The Place Where the Spirit Erupts

"The call of beauty – of the sort of beauty that grips our sight to the point of sometimes closing our eyes shut – summons our voice to speak, that it may be heard within our voice as a call and therefore actually be seen. This voice, our own, the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world."
Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response

Pentecost is almost upon us. In my early years of ministry, this festival meant enduring the good intentions of a director of Christian education, who always arranged for a large pan cake to be baked for the occasion – “HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHURCH!” – though we never punctured it with the thousands of birthday candles needed for historical accuracy. Imagine trying to light such a multitude, an act the local fire marshal would have scorned. And the task of blowing them out would demand something akin to “the rush of a mighty wind [which] filled all the house” where the earliest followers of Jesus had gathered in the Acts account!

One year, this director organized a dozen doves to arrive in cages, and they coo-ed through the entire service until the benediction when we released them from their forced captivity. We all stood on the front lawn of the church and watched, spellbound, as these gentle birds rose like white streaks high into the sky before gladly escaping over the horizon. Most years, though, the sanctuary was filled with clusters of helium balloons, meant to be launched at the end of worship; of course, some inevitably escaped prematurely, to the evident delight of the children, rising to the ceiling of the sanctuary where they lingered awkwardly for a few days before slowly descending. We always had birthday banners and clowns and . . . well, you get the idea. Perhaps you’ve been an accomplice to such crimes of frivolity, too.

The up side of the giddy party atmosphere was the delight it brought to the children, whose faces shown with excitement and wonder that church could be fun. The down side was that, given the festivity of it all, the radical, dangerous, and even subversive nature of the church’s origin and mission was lost in clouds of confetti and the cavorting of clowns.

This is not to say that Pentecost should be a dreary day marked by ponderous sermons and humorless worship. But I wonder what might happen if we paused, as congregations gathered to celebrate this day, and considered how these ancient stories might call to us with an invitation of another sort. What would it mean to take seriously the witness from the ancient prophet Joel whose words Peter spoke among those gathered in Jerusalem for this Jewish festival, remembering God’s promise to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” such that the young shall see visions and the old dream dreams, an outpouring that led female and male slaves to prophesy that “the day of the Lord” had come? What would happen if we listened to the voice of the poor, the disenfranchised, speak to us of what justice requires in these times? How might we hear the visions of the young who are calling us to risk change for the sake of this and future generations, and the dreams of the old who warn against what they know of war’s reckless violence? Such pressing themes hardly lend themselves to the frivolity of birthday cakes and balloons, clowns and doves.

In fact, scientists among us who are reading the “signs” of these times are prophesying in their own way and with an equal solemnity, meaning to awaken us to the dire ecological threat we face – together with all living creatures and things sharing this vulnerable planet. In their own way, they bear witness to the psalmist’s refrain, “Thou hast made known to [us] the ways of life” (Ps. 16. 11, cited in Acts 2. 28). Theirs also is a voice responding to the call of beauty, in all its sanctity and vulnerability.

When Peter’s long sermon was finished, full as it was of warning and invitation, those who were listening asked of him and the apostles a simple question: “What shall we do?” Will we, too, gather to consider how to live faithful to this “call of beauty,” recognizing how our shared future with all living things calls us to see that we hold “all things in common” (Acts 2. 44)? How might this Pentecost be a day, in our churches, when we commit ourselves to heeding “the call of beauty” that rises from creation, which “summons our voice to speak” – to see visions, to dream, and to prophesy for the sake of future generations?

Balloons may awaken us to the delight we long to hear in children’s laughter, and the release of doves remind us of the freeing power of wind and spirit. But this Pentecost, cake and clowns alone will not do. Alongside celebration, the earth’s fragile and vulnerable beauty calls out to us, asking of us a different response than acts of frivolity. With those first followers of the risen Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, will we find that “the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world”? Will we see the church as the place of this eruption, heeding the Spirit’s call, and becoming Her voice? What shall we do?

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School