Pentecost
As I was exiting a meeting this last week with a group of folks, one person turned to me and said: "so, I know I've been a Christian for twenty-odd years. What is Pentecost again?"
I whipped up a quick answer to what is not a short question--something about undoing Babel. I suppose I could have spoke as well of the Advocate, a kind of lobbyist we have looking out for us in the fabric of reality. Or maybe I could have spoken about the teaching function of the Holy Spirit, how we are promised to continue to learn new things even after Jesus is gone. Or maybe about how Christ's Spirit is still with us, how the church is God the Holy Spirit's dwelling place. And on and on--there are many, many things I could have said.
It reminded me of a problem that arises for me often when I'm preaching, and I think it's probably a problem all share. Here's how I think of it: should we preach Christianity 101, or Christianity 201?
In our faith, there are different layers of questions as people grow in faith. There are the 101 type questions: whether God loves us and how we can experience that love, what forgiveness means, what it means to have gifts and a ministry, and many more. And there are 201 type questions, and these simply reflect deeper on these same questions as people have lived with them a while. How is God's love present in a society with poor healthcare? Not only what does forgiveness mean, but how is reconciliation different? Not only having gifts and ministries, but how do those turn into a vocation?
There's nothing wrong with either type. It has to do with how long we've walked this pilgrimage, and sometimes, a longer walker is delighted to remember some 101 type lessons, and someone who is just beginning can be transformed by far more mature conversations of faith.
But our communities are made up of both types of folks, and 101ers are sometimes lost when they hear 201 preaching, and 201ers can be bored by hashing old ground that truly doesn't speak to the places they've come.
For what it's worth, if you find this kind of division among Christians offensive, both Paul and John seem to take for granted that this division exists. But as I say, there's nothing wrong being early on a pilgrimage or late, but as the preacher, it's a real pain in the ass sometimes to know where we can reach people. BECAUSE, although people seem for odd reasons to doubt this, we preachers want to reach people.
So: how do we know? Is it back to basics, or continuing development? Jesus didn't seem to know. He certainly screws up a similar situation with the Syro-Phoenician woman, thinking he should be 101 when in fact she was way, way down the journey of faith and needed to hear some 201. If Jesus didn't know his audience, so much so that he changes horses in mid-stream, it seems likely that we'll fail to know our audience sometimes, too.
What I wonder, though, is if the Holy Spirit isn't at least as active in those bad sermons. Certainly, even while Christ was stuttering apologetically to the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Spirit was active in telling that challenging story to us. In other words, what looked like failure to Jesus looks like success to us.
I think that the true good news of Pentecost, the true hope at its heart, is revealed in this hope that the Spirit is in bad sermons. The message at Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit can speak good news in any language, any context. Maybe all of our worst sermons, all of our worst ideas, all of our misguided notions of how ought to live--maybe all of these are truly, utterly bad. But because they are so bad, they can be put to good use, become part of a longer preaching of the gospel to an audience we know only dimly.
The gospel at Pentecost is that, perhaps, even bad preaching can become good.
