Unity in Diversity; Diversity in Unity
The Feast of Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit of God blows into our lives, breaking open the rigid constructs we hold to so tightly. We see that unity and diversity are not opposing realities; rather, they are held together within the deep flow of the Spirit. Our challenge continues to be to do our inner work so that we can be nimble and participate with the Spirit’s transforming work in the world.
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Transcript
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’m going to do it this way at this service.
Here’s one of my favorite prayers:
Come, Holy Spirit,
Fill the hearts of your faithful
And kindle in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created
And you shall renew the face of the earth.
That’s one of my favorite prayers. I try to say it most mornings whenever I wake up. Lisa has come downstairs to feed the cats and I’ll wake up.
And before my feet hit the floor, and definitely before I turn on any news, I try to take a few moments and lie there, and I say that prayer. And then I usually say the Venite which is Psalm 95, that we can find in our morning and evening prayer. And it’s a good way to start your day, right? To start it invoking the spirit to come into your life.
That prayer is based on Psalm 104, which is our Psalm for this morning. There are two lines in there that at some point someone took and translated into a prayer. I think I love the most ancient prayers the best, the ones that you can’t exactly track and figure out when they were written. And this is one of those. No one knows exactly when that prayer was written, it’s that old. They know it was included in a missal, a prayer book, a thousand years ago. But people used it prior to that. It’s just always been there.
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth.
It’s an invocation, which I always think, when we do classes for children and for all of those who are newer, and when we talk about all of the different types of prayer, invocation is always the one that makes me pause and ponder just a little bit and wonder: Are we really aware of what we’re doing in that moment when we’re invoking the Spirit to come into our lives and be present to us, when we’re opening our hearts and our souls to listen and to receive the guidance that the Spirit has? Are we aware of what we’re doing, and just what are we invoking? Just what spirit are we invoking?
And on this day, on the Feast of Pentecost, it gives us a chance to reflect on that, to ask ourselves just what is going on and what are we opening ourselves up to?
The story says in Acts that we read this morning, that they were gathered in that upper room, and it always helps to remind ourselves of who was actually in that room. The Blessed Mother was there. Mary was there. We don’t often note that, but Mary was there with the disciples and with others, and they were gathered there because it was 50 days after the Passover. That’s why they were gathered there. They had come in their grief and in their confusion and in their joy at Jesus being raised from the dead, all that they were feeling still. And they gathered to pray and be with each other in that upper room.
And in the midst of all of that, that they thought they had a wonderful meal planned, and then in blew the Spirit. The text says it was like both wind and fire blew in their midst and upset everything that they had planned. And then suddenly they found themselves speaking in different languages. And then a crowd gathered, the story goes, because the crowd wanted to know what was going on when something was happening, something unplanned, something that they had not encountered in that way.
And I love that line. I giggle every time I hear that line, that some of them sneered and said, “they’re drunk on new wine.” And I love the excuse that is given for why they are not: they’re not drunk, it’s only nine in the morning.
So that tells us there’s a lot going on in that moment. They have been shaken up. Their worldview has been broken into, to put it that way. And it already has had a ripple effect around them, with the crowd trying to figure out just what is going on.
It’s a fascinating story and it teaches us a lot. It teaches us both a lot about God and it teaches us a lot about ourselves. So I want to dig into just one or two things this morning and offer them and see if we can chew on them going forward.
One of the things that it teaches us is that we so often in our lives are pulled between an apparent dualism, between unity and diversity. And we see this playing out once more in our lives today, right? We see it played out. Camps form.
Camps form, and one camp emphasizes unity in the sense that there can only be one language, there’s one appropriate language. And you can go down that path and you have this sense of there can only be, or there is or should be, one contrived monoculture that best represents who we are. And it’s very clear who the “we” is.
