By Jim Perkinson, a homily for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI (May 28, 2023)

So, Pentecost!  We will begin deep in the weeds.  Literally.  “Pente-cost”—in Greek, the 50^th day!  But 50^th day after what?  After Passover.  But why 50?  Well, 49 + 1.  Huh?  We scratch our heads.  But of course, the early Christians, though working in the language of the Greeks—pentekoste—are translating practice and memory of the Hebrews.  So hard this biblical faithfulness business—plunges us straight into serious cross-cultural labors and mistakes.  Such a big history of mistakes!  More on that later.  But the Hebrews! They didn’t call it Pentecost, but Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks.  7 weeks after Passover, but with the counting starting on the 2^nd day of Passover—so 49 + 1. 

Ok—but then, what anchors Passover, when does it begin?  Ah, now we’re getting down to it, yes, getting down, “gettin’ down,” heavy on the down beat!  But what is down?  What direction?  There—pointing to your feet?  Yes, but what is down there?  A tile floor, you say?  And under that?  Wood floor joists?  And under that?  Pipes?  Yes, yes, and a basement and then cement.  And, and . . . But finally, even in the city, we get to it.  Earth.  What all of life stands on and grows in.  The big assumption.  The Big Momma we take for granted again and again! 

What anchors Pentecost is the Earth.  Land.  Specifically, in Palestine, land undergoing the season of spring, giving rise first of all to barley and its harvest, around the 16^th of the Hebrew month of Nissan—which is to say mid-springtime and the start of Passover.  And that begins the counting, 1, 2, 3 . . . 48, 49, 50!  And then we are at the wheat harvest.  So, Passover is literally grounded in the ancient barley harvest and Pentecost/Shavuot in the wheat harvest 49 + 1 days later.  And barley and wheat are both actually weeds. Ha!

And of course, all kinds of 7 x7 memory is also codified up in there as Pentecost is part of the “Schoolhouse of 7s,” marking Israel’s entire sense of Time and thus history, rooted in her post-slavery, wilderness-wandering and -training and -initiation days, during which she is being taught and nurtured by . . . what?  Likely Aphids, pooping out 130% their body weight every hour that “falls” from the “sky”—from say 15-25 feet up on the tamarisk limbs where they are dining on the leaves and then defecating the surplus.  It is called “man” in Arabic; “manna” in ancient Hebrew.  And it puddles on the dry ground and can be scooped up and baked into honey loaves that are a strong carbohydrate and will keep you alive in that desert environment until you can find an oasis of water and some other kinds of nurture—as Arab Bedouin folk do today. 

And they are told—as the primal commandment even before the revered 10 big ones given on Sinai later on—to only gather enough for 1 day at a time and then every 6^th day, enough for 2 days and not an iota more.  And rest.  Do nothing altering the Earth that day.  Thus, the marking out of the 7^th day as a time of “re-wilding,” of returning everything including humans to their natural condition. 

And that practice of an every 7^th day returning of everything to its innate wildness, then is elaborated in the 7^th-week-marking-of-time after Passover with the Pentecost celebration, and then the 7^th-month-celebration of Sukkot in the fall, and then the Sabbath-Year-release-of-debts and letting land lie fallow and animals not work and humans revert back to hunting and gathering that is to be observed every 7^th year, and then the 7 x 7 Jubilee Year tacked onto that particular 7^th year Sabbath, which is a kind of “generational” time frame. 

So, an entire elaborate framework of 7s, all geared toward keeping people awake and alive to the fact that the real nurturer and healer and teacher on this planet is Earth, is Wild Nature Herself.  That “regime of 7s” was what was to shape the people of Israel into a People of God.  Though only practiced in a partial and spotty fashion—it nonetheless remained central to the understanding.  In the books of Jeremiah and Daniel and the Chronicles, the Babylonian Exile is actually explained as, at the deepest level, an act of the Land itself in reclaiming all of the Sabbath Year releases it had been promised but never granted.  So, Israel did not return from exile until after 49 years. 

But back to Pentecost.  What also happens with the 3 main Pilgrimage celebrations of Israel—the Feast of Passover, the Feast of Pentecost (or Shavuot), and the Feast of Booths (or Sukkot) is that they each get correlated with historical events in the life of Israel when Israel went renegade as Bedouin nomads: Passover was linked with the Exodus from Egypt; Pentecost with the giving of the Law (or Torah) on Mt. Sinai in the desert; and Sukkot with 40 years of wandering in the Wilderness. 

So, the founding events of this new community on which all of Christianity supposedly models itself, involved engaging in a concerted and dangerous slave-revolt/walkout from the Egyptian city-state system and 40-year initiation into a regime of being de-programmed continuously from that imperial shaping and re-programmed in wildlands living by means of herd-animal-nomadism while gathering undomesticated fruits and insect offerings and rain-gifts of water. 

