Pentecost Year B: Queries and Quarks
Rev Dr Dawna Wall
The Pentecost readings this year give us rich, vibrant and troubling images of the Holiness of the Spirit and of Her work and presence with us and all creation. In the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14) we have the profound and disturbing image of the Holy One and the prophet conversing and traversing the remains of the ancestors. Each asking questions of the other about how life and breath is given and received, as the complexity of the body and its matter come together. The Psalm (Psalm 104:25-35, 37) celebrates the diversity and expansiveness of creation – here we find trembling, terror, generosity, sport, a filling and emptying that rise and crash and give expression to our own lived experience of the natural world.
The Acts reading (Acts 2:1-21) is either the first reading in place of Ezekiel, or second reading instead of Romans. As the Psalm expands images of God’s created world, Acts expands the dimensions of language and culture and turns to images of the last days. As we daily confront the fears, realities and uncertainties wrought by climate crisis, the eeriness of the prophecy resonates with us, a people working to keep the panic at bay while also embracing, nourishing, and planting hope wherever we can. In the imagery of a woman in labour found in our reading from Romans we hear the groans and expressions of agony that are a part of life and death and hoping for what we do not see with patience, tenacity, and a healthy respect for the place of sighing which is a land beyond our words. Mapping love through each of these readings is one way we trace the Spirits movement – loving presence in the valley, in the listening and understanding, in the stuttering, stunned places where language fails, and where Jesus promises the Spirit will come to help us bear the things that are too much for us. We do not do this work alone, the companionship and connectedness and understanding which find expression in bones and sinews coming together, in languages of body, mind and spirit spoken and understood.
Commentary and Reflection
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Bones of Ancestors
The Ezekiel passage also invites us to the difficult and painful work of considering the bones of ancestors and the places where we are personally and communally disconnected from the gift of life.
Reflecting on her new book, A Faith of Many Rooms, Debie Thomas shared some thoughts and questions for reflection on this passage:
“God has invited us to a long beholding of death, to see what is without flinching.”
“Do we know the broken, difficult work of faith all the way to our bones?”
“God
The DNA project by Haley Omeasoo, a registered member of the Hopi Nation and a Blackfeet descendant who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation is about about making connections. She wants to connect tribal groups to the remains of their ancestors, and she wants to connect families of missing relatives to the people they are searching for so desperately. “Where I’m from,” she said, “we’re all related somehow.”
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Holy Wisdom has always been in motion – crying out in the streets, naming sorrow where She sees it, cavorting with Leviathon for the sport of it, encouraging us, cajoling us, to learn the steps of her dance. Wisdom shows us she’s not afraid of movement in any direction, looking backward, forward, up and down. She nods and bobs to show us that off ramps can also be on ramps and that all roads can lead us to holiness.
Acts 2:1-21
Reflecting on her new book, A Faith of Many Rooms, Debie Thomas shared some thoughts and questions for reflection on this passage at a recent clergy day in the Diocese of Massachusetts:
“Pentecost blesses Babel and weaves diversity into the fabric of a baby church.”
“What languages do we need to speak that we haven’t spoken before?”
Romans 8:22-27
Reflecting on her new book, A Faith of Many Rooms, Debie Thomas shared some thoughts and questions for reflection on this passage at a recent clergy day in the Diocese of Massachusetts:
“When we’ve found our hope too small to cope with the daily realities, we yearn for a hope that is honest, an unclenched hope, free from expectation, a hope that embraces finitude and is not quantifiable.”
This passage tells us plainly in Thomas’ words: “…hope can get tongue tied.” The language of silence and presence is the vernacular of hope.
“Hope is not the opposite of lament. Lament is a form of hope.”
“Hope is rooted in God who is grounded in vulnerability. Hope is about the long haul. Hope gets in apathy’s face.”
Living with Uncertainty
In Maggie Jackson’s book Uncertainty: The Wisdom of Being Unsure, she surveys how her unpredictable childhood helped develop the gifts of curiosity and hyper awareness of what might be coming down the road, as well as an uncanny capacity to always scan for off ramps.
But Jackson also explores the capacity uncertainty can be for us to take a deep breath, and to move away from fear, allowing more oxygen into our systems, so that our brains and hearts can work more effectively. Taking a deep breath, letting it move in and through us, what do we see? A wounded world, aching humanity, a climate crisis evolving at a rate that terrifies and paralyzes us. And we breathe – partners with creation, with the plants and trees who create the oxygen we breathe.
Patawotamie botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
The Spirit at Pentecost dares us to proclaim radical hope, radical optimism, not because we have our heads in the sand, but because we are rooted and grounded in an ancient story that shows us how God’s love is always scanning the horizon for transformation and possibility and because we know we are called to return the gift speaking peace to each place we find ourselves, and breathing deeply of the peace returned to us.
Hope is the Key to Environmental Action David R. Boyd CBC Interview
John 15:26-27;16:4b-15
The images we associate with the Holy Spirit are all from Creation – water, spirit, dove, fire, wild goose. In this passage Jesus continues to comfort and reassure he tries to articulate something wonderful and true about the Advocate, sent by God to be with us in and beyond time.
Jesus also reassures us that we cannot know or understand everything at once but we can keep working to increase, expand and deepen our knowledge, our relationships with the Holy One, with Creation and with ourselves.
