Readings for Pentecost Sunday (Year C)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on Pentecost Sunday June 5, 2022.
Pentecost invites us to appreciate the diverse manifestations of the Holy Spirit and the colorful ways that the Gospel becomes incarnate and expressed in our world’s panoply of cultures and languages. This feast day reminds us of the fact that we are part of the largest Protestant Christian communion in the world, the global Anglican communion, composed of 41 provinces across 165 countries.[1] Today, most Anglicans live in Africa and the average Anglican Christian is a black female teenager![2] Also, the fastest growing Anglican churches in Africa are those influenced by the charismatic and Pentecostal movement,[3] a movement that empowers people to experience the fire of the Holy Spirit directly and to manifest the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the gift of speaking in tongues, like the Apostles at the first Pentecost.
Although I do not imagine Christ Church Eureka ever looking like a Pentecostal church, (like the Pentecostal Church here in Myrtletown), I do believe that the growing “Anglo-costal” churches in our global communion can help us confidently claim and uphold the value of a direct and personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, a value that flows like earth-shaping lava on the fringes of our tradition. In the 18th century, Anglican priest John Wesley emphasized the crucial importance of a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit, which he himself described as a strange warmth in his heart[4]; and in the 14th century, it was the freelance English hermit and mystic Richard Rolle[5] who wrote these words in his spiritual classic titled The Fire of Love:
It seems like only yesterday that my heart first caught fire.
I remember touching my chest to make sure that my clothes weren’t burning.
I became overwhelmed with such joy and delight
when I finally realized that I was experiencing the fire of love.
Like a hand held over a flame
my soul felt the warmth of holy love.
Of course, we can get burned by this love, even burned to death.
But what better way is there to die than by the Holy Spirit’s honey-sweet blaze![6]
More recently, Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett experienced the fiery baptism of the Holy Spirit, which he described in his book Nine O’Clock in the Morning, a title inspired by the time of day when the Holy Spirit seemed to inebriate the apostles in Jerusalem. When Father Dennis inquired about the spiritual glow that he observed in parishioners whom he met in a neighboring parish, he learned about the baptism of the fire of the Holy Spirit. He learned that he could experience that fire as well and that all he had to do was ask. Dennis Bennett soon became the leader of the Pentecostal and charismatic movement that swept like wildfire through the Episcopal Church in the 1960s.[7]
Our Anglocostal siblings in Africa remind us of Dennis Bennett and Richard Rolle and John Wesley, whose spirit-filled lives invite us to be bold enough to ask, to ask God for a direct encounter with the world-shaping fire of his Holy Spirit. Are we bold and daring enough to claim our identity as “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” and to ask for the Holy Spirit to light our hearts on fire? Do we have the chutzpah to ask this even now in the Name of the One who said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified… If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it” (John 14:13-14)?
[1] Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, also happens to own 165 dairy cows who each sleep on waterbeds. There’s one cow for each country within the Anglican Communion, although I’m pretty sure that’s an unintentional coincidence. https://www.businessinsider.com/queen-elizabeths-cows-sleep-on-waterbeds-2018-6
[2] https://channelman.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/the-average-anglican-is-a-black-female-teenager/
[3] Expressions of Pentecostalism in the Anglican Communion have been referred to as “Anglocostalism.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-anglican-studies/article/abs/anglocostalism-in-nigeria-neopentecostalism-and-obstacles-to-anglican-unity/81A5143BDB1F90517198B033C592AD88
[4] While listening to someone read Martin Luther’s Introduction to the Book of Romans in May of 1738, John Wesley said that he felt his heart was “strangely warmed” and his trust in Christ deepened like never before. This day, known as Aldersgate Day, is celebrated by Methodists as a kind of holiday on May 24th.
[5] Richard Rolle (1300 – 1349) is known as the First English Mystic as well as the English St. Francis. Embodying English practicality and creativity, he fashioned a hermit’s habit out of his sister’s tunics and his father’s raincoat. His family thought he was crazy.
[6] My distillation of the opening words of the Prologue to Richard Rolle, Incendium Amoris.
[7] Dennis J. Bennett, Nine O’Clock in the Morning (South Plainfield NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1970).
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 