Feast of Pentecost
Ezekiel 37.1-14
Psalm 104.26-36
Acts 2.1-21
John 15.26-27; 16.4b-15
19 May 2024
©Suzanne Grimmett
“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”
Donald Miller, Blue like Jazz: Nonreligious thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Perhaps what we witness to on this Feast of Pentecost has more in common with the unpredictable, unfinished energy of jazz than with the careful symphonic orchestration of the next movement of the Church. On this day when the Spirit moves like rushing wind and tongues of flame, the theme song of love is played with daring improvisation as sons and daughters prophesy, young men see visions, and old men dream dreams. This has been the story of the Church down the ages as generation after generation has picked up the melody and extended it with the new instrumentation offered by their own unique context.
Choosing to follow Christ into the dance of God- Creator, Word and Spirit- is more about falling in love than making a considered decision. Love is something that happens to you, and those who down the ages joined in the dance have done so as they witness the melody of love being played out in the lives of others. In that moment of spiritual encounter, we may catch our breath in humility and wonder as we are brought face to face with ourselves, but also face to face with love itself, revealing truth about who we are, who God is, and what this life can become when it is part of the great dance. In movements of the Spirit, these two truths are revealed in counterpoint- that we are greatly beloved, and the music of life is not all about us.
Perhaps these might be truths that we can hold on to in times of change. It is ever so tempting in the life of the Church to look back with nostalgia and make of tradition an ossified relic that becomes an idol rather than a living way of wisdom and power in each generation. Sometimes we have equated a rigid moral code with Christian faith, preventing the development of new traditions and ethical language that will hold us in goodness and integrity. There is so much hunger today for spiritual traditions that proclaim and live a higher morality of love and justice. Our generation needs the witness of people who love God and love one another, not with pious platitudes or rigid rule adherence, but in Spirit and in truth. The world pays more attention to whether people of faith are living with compassion, justice, generosity, and integrity than in what these same people say they believe. Sometimes you need to see how someone acts when they truly love something before you can love it yourself.
The Feast of Pentecost should remind us that such new life follows Spirit. The first reading we heard today from the prophet Ezekiel should be a challenge to any individual and indeed, any part of God’s Church, who has ever felt that life is done for them, that their heart will never quicken again with joy, or that the future could never be better than the past.
“Can these bones live?”
God speaks to the prophet at a time when the people of Israel are suffering a death of spirit and hope, living as exiles in a foreign land. No temple for worship, their leaders killed or imprisoned and the horror of violent acts against their families compounding a hopeless fear that the soul of the people had died. There is violence that is physical, but there is also violence against the spirit that can leave a people stuck, unable to see where or how life may emerge again. There are sadly numerous contexts of people around the globe today and in our own country where colonising violence in different forms has done terrible harm to the spirit of women, men, and children.
Ezekiel gives his people a vision of life that is against all evidence to the contrary- their people, their faith, their nation all seem to lie as dry bones in a valley where there is only death. The prophet reminds us of what a prophet does- speaks a word of life and truth. That flesh and breath can return to the people is through two things- the word of the prophet prompted by God and the breath- (Hebrew) ruach -Spirit. The people do not have to try to conjure life and hope through their own effort or will or works, but rather they receive life, imagined in the words of the prophet and breathed into them by the Spirit. The bones spring to life with a rattling of bone upon bone, rising to be covered in flesh and sinew and skin and shocked into life by the very breath of God. It is such a graphic visual image that the prophet gives us, and one that we can carry with us into our own lives and situations.
This image can speak to any moment where it feels like where there had once been life, there now is only strain and hard work; a sense of being dried out or dried up, stretched too thin or feeling that no matter how hard we work, the energy has gone. Perhaps the deadness has crept in because there has simply been no love. Perhaps our anxieties have got in the way of hearing an imaginative vision and the whisper of possibility. In many parts of the Christian church there is this sense of the social and spiritual landscape having shifted and a need to be reinvigorated by a fresh wind of the Spirit. As we look at the challenges faced by all of God’s people in the Church today, we might find ourselves asking the same question as Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?”
The good news is that Christianity has never been about believing the ‘right things’ but always and ever about life. Prophetic voices today speak the word of faith that enfleshes the bones of tradition and incarnates a way of forgiveness, belonging and hope for all people. We are to be nothing less than temples of Spirit, people inspired daily to be about the way of Jesus, loving our neighbours, caring for the poor, and liberating the oppressed.
Donald Miller is not the only one who has used jazz metaphors to describe life in the Spirit. In reflecting on modernity’s pervasive image of God as a kind of micromanager of human morality that keeps us in a dynamic of fear and punishment, Richard Holloway suggests the more life-giving image of;
…a jazz session that constantly makes new music by listening to what’s happening around it and applying the best of what is left of the tradition to the current context. The genius of improvisation seems to be a better metaphor for actual human moral experience than struggling to apply a single text to every situation. God invites us to join in the music, to listen and adapt to one another, to keep the melody flowing.[1]
And what is this melody? The melody is life and it is love. It is heard thrumming in the Spirit who was there, brooding over the waters of creation, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and leaping like fire between the people of God on the day of Pentecost. It is played by all who have been wholly captivated by the Spirit of Christ until gently, perhaps slowly, their lives are transformed and they become a witness of love to the Church and to the world. Instead of being passive subjects of a distant god whose threatening presence is known in a myriad “thou shalt nots”, the Spirit makes us active agents, responsible for our moral choices and the shaping of our communal life. Thanks be to God, this same Spirit pours upon us a grace so abundant that those who know it intimately can do nothing else but turn and offer that same liberating grace generously to others. The melody is passed from one to another, in soaring refrains of variety and beauty.
So may the music of our lives invite others to fall in love with what we love. And may the liberating Spirit of truth and life fill us all this day with new visions, new dreams, new hope.
+Amen
[1] Richard Holloway, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics, Canongate Books, Edinburgh (1999) pp33-34