And all of that mediated by this meeting at a taboo mountain, shrouded in storm cloud and thunder and lightning, that “incarnated” Israel’s first ever encounter with the Divine Mystery that she would embrace under the name “YHWH.”  YHWH as a Thunder-Storm!  Deep stuff!  An ancient agricultural harvest fest spliced into a pastoral nomad practice of learning the land through herd animals as what Spirit-Coming really points to. 

And then we come to the Book of Acts version.  And the big question here is Who and What initiates the event and what happens?  Last week the scripture was about Jesus’ Ascension and this week it is the Pentecost visitation that commands attention.  The body “going up” to the right hand of God and the Spirit coming down on the tongues of followers. 

But as I prepared what to say today, sitting on my living room couch a few days ago, I was struck with what I have never heard from any of us giving personal testimony here at St. Peter’s.  I have never heard anyone say they were adopted by a cloud—as Jesus was in his ascension: a Cloud gathered him up, says Luke! Read it!  Or accosted by a violent Wind or had their heads enveloped in something like St. Elmo’s Fire, as Acts 2 says.  Or that like a woman going into labor, they broke Water as they prayed for guidance and help, as John 7 narrates.  The Big Actor in every one of these texts is not human but an Elemental Power of Nature identified as Spirit or Divinity!  And we read right over it!  I wonder why? 

The biblical language is all wild and natural and elemental—big forces, at work everywhere in the created order, that come forth as spiritual power. While our language is all personal and subjective and individual—I felt this and I felt that and I felt the other thing.  It is very striking to me.  

And I am part of the picture right alongside the rest of you.  I think “Pentecost” and I think “Baptism in the Spirit” and “speaking in tongues”—something that I first experienced in December of 1970 at a Catholic charismatic prayer meeting in Dayton, Ohio, and has been part of my spiritual life ever since.  My own personal experience of what could actually be understood as a form of African possession cult spirituality that broke open inside Christianity on April 9, 1906 at a house on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles destined to become known as the Azuza Street revival led by various African American converts to Christianity giving birth to modern day “Pentecostalism”!  Powerfully renewing! 

But now today, powerfully threatening and perverse as it leaves any remnant of African village practice behind and becomes increasingly wedded to right wing fascism around the globe, and today bans books while licensing the killing of children in our country.  Modern day “Pentecostalism.”

And here is the problem.  We have reduced Jesus—and life in general much less humanity and “spirituality”—to something very much smaller than the biblical vision or African village religion offers.  We have reduced the Spirit to our own cultural narcissism, so that it is primarily about healing our own individual trauma and securing a privatized conduit to heaven for our prayers here-and-now, and for our souls at death—the rest of the world and history and nature be dammed! 

And to the degree we cooperate in that reduction—it is we who are dammed—not just in relationship to heaven, but in the very concrete sense in which we have been damming most of the world’s rivers for centuries now—58,000 dams in operation on the planet today—and only lately are we discovering that in doing so, we are destroying eco-systems left and right, gutting fish stock, drying up most of the world’s major rivers, beginning to eclipse fresh water from the planet’s surface such that one half of our species will not have access to drinking water by 2025, as well as messing with the waters that make up more than 60 % of our own human bodies.  Biblically, rivers incarnate Spirit!

The image in John—ventriloquizing Is 55:1-2, 10-12—suggests the primary reality of Spirit is actually what happens continuously as Storm Clouds hit Mountains, drop Rain, become Streams, coalesce into Rivers, and make their way back to the Big Momma Womb of Life on the Earth which is that Salt Water Woman we call “Ocean” who covers 71 % of the planet’s surface. (Indeed, the bible is constantly indicating the Spirit is “poured”).   And a woman “breaking water”—which is exactly what the John-image is camped out on, which literally says in gender-bending Greek, “Let anyone who is thirsty come and drink; out of “his” womb will flow rivers of Living Water—that human birth process is a small “Anthropocene” version of the real Living-Water-gifting that is on-going, all over the earth, all of the time. 

The word Spirit itself in Hebrew is ruah which means Air, Wind, Breath and is constantly hooked up with Water and Cloud and Storm and Lightning and thus Fire in the biblical witness.  Stirring a human heart and provoking a new liberation of the tongue in glossolalia or tongues-speaking is a minor side-effect of the real deal. 

Thomas Berry—Roman Catholic priest-philosopher who died in 2009 after writing provocatively and profoundly about eco-theology, and the climate emergency we were/are headed into, in his book Dream of the Earth offered this diagnosis:

The confusion and insecurity that we presently experience originated, to a large extent, in the 14^th century when Europe experienced the plague known as the Black Death . . . [and out of that came] two directions of development—one toward religious redemption out of the tragic world, the other toward greater control of the physical world to escape its pain and to increase its utility to human society.  From these two tendencies the two dominant cultural communities of recent centuries were formed: the believing religious community and the secular community with its new scientific knowledge and its industrial powers of exploiting the natural world (Berry, 125, emphasis JP). 

The result within Christianity (and especially Protestant Christianity) was an intensification of faith experience as concerned almost exclusively with Redemption rather than Creation.  Lost in the process was any recognition of the revelatory import of the natural world and any theological curiosity about the Created Order.  And in its “American” version, writes Berry, Christianity was reduced to an intensive [trance-like] preoccupation with the personality of the Savior, with the interior spiritual life of the believer, and with the human community alone and with its salvific deliverance out of the mess we have made, as the only focus worthy of faith (Berry, 126).  All of us in this congregation are the inheritors of that spiritual reduction and the experiential narrowing it has engendered. 

And it continues apace, as now even merely human-to-human relations—much less relations with clouds, waters, winds, and fire—is more and more a matter of a 3” x 6” screen controlled by an individual hand, yielding privatized data and privatized profit to big-tech corporations with every single key stroke.  “Life” is now a pixel decided by an algorithmic profile under control of a pirate! But even there, in the most draconian miniaturization imaginable, it is still ruled by elemental entities such as electricity and metals and minerals and plastic—more than 1,000 of them in every single selfie-phone out there—and every one of them shaped by fire, and water, and air, and earth!

So, what am I saying and what to do?  For Israel, the Spirit’s coming was fundamentally about a renewal of relations not just with other life forms, but with the elements themselves.  

Spirit as Wind, Spirit as Water, Spirit as Cloud, Spirit as Fire, Spirit as Earth!  And of course, Indigenous folk have always known such and known how to interact with such!  As did, indeed, the Wise Women of ancient Europe—before the Church decided to steal their lands and vacate their knowledge, by labeling them witches and burning them alive! 

One day when I was eight, while clearing a lot my parents had just bought on a backwoods lake in Kentucky 40 miles south of Cincinnati where I grew up, I inadvertently walked barefoot onto the gray ashes of a fire I was tending.  And yelping in pain, made a beeline for the lake nearby, into which I plunged my sizzling feet.  My mom had heard and seen the beeline and called me immediately up to the cabin. By the time I got there, some 50 yards up the hill from the lake, I had second degree burns blistering up across the bottoms of both feet, had to be rushed to a country doctor nearby, greased up and foot-wrapped.  Could hardly walk for days, was scheduled to go to a boy’s camp on the Ohio River that following week, and went, but was slowed in my activities and movements, and then surprisingly, won a swimming contest there, not by trying to, but merely by doing what was in front of me to do to be part of my group in spite of my limping feet, and “winning” by happenstance, and then was carted away from the pool on the shoulders of some of the other guys in my cabin. 

It taught me a lesson I am still learning—how to live and move and have my being within myself, not pretending to be something I am not, accepting my own limitations (such as burns), and going with my own flow whether it “wins” something or not.  And let Chance and the Universe and Spirit, do the rest. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but those flames and their cinders “initiated” me in a manner of speaking and taught me something about my own energies that is still unfolding.  In spite of the pain, I have loved Fire ever since; “have” it, along with Earth, as part of my Taurus zodiac sign; and have at times been likened to such in terms of the intensity of my passions once I am interested in something.  I am partially Fire—not in some dramatic heroic sense, or some woo-woo New Age conjuration, but just prosaically, in an ordinary but real manner, metabolizing life in my own inner forge—complete with gaseous by-products, as my wife can tell you—and learning from this ancient Creature, oldest “thing” we know of in the universe short of the Great Mysterious, Black, apparently Infinite Expanse of Space Herself, the Real Big Momma of us all, whose first offspring was what condensed and sparked and then flamed into a Big Bang explosion of utterly astonishing motion and creativity that is still racing outward at increasing speeds even now after 13.8 billion years! 

So yes—Pentecost!  The coming of the Spirit!  Wind! Fire! Cloud! Water! Earth!  Do you see Her?  Can you birth Her!  Do you know you have been birthed by Her?  And if so, how, now, will you honor Her?   Honor Fire?  Honor Wind?  Its not too late.  Our ancestors knew how to do such! 

Ah, but we’d rather have the Spirit as a privatized bell boy, answering to our individual summons and concerned only for us humans.  Soon enough—that Spirit, that Pentecostalism, will likely insist it is “supreme” as “evangelical” and “nationalist,” and commandeer Washington, D.C. and proclaim the entire country “Christian” and the only legitimate “rights” on the books as “white” and “straight” and “male” and exclusive, and everything else and everyone else expendable.  Talk about “speaking in tongues” . . .