Feast of Pentecost A June 8, 2014
Acts 2:1-11
Psalm 104:25-35, 37b
1 Corinthians 12:4-13 John 20:19-23
What is the official motto of the United
States? Is it: E pluribus Unum? Or, In God we Trust?
E pluribus Unum was the de
facto but not the legal motto until 1956.
The American Congress got really religious in the 1950’s: They codified “In God we Trust” as the
official motto of The United States. And
in 1954 on Flag Day, the Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of
Allegiance, which had survived without that addition since its composition in
1892 and official adoption in 1942.
The Day of Pentecost is a very “E pluribus
Unum” day. From the many One. The foundation of any mystical body whether
it be a country or organization or the church has to deal with the basic
complex dynamic of life itself. The one
and the many. One could turn the phrase
around. Ab uno, in plures. From the one, the many.
The Gospel of John begins with, “In the
beginning was the Word…and everything was created by the Word. So from the Word came many languages, many
textual creations which are the very basis for people understanding themselves
and their own life stories within their culture settings The culture setting
makes it profound imprint as people take on their languages within their own
families.
Word is what unifies all but Word is able to
be reflected into endless diversity.
Word is perhaps the only thing which cannot be falsified. One can say or think, “Word does not exist,”
but one has to use word to say or think such a thing and so a denial of word
cannot be true. Word is undeniable in
human experience. It is the unity of
human experience.
But it is not enough to confess the
simplicity of the Singularity of Word; we speak many words. Our bodies articulate many kinds of body
language words of action. Word is the
very condition for the many tongues of the Day of Pentecost. Many from the One; One from the many. We live in the tension of these two
meaningful truths each and every day of our lives.
One from the many is the great faith
adventure of life? Why? Because once the great egg Humpty Dumpty has
shattered from his fall, it is harder to put him back together again. All the king’s men and his horses have tried
forever to use the glue of power and government to force the shattered outer
shell of the diversity of life back into one situation of unity.
As we ponder the unity in difference which is
celebrated on Pentecost, the day of many languages confessing a common message,
we are required to ask of ourselves what this unity means.
Unity cannot mean the extreme simplicity of
monochromatic experience. White and black
are colors but if we only had one color in life to experience we would live in
boredom if there was no differentiation in color.
I have some very ambiguous feelings about
some modern optical art. When I went to
a gallery in Washington D.C. and saw the Rothko panels covering the wall, an
entire wall of large canvasses all monochromatic and worth millions of
dollars. I couldn’t help but think the joke
is on us, this whole system of how artistic value is made in our culture. Yes, I understand the philosophy and the
revolts within schools of art and such canvasses are not just canvasses but
also expressive of paradigm shifts within our culture. And I like many of Rothko’s paintings. His monochrome canvasses are not just valued
art because they are single colored canvasses, they stand in the tradition of
aesthetic value being the contrast between the one and the many. One could say that Rothko’s monochromes have
value because he did so many other polychromatic works.
It was given to the followers of Jesus to
find a way, to put unity back together from the many. This is the great faith adventure of life
itself if we want to preserve life for the future. Our tradition is a worthy tradition to
persist within because of this adventure to put unity together from the many.
It is easier to separate and contemplate as a
single agent meditating on one’s breath and navel on the mountainside. Living and working and praying among the many
is often messy. It is very messy to go
among the many languages which people speak in words and in their life styles
and experiences. The day of Pentecost
calls for us to look for the One within the many. The Day of Pentecost is not over; we are still
in the hunt for the One within the many.
But the one is not having everyone fold into
the background of a single white color and becoming invisible. The oneness which we seek is an experience of
the total play of difference towards some higher purposes. And what would those higher purposes be? What would unity be known as if it is to be
true to the many?
We have words for the higher unity from the
many. One word might be harmony. Harmony is a word which expresses the
honoring of differences in a unity expressed as beauty. Harmony can co-exist with solos and with
melody. In actual life practice another
name for harmony is justice and love.
Love and justice express the freedom of the differences of gifts to be
expressed and the result is not a competition which destroys the individual but
of a harmony which creates something beautiful.
Do you know why people like to sing in
choirs? They like to work on the
individual parts over and over again and add them to the other voices because
in the performance there is the beauty of getting truly lost as an individual
voice in the greater work. The harmony
of the piece of music both elevates the many and the one in a singular event.
If we can grasp this experience we can grasp
the mission of Pentecost. The mission of
Pentecost is to bring back the events and expression of unity from the
experiences of the many. This mission is
greater than the church; it is the American experiment which has known
successes and failures. Today, it would
seem that E pluribus Unum has been reduced by greed to the power struggle
between groups. It’s almost like the
basses in the choir getting so strong they decide that they don’t need the
other sections or they only want the other voices for occasional contrast in
service of the superiority of the basses.
The work of Pentecost is not over; we in the
church need to live this tradition of the One from the many so that the
collateral effects of our success will be known in family, business, education
and politics. We owe it to God, to
Christ, to the Church and to our world to devote ourselves to the One from the
many.
The Spirit is One who speaks in many tongues
and languages of the diverse experiences of all people. It is a daunting task to find harmonic unity
among so much diversity. The task is
even more daunting today because instant communication allows us to know such
manifold diversity in a deluge of information.
It seems almost too difficult to process such complex diversity into workable
harmonic unity.
But the Spirit is One; the Spirit inspires us
to new harmonies where differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as the
Spirit inspires the egos behind the differences to be checked at the door for
the purpose of those higher harmonies.
Let us on this Pentecost Day re-commit ourselves to these higher
harmonies of Jesus Christ as they are known in justice, love, service, sacrifice,
joy and peace. Amen.
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