Whitsunday (The Day of Pentecost)

“And there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them”

An English poet of the mid-20th century once wrote:

There must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine.

Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair?
We walk blind and we try to see
Falling behind in what could be

Now if those words sound familiar to you it’s not because you read them in your high school English textbook, but because they’re the lyrics of the 1986 song Bring me a Higher Love by Steve Winwood, a song which goes on to repeat many times as the chorus, “Bring me a higher love…where’s that higher love that I keep thinking of?”

Now it’s possible that Steve Winwood was singing about the desire for a better love than his past loves to enter his life, that is, better human love – a better girlfriend, a better relationship, something more meaningful. Or – I like to think – he was expressing the deep desire of our often disordered human hearts that we be filled with a love higher and greater than our own, a love that is not our own and that can transform.

We’ve talked at length since the beginning of lent about the fact that we all lack. That we are all here in this place today, for example, because we’re finding something here that we can’t find out there. Our wanting hearts are meeting some fulfillment here in this place and through this faith, it is giving us something that we’ve looked for but found nowhere else. That the world and its ways, the kinds of love that we find expressed out there, the values we see being lived out leave something to be desired. We are here, in part, because we – like Steve – are looking for a higher love.

But we’re already a bit hamstringed when we talk about love because of the weakness of our language. I took a class in university on the Russian writer Dostoevsky, and I remember sitting in class as the professor read a passage to us in English directly from the Russian text, and he came to a part where the main character took a sip from the top of his glass when it had been filled too much. Every English translation renders the verse, “he sipped from the top of the glass,” but the professor explained how impoverished we were for not reading Russian because the word used to describe that action was a homonym for another word that had to do with priests officiating at funerals. To a Russian reader the verse was full of meaning and a foreshadowing of the character’s death; to us, the character just sipped from the top.

Love is similar. It’s something for which we really only have one word with which we try to describe many different things. One might say they love their spouse and they love to golf, but we know (hope) not in the same way or to the same degree. In the Scriptures there’s various kinds of love – there’s philial love, friendship love, love not based on romance or physical attraction but something else. There’s eros, the love that drives people to do silly things when you’re in love, that makes us think only about the person we love so that we forget everything else. Eros can be good, but it can also be dangerous.

And then there’s agape love. The love of God, the love that governs God’s kingdom. The love that drives our praying for others, our feeding others, our sharing the good news of Jesus with others, our forgiving others. When Jesus, hanging on the cross, forgives those who drove the nails – that is agape love at work. This is the love Jesus demonstrates in the Gospels – drawing near to sick, the Caananite or Samaritan woman, the poor and unclean, to us.

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, fifty days since Jesus rose from the dead, ten days after his ascension, and the day on which he promised to send the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

The Lesson today from Acts describes that moment when the disciples were together and suddenly overcome by wind and fire that seemed to rest on their heads as they began to talk in languages that weren’t theirs. Such a commotion it caused that all kinds of others gathered around them and heard them speaking in their own language, no matter what it was. A kind of inversion of the story of the tower of babel when man pridefully builds a tower to reach heaven, but God scatters and confuses them by causing them to speak different languages. Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, brings a kind of clarification - our former confusions are fading away as we receive God’s spirit into us, our confusions fade because we are being transformed.

So much of what Lent and Eastertide, the Ascension season hopes to bring us to is to recognize more deeply that we need a saviour at all. We like to call Jesus the saviour, but we like a lot less to recognize that we need saving, that we don’t got it. And while it’s one thing to say it, to really believe it and to know it requires that we be changed, that whatever loves we might have in ourselves – the love of self, of possessions, or power – die, so that a new, higher, and better love can find a home.

The Feast of Pentecost is not a festival of the Holy Spirit, but a festival of the descent of the Holy Spirit. We’re not celebrating the Holy Spirit; we’re celebrating that the spirit now lives in us. This spirit was always there, it was the spirit in Genesis that hovered over the face of the water, and at other times before it came calmy, but now it breaks in with a rushing wind. Something new is happening, something different. St. Cyril of Jerusalem says that the spirit came as saving fire, not to burn the ones who receive it, but to consume the thorns within our hearts. Not to burn or blacken us, but to purify and give lustre to our souls like gold in a furnace.

Our receiving this gift, the comforter, gives us grace to grow and the chance to be transformed in every way. Not the spirit that grows within us, but we who grow with the spirit within us. We grow into the God’s spirit that lives in us, the spirit that becomes the wellspring of life and faith in our minds and in our hearts, the spirit that allows the thorns to be burned so that the soil of our hearts may bear fruit.

But to go back to Steve Winwood, this demands of us the recognition that without this love in us we cannot love as we ought. All of our loves, our charity and our thoughts will be wanting, always inclined to ourselves and our desires, and not God’s, always disordered. At Pentecost the Spirit comes to bring order to our hearts, to show us, teach us, and fill us with that higher love that we – with Steve – have always longed for.

Last week Rev’d Ned taught us that the Ascension is really the fulfillment of the resurrection, that the work of the cross and the empty grave wasn’t quite done until Jesus ascended, and today the crown is placed atop it all, the final seal stamped on the work, and this week the whole cycle of the story of our salvation that we’ve been engaged in since Advent 1 comes to a close.

The spirit is given, we are filled, and now we give ourselves to the transformation that it makes possible. This whole stretch of time since Advent work together, in perfect harmony, to show that what began with Jesus’ coming down to us at his birth is fulfilled finally in us in God’s coming down to live forever in us as his spirt, so that we may one day be drawn back up into His glorious life. As the great 16th century poet, George Herbert, wrote:

 Listen sweet Dove unto my song, 
And spread thy golden wings in me; 
Hatching my tender heart so long, 
Till it get wing, and flie away with thee.