Sunday, June 5, 2022
/The Day of Pentecost
Gen 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, (25-27); Psalm 104:25-35, 37
The Rev. Clint Brown
For a long time the prevailing wisdom had it that once we reached a certain age our brains stopped developing. What you had you had, so you had better make the most of your window of opportunity. But now we know that this is just not true. Neuroscientists tell us that our brains continue to develop throughout our lives. The word they have coined for this is “neuroplasticity.” We can with effort remap our brains. To learn a new skill we create new neural pathways; to undo bad habits we break existing connections. Why we believed the opposite for so long is actually counterintuitive. After all, the regular work of living requires us to adjust to new situations and people all the time. When we run over a pothole, we remember to avoid it the next time. And it’s interesting what we can learn even about things or people we think we already know a lot about.
Take my friend Brenda. Cavan and I will get to visit her later this summer at her home in East Tennessee. She’ll be 82 years old this year and she shows no signs of slowing down. She lives alone. She still rides horses every chance she gets. She can proudly claim to be the most senior acolyte at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Johnson City. Oh…and did I mention that she’s a champion axe thrower? But even at that, despite all the years I’ve known her, she’s still full of surprises.
Once when we were talking late into the night, Brenda started telling me the story of her pet frog. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never known anyone who had a pet frog. Well, she said, this was a rescue frog. Brenda had saved it from her dad’s minnow bucket when it was still a little polywog. It was the summer of 1960 and during this particular summer the family was vacationing in Quebec, so, of course, this was – sorry I can’t help myself – a French frog. And as a French frog he was christened with the name Monsieur Jean-Claude Pierre de Fourchette. Monsieur de Fourchette grew into a fine and friendly frog and very attached to Brenda. In fact, so attached to her that he had a very peculiar tendency. Whenever Brenda cleaned house, he was wont to ride around perched on her head! Vacuuming the rug or unloading the dryer, there he was surveying his domain from his lofty perch. One day Brenda had a visitor come to the door, her landlady no less, and, you guessed it, Brenda had forgotten that Monsieur de Fourchette was on her head. The landlady looked up and down and up and down and made a great effort at trying to ignore what was so obviously unignorable, and finally blurted out, “Do you know you have a frog on your head!?” So, yeah, pet frogs are a thing and it just goes to prove that we’re always learning new things, even about people we know very well.
And, you know, it’s the same with God? Today as we the Church stand witness to baptism, we will take the opportunity to renew our own baptismal covenant. When the Celebrant asks, “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship…?” we will answer, “I will, with God’s help,” knowing full well that the reason for this is that there is so much to learn and unlearn as we walk the path of faith. The word disciple, after all, literally means one who learns. How are we to know what we are meant to do and how to do it? How are we to know what God wants? How can we learn the way that leads to eternal life?
The Christian tradition has an answer. The Christian tradition has long answered that there are two “Words” that have come down from heaven to tell us what we need to know about God. We encounter both in today’s service, divided as it is between the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Table. The first is the Bible, a written word, and the second is the Word made flesh, Jesus. In the Bible, we recognize the record of God’s dealings with a chosen people. During the Miqra this congregation has been intentional about honoring its importance by reading it through in its entirety as a community. From it we learn that there is one God, the creator of heaven and earth, who can be known to us. The Bible, however, is an imperfect word. To put it bluntly, it’s a very confusing portrait of God. Indeed, for many people it is the reason they have rejected God altogether. What kind of answer are we to give? What we say is that it has some important things wrong. It is wrong about its attitudes towards slavery and human sexuality and the status of women, to name just a few, but that’s okay. All that indicates is that it cannot be the final word for us. It doesn’t have to be outright rejected. What we Episcopalians believe is that the revelation of God did not end with the closing of Scripture.
And that brings us to Pentecost. We believe that, through the ongoing work of the Spirit, we have learned some things too. The Day of Pentecost is the moment when the Christian witness is born, to tell the world that what was old is being made new and the Spirit is ever at work among us renewing the earth. Pentecost testifies to the fact that we are still on a journey, still reaching out to God…and God is still reaching out to us. What is the message of Pentecost? It is that there is always something new to learn.