Quotations
Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing. We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don't exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize.
Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
“The Holy Spirit embodies the life force of the universe, the power of God, the animating energy present in all things and captured by none.”
Joan Chittister, OSB
The breath of life is an energy that flows into and out from us, God
and the world. If we tap into this flow, we can experience the call to restore our connections with one another. With our own divine creativity, we respond to that that call whenever we contribute to the life of the world.
Damon Garcia, Liturgy that Matters enfleshed.com
“Life repeats itself, renews itself, no matter how many times it is hurled to the ground, hurt, ridiculed, ignored, scorned, tortured or made helpless…The new seed goes first into the empty and open places – even when the empty place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind, or a devastated spirit.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Preaching and Teaching Ideas
Nurse Logs and the Practice of Self-emptying
Sally McFague writes that a practice of kenosis, or self emptying deepens and strengthens “an awareness of our radical interdependence with all other life forms, as well as an increasing appreciation for the planet’s finitude and vulnerability” in her article, Earth Economy: A Spirituality of Limits. (Special thanks to the Very Rev’d Peter Elliot who pointed me in the direction of this amazing resource!)
She continues: “Old-growth forests are a mess – liter- ally a mess. On first view, such a forest strikes one as a tangle, a jumble, of stuff of all sorts: trees standing, lying down, or half-way down; caves, holes, and openings; ferns, mosses, and lichens; mushrooms, rocks, and epiphytes; springtails, crustaceans, and dragonflies; water dripping, running, standing; trees on top of other trees, trees with bushes growing out of them, trees with holes and knobs and twisted limbs like pretzels. An old-growth forest is seemingly chaotic, but it works, it sustains billions of different forms of life. Its haphazard quality is part of its genius: anything that can find a way to live there is accepted. Animals and plants live with, in- side of, on top of, beneath, partly inside and partly outside, one another. It is impossible often to tell what is what: where does this tree begin and this other one end?
“Nurse logs are lying-down trees – some would say dead trees – that having lived several hundred years as standing trees are now into a second career as homes for other trees. The body of the nurse log provides a warm, nutrient-rich birthplace for young saplings of all sorts to grow. It is not just seeds from the nurse tree that grow on it, but anything and everything. All are welcome! The nurse log can live another several hundred years as the giver of new life from its body. A new tree stretches its roots around the nurse log and still retains this odd position after the nurse log disappears. With the hole between its roots, it is a visible sign of the invisible tree that nurtured it. What is living and what is dead? Life and death are mixed up here.”
Four Directions Prayer
The Prayer in Four Directions is composed of invocations to each of the four directions which together form an affirmation of the circle of life. The turning from one direction to another engages body, mind and spirit in the art of moving prayer. This Eucharistic Prayer from the Anglican Diocese if Islands and Inlets in British Columbia includes the prayer of four directions.
This tradition of the First Nations is one that reverberates in our reading from Ezekiel, as the wind comes from four directions speaking to the bones, as the prophet, having engaged in holy conversation with the Holy One, finds his voice and begins to speak courageous acclamations of life to that which is long dead.
The four directions offer different vantage points for us to consider the work of Pentecost and the inflow of the Holy Spirit, and of the shared work we have with all that is, breathing out the carbon dioxide that is transformed by plants and trees to oxygen, one astonishing and beautiful example of what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “a mutual flourishing.”
We know that the earth is in our bones and someday our bones return to the earth, we hear these words on Ash Wednesday, a tender, embodied reminder that we are a part of God’s holy compost system of renewal and integration.
The sacred stories of all creation shape our interior and exterior landscapes and the landscapes in turn shape our stories. It is a mutuality of forming, teaching – an in-forming that like breathing, is emptying and filling over and over again.
Sources and Resources:
Leah D. Schade, Eco-Pentecost: Churches united in restoring creation
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2024/05/eco-pentecost-churches-united-in-restoring-creation/
Leah D. Schade, Day of Pentecost: Ecotheological Reflection
http://ecopreacher.blogspot.com/2015/05/day-of-pentecost-ecotheological.html
Jim Perkinson “As a Mighty Wind”: or Which Pentecost, Radical Discipleship
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2023/05/29/as-a-mighty-wind-or-which-pentecost/
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, Pentecost: Bellies in the Mud, Radical Discipleship
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2023/05/29/as-a-mighty-wind-or-which-pentecost/
Wes Howard Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, Pentecost, Radical Discipleship
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2019/06/06/wild-lectionary-pentecost/
Ragan Sutterfield, The Coming of the Holy Breath, Radical Discipleship
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/06/01/wild-lectionary-the-coming-of-the-holy-breath/
Author Bio
The Rev’d Dr Dawna Wall is Curator at the Episcopal Chapel of St. Anne, in Arlington, Massachusetts. She is an Associate of the Order of St. Anne, a Council Member of the Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission and serves as Priest Associate at St. Paul’s Cathedral Parish in Boston. She is a Spiritual Director and Retreat Leader, currently immersed in the Spirituality of Trees in scripture, life and prayer.
Artist Bio
Living in Victoria, British Columbia, Katherine Farris is currently focused on landscape, still life and abstract landscape paintings. For her, the act of painting offers a way to explore an idea, a theme, an object, a memory, or a feeling, through colour and texture. The more colour, the better! https://kfarris.com