel the joy and power of the God who brings all things into being. It’s just that such experiences are not the ultimate definition of the way the Holy Spirit acts and effects our lives. Being Pentecostal limits sadly the possibilities of the Spirit.

For we bland souls who sit still in our seats, preferring milky white to flammable red, the Spirit still moves us in mysterious and immensely powerful ways. Quieter ways, but the Spirit will be still be moving you and me on Monday and the following Monday. That’s because the Spirit electrifies your imagination.

Imaginations are seldom noisy, but when they are ignited and you see connections between previously unrelated things, and you can see how something and someone can benefit from these connections, then your heart and soul and mind and strength are suddenly on fire. All this formalized talk about being “born again” in so many churches is frivolous, irrelevant chattering compared to the little inspirations and visions of a different way of perceiving the world. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul haunts us, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” A spark of imagination in even the most unassuming person can renew the world.

The Saskatchewan Centennial forces us to think back 100 years and what kind of imagination did people possess to live in a really flat province with bitterly cold winters? I think that Centennial public spot on the radio shows wonderful imagination in recognizing that the benefit of such a flat cold place is “really great ice.” We do not need the NHL with thoughts like that.

This year has produced a spate of books about what went on in 1905 in the grey boring environment of a patent clerk’s office in Zurich, Switzerland. A lowly clerk slaving away at a dreary exercise of paper-pushing, a petty bureaucrat if there ever was one, began to imagine one thing after another. Several of the current books about that patent office offer the opinion that this clerk’s isolation from academia kept his mind open to a different way of conceiving the world, that the deadly repetitiveness, almost mindlessness of his work allowed his mind to wander and live freely for hours on end, and over time his imagination gripped his mind so that he saw the universe in a way no one had ever seen it before.

He wrote in quick succession four papers and submitted them to professional journals, and his imagination startled the world. Professors pilgrimaged to the patent office in Zurich to talk to the 26-year-old Albert Einstein, and the study of physics and indeed our world has never been the same. Oh yes, Albert was Jewish and that was a problem for universities and professional societies and journals and eventually for governments, but it was no problem for his imagination, nor for the truth. The Spirit of God does not check the denominational tag on a person’s soul when it puts your imagination on fire with ideas that don’t go away once Pentecost is over.

The apostles did not know when or how the Spirit was going to arrive. The harvest festival of Pentecost was not that special an occasion. But they knew it was coming soon and lived in a state of anxious anticipation. If you and I aren’t anticipating anything to happen, we’ll probably miss or ignore what does happen.

It’s all right to clap thunderously, it’s OK to shout a loud Amen, it’s not out of place to feel overcome by the love of God and find yourself slain in the Spirit. But when you begin to imagine ideas and plans and worlds that alter this dreary sinful world in even the smallest of ways, then Pentecost is firing us up again.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan