"As one blows into a flute ..." (a sermon for the Day of Pentecost, May 31, 2020)
In a newsletter article that I wrote a month or two ago, I mentioned how it was getting hard to know which day was which. Without the activities and routines that made one day different from the next, every day—and every day’s routine—was like the day before. And the day to come!
In that sense, I wrote, life was beginning to resemble what was happening to the character played by Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. Every day he work up was literally the same day: Groundhog Day. So, eventually, he needed to make the best of every day, which was always the same day.
Maybe that’s how you feel today! For instance, just like on Easter eight weeks ago, we’re still barricaded behind closed doors like the disciples themselves. And today we’re even reading and repeating at least a portion of the exact same passage we read eight weeks ago!
Has anything changed at all! Are we, like the character in Groundhog Day, locked in time, neither here nor there? Neither advancing nor retreating?
While I know—believe me, I know—that life seems that way right now, the good news is we are indeed in the midst of change. Of newness. And even of blessed and dramatic growth!
I say this because today is Pentecost (the red shirt day). Today we celebrate that God has now fulfilled what had been promised, first, by the prophets and, then, by Jesus. The promise that, just as had happened at the first moment of creation, so the day would come when God would bring about a new creation—just as in the first creation—by breathing life into all creation.
And that’s what we’re celebrating today! It may feel like every day is the same. This Sunday—the same as eight weeks ago on Easter—we are still barricaded and isolated behind closed doors. And we’re even reading a portion of the exact same gospel text as eight weeks ago. But, despite appearances, every day is not the same!
Today is Pentecost! Today we celebrate that God’s promises for all of creation are coming true! God is breathing new life into us, and we are full of life, and growth, and change!
But first things first! Last week I mentioned that we have two different accounts of the breathing—the pouring—out of God’s Spirit.
One was today’s first reading and the other was today’s gospel reading.
The account from the Book of Acts (today’s first reading) is the traditional description of the pouringor breathing out of God’s Spirit that came fifty days after Easter and ten days after Jesus ascended to the right hand of God.
This account forms the basis of what we’re doing today: celebrating the breathing or pouring out of God’s Spirit in a new and renewed moment of creation! By God’s grace, we are being made anew!
But, while the account in Acts dates this pouring and breathing out as being on Pentecost—and, hence, its celebration today—the account in the Gospel of John (also read today) dates it as happening immediately on Easter Sunday itself.
We talked about this last week. John—who loves to reframe or give a different perspective on stories already-familiar to Christians—suggests that Jesus couldn’t wait to pour out God’s Spirit by breathing on his disciples.
When we read this on Easter, this spoke poignantly and powerfully to us. Jesus’ disciples were just like us on Easter, locked and isolated behind closed doors.
Yet Jesus came to them and Jesus comes to us. Closed doors are not closed to the risen Lord Jesus. Hurray!
So, whichever way we date it, both the account in Acts and that in John are saying the same thing: God is now doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. Just as we cannot conceive or birth ourselves, God does for us what we could never do! God pours his breath on us to make us into new people.
We are now birthed by God into his children in an act of new creation.
And this is how that happens. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says. Receive it!
God gives it; we receive it!
But, I don’t know if you noticed it or not, the title of this message is, “As one blows into a flute …”
It’s time for me to explain what that means and what it says to us about the work of God’s Spirit in our lives.
In her commentary on the Gospel of John, scholar Jo-Ann Brant gave her own translation to the passage that, in our Bibles reads, “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this,” our translation says, Jesus “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit …’”
Based on her meticulous study of the Greek, Jo-Ann Brant translates the end of that passage as, “having said this, Jesus blew [as one blows into a flute] and he says to them, ‘Receive [the] Holy Spirit.’”
I love that! On Pentecost Jesus blows his Spirit on us “as one blows into a flute”!
Now, I’ve never played the flute (though I am married to someone who has!), but I know that the flute makes its sound, not by being blow into (like you might a recorder or even a kazoo). The flute makes its sweet music by blowing across it! The breath blows over the instrument. And, in the care of an expert blower, the flute resonates with the breath blown over it, making beautiful music.
There was an additional reading assigned for today that, for the sake of time and simplicity, we didn’t include. In First Corinthians 12, Paul writes, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit,” the same breath of God blown over us.
Paul then says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit—the breath of God—for the common good.” And then Paul gives examples of how God’s breath blown over different people yields the “beautiful music” of different spiritual gifts.
And, finally, that’s what today is all about. Like custom-made flutes, God has made each of his different, yet each is as beautiful and as capable of beautiful music as the next.
And that’s what it means, right now, to do as Jesus instructs. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says.
Receive it. Let it blow over you as you find your unique voice and gift to bring benefit and blessing to all.
"Receive the Holy Spirit.” In Jesus’ name. Amen!
