Pentecost Sunday

Pentecost Sunday

To be able to take the other seriously

Acts 2.1-11; 1 Cor. 12.3b-7, 12-13; Jn. 20.19-23

Today is the culmination of the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. It's the end of what the biblical writers have to say about it. It is also a response to the question, given our belief God raised this man Jesus, of how his presence, his influence will be felt in the world today.

Of course these Jews have to go to their own heritage to find language in which to express that influence. The great Jewish word used is "spirit", which is, throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, an expression of God's activity in the world. Spirit simply means "breath". So, in Genesis, God animated Adam by breathing life into him;; God animated the prophets by breathing in, "inspiring" them, thereby humanizing them. For that is the work of the Spirit of God: it makes us human. So if we want to talk about Jesus as the paradigmatic human being, and how we can experience his presence and influence, then we use the hallowed language of the "spirit" of God; the descent of the spirit.

As I said Pentecost is a summary of everything that happens in the wake of the Resurrection. For the past six weeks I've tried to spell out those effects in a variety of ways. The spirit is that which keeps us, and the Church at large, from becoming a ghetto again. (Ironically, unlike the original ghettos, which kept the Jews in, the Church as ghetto keeps the world out.) There is something drastically wrong with the Church as ghetto and the spirit is supposed to inhibit that tendency, which is always present. The spirit is supposed to keep us from being afraid, being paralyzed by our fears of each other, of the world. The spirit is to bring us to the peace that, as the biblical message has it, enables us to live naked and unashamed with each other, before each other.

But the best summary statement I know of the action of the spirit comes from Karl Rohner. In answer to the question, "Well, how do you tell when the spirit of God is around?" In one of his essays he says that you can detect the presence of the spirit whenever one human being takes another human being seriously. So, I'd like to look at that extraordinarily insightful and rich statement, as a way of talking about Pentecost.

What does it mean for one person to take another person seriously? Of course, this must be done mutually; it cannot be fully done one-sidedly. If I can't take another person seriously then they're not going to be able to take me seriously. So I'd like to suggest a list of those inhibitors of our being able to take each other seriously, which are characteristic certainly of the world I inhabit.

Maybe the most devastating is the way we functionalize our relationships with each other. "You exist in so far as you are a function in my world. You are real because you can type, or collect my e-mail adequately, or send my faxes on time, or show up for work, or do your assigned job. In a word, do what I want you to do." What happens when we treat each other that way - as we normally do? We reduce the other to being no more than a function in my world. "I need you to do this: I need you to love me, to clean my clothes, or my house; to prepare meals; to bring home a paycheque" - fill in the blanks, the possibilities are infinite and to the extent that we do this we do not take the other seriously in their own humanity or in our own. We simply reduce each other, truncate, miniaturize each other; deny each other's humanity, see each other only as parts in this great cosmic machine, of which I am the principal operator, if not the creator and sustainer. And this is normal in our world.

Now we have to be really careful here, because there is today a kind of Romantic counter-position to functionalizing each other. This position assumes that we can see and appropriate the personal centre or whole of the other, with no reference at all to what the other does - or to our own needs. Such inter-personal transparency is impossible. And in believing one can penetrate the mystery which is the other, or of one's self, the would-be penetrator takes neither the other, nor themselves truly seriously. To entertain the possibility has nothing to do with truth, or reality, or the spirit.

To return to the functionalized world. We have the functional economy, the functional society, the functional political system - and yes, there is the functional church. All these constitute, as Karl Marx, that great atheist ex-Jew put it, a spirit-less world. It is literally that. And one further symptom of that kind of world is its humourlessness. Worse, its joylessness. Because I think we can only rejoice with each other, at any level, if there is a human being there with me, and not just some abstract function.

What's another instance of the spirit-lessness of our world? The world as spirit-free zone? Well, we can take up the matter of fear again. The fear of the other which is based upon a kind of ideological fixity. It expresses itself in such statements as "if you do not fit into my idea of how things are supposed to go then you are obviously a threat and alien to me. Clearly then, I can't take you seriously as a human being." And as I said, this is one of the great dangers in the Church today. The battle cry of orthodoxy rings out over and over again. One may very well wonder what is in play here, whether there's not some kind of ideological filter, some sort of check-list which people must go through to see if this other one measures up, is respectable, or admissible to the range of my attention, consciousness, acceptance. Unfortunately, the evidence for this frame of mind is massive and it seems, omnipresent. You must fit my idea of proper colour, gender, sexual orientation, your language, way of seeing things, odour, wardrobe, education. These represent the multiple filtration systems that we use to exclude the other, or to reduce the other to a quantum which is recognizable or unrecognizable on the basis of my criteria of acceptability. To that extent we live in such a spirit-free world, or, to use Marx' much more telling phrase, a spirit-less, a dispirited world. We cannot take each other seriously because we've reduced each other to some kind of abstraction. "You are this position; you are an exponent of this ideological attitude, understanding, view of the world."

Of course, ultimately, we cannot have peace except the peace of death camps or prisons, which require as a condition, the dehumanization of the other. We keep everybody else in line. It's a tidy world, much loved by bureaucrats, but it's also a dead world; dead both for the keepers and the kept. Because neither can take the other seriously in that environment and to some extent that is the environment, internal and external, of all of us. In one place or another: in our families, in our jobs, every place where we live.

To be able to take the other seriously means a radical demolition of these borders, all these filtration systems that we establish to preserve what we believe, out of fear, is our own integrity. Well, the spirit of God disturbs things. In the passage from Acts which Catherine read, if you read a bit farther, you find that people thought the apostles were drunk. They are disorderly. All these people who were able to address all of their hearers. It did not actually happen as described, but what Luke wanted to say is very clear: that for us human beings, who hear so selectively, and often not at all, the spirit of God operates to alter that. So that, again in Rohner's words, we can take each other seriously in our full humanity. Because that is the basic fact: not how intelligent you are, or how efficient, or how much money you can give me, or whatever.

Finally, we're going to have a baptism. We've had dozens of baptisms in this chapel. I think I've baptized most of the kids in this room. It's a joy to see them. And what we are doing here, too, is breaking boundaries, borders. That is this child, Dylan Robert Elliott Francis, is not just the private possession of these two human beings who have biologically generated this child. This child's family is supposed to be all of us. God's first of all, and because God's, everybody's. In other words we're breaking the boundaries of families, in the sense of opening them up, by welcoming this baby into this group. But, concretely, what does that mean? Do we feel responsible for each other's kids in this room? We're saying that the boundaries of this child's nurture, and attention and love, however imperfect, is not marked by biological parenthood, but the boundary is supposed to be marked by God, and include all the rest of us. Baptism, like everything we do when we celebrate the liturgy, is a challenge to our own narrowness; a challenge to our own obtuseness, a challenge to our own indifference, a challenge to our own unwillingness to admit that the world is larger, richer or more wondrous than we typically imagine it to be. So, we want to welcome your baby among us, which is what we'll try to symbolize right now...

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