That’s one camp, but on the other hand, there can be another camp, sometimes that asserts itself, and that camp looks like this free, unbounded expression without any attachment or grounding whatsoever in a common life. So that camp can form too, right? So you have this pull within us that we find ourselves, and ever has it been so, the sense of how we understand what it means to belong, what our deeper identity is, how we see ourselves as humans, as people in community. And that tension is always there between unity and diversity.
But what Pentecost teaches us is that that perceived dualism is an illusion. That the sense of being separate in that way actually has no substance, because it teaches us that something is going on underneath all of that, cutting through, breaking through the boundaries that we impose. We’re the ones who start to categorize and impose those boundaries, and the spirit blows like a mighty wind, like a rushing flame, and it breaks through those boundaries. And it shows us that within unity there is diversity, and within diversity or amongst it there is unity. And they’re held in tandem with each other.
We may not like the fact that God acts in diversity, but that is the truth of God’s nature. Look at the Psalm today and it gives us a sense of how God is at work. It says not only did God create all that there is, but he created Leviathan just for the sport of it, it says. Just to see if it could happen. God is a promoter of diversity. God celebrates diversity. And as we’ll hear next week on Trinity Sunday, there is diversity within God’s own being.
We don’t like that because we prefer to have things within a package, within a box that we can control. And so Pentecost Sunday teaches us this: that that sense of separation is an illusion, that all is held in God’s embrace. And somehow, somehow, the mystery of that is that we participate in that and live in that.
Here’s what it looks like in my own life. When I was in high school, my great, my great grandmother turned 84. I was very blessed to grow up, really, with both great grandmothers, one until I was nine and the other until I was 19. People in my family had babies really young. But we all met at my great grandmother’s house to celebrate her life, to be there for her.
And someone had the great idea to take a big roll of paper and tack it to her little clapboard house on the outside wall next to my great aunt Margie, Margie Bell—isn’t that a great name? So we tacked the paper up on the wall and someone started with a tree trunk. They drew a trunk of a tree, and then each family unit would come forward, with all of my great grandmother’s children drawing the first branches, and then their children, and their children.
And we all came up with markers, and we all wrote our own names onto our family tree. And when we stepped back and looked at that, there were 129 people all gathered in her lawn, with all of our names written on this tree. And the most incredible thing when I think about that, within that is, it holds a deep truth within the word family itself, because the word family can be both singular and plural.
It’s a quirky thing about that word. You can say appropriately, the family is, just as you can say the family are. Both those things are true. When you say the family is, you can emphasize the unity of the family, that the family itself has a certain identity. When you say the family are, you emphasize the diversity of the family. And in my family, I don’t know about yours, there is a lot of eccentricity. But within the word family itself lies a deep truth.
Sister Genevieve says paradox is key. We forget that more than one thing can be true at the same time. So the deep truth of Pentecost calls us to be aware of how God is at work in our lives, and also to be aware of what those tendencies are within ourselves, to want to gravitate toward only one of those poles.
So we are called to ask ourselves, what is it about me, what is it about us, that at this point, what is it about our nation’s life, what is it about our culture that emphasizes one of those over the other? Where is that coming from? Those are the deep spiritual muscles that we’re called to stretch and use, as we’ve been saying, and to identify, to be aware of ourselves, what our own deep work is.
Baptism gives us a chance to do that. If you look at the baptismal liturgy—sneak peek, we’re going to say the baptismal covenant together—and here are some words that we’re going to say. We’re going to ask the family and all of us gathered: Will you continue? And then we have a series of things that we ask, and listen to the verbs: sharing, persevering, repenting, proclaiming, seeking, serving, loving, striving, respecting. Our practice of faith is an active practice of faith.
It is not a practice of faith that allows us to become complacent, and it most definitely does not allow us just to be comforted. But it challenges us to ask ourselves, how are we being called to stretch and grow? And to do that, we invoke the spirit to be in our midst, and we dare to invoke that spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit,
Fill the hearts of your faithful
And kindle in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created
And you shall renew the face of the earth.
Amen