Tongues of Fire

"Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them." -Acts 2: 3 ". . . Let us make this earthly life more beautiful with our faith and hope." -Kinga-Reka Zsigmond

In the Christian religious tradition, today is the day of Pentecost, also known as Whitsunday, or "White Sunday" for the white vestments supposed to be worn on this holiday.

Pentecost means "the fiftieth day." Originally a Jewish holiday, Pentecost was the Greek name given to the Feast of Weeks. It was so called because it fell on the fiftieth day after Passover. According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the source of much fascinating and arcane information about many things religious, "At this feast the first-fruits of the corn harvest were presented and, in later times, the giving of the Law by Moses."

Within the early Christian community, as described in the New Testament Book of Acts from which I read to you this morning, Pentecost came to mark the fiftieth day after Easter and became known as the Feast of the Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles. On this day, so the story goes, the Holy Ghost descended on the Apostles, giving them "tongues of fire" and the power of preaching to conversion.

Within the Christian Church, it is the second most important festival after Easter, for it marks the foundation of the Christian Church.

We North American Unitarian Universalists no longer pay much if any attention to Pentecost, but among our Transylvanian Unitarian cousins it is one of the four most important religious holidays of the church year. Its celebration goes on for three days. It is one of the four times a year, along with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, that Transylvanian Unitarians take communion, or as they prefer to call it, "The Lord’s Supper."

The Transylvanian Unitarians are traditional, albeit liberal Christians, while we Unitarian Universalists, at least since the time of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, have had a somewhat more complicated relationship to the faith of our origins. We cannot, however, completely escape from our roots in Protestant Christianity, nor, I would suggest, would we want to.

Though our faith has become one that is fed from many sources, and not just from one particular religious tradition, still it is mostly built upon Christian foundations, and can only be fully understood within a Christian context.

While the emphasis in Pentecost is mostly on the foundation of the early church, there is another important dimension or theme. This, according to the morning’s reading, is the theme of spiritual fulfillment, or, one might even say, of spiritual "maturity." Our Partner Church minister Zsolt Jakab calls this aspect of Pentecost, poetically, "the fulfillment of the soul." It has to do more with what we might call the life of the community and with right relations among people.

This latter concern is clearly reflected in one of the readings from Acts which I shared with you this morning:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

Pentecost, then, is at least partly about a kind of turning--what is traditionally known as and meant by the term "conversion"-- toward this compelling vision of community. It is about what our opening words called "transformation." It is not something that necessarily happens quickly and without effort, in fact, to suggest that it is, is likely to trivialize it. As my Transylvanian colleague Kinga-Reka Zsigmond wrote in the morning’s other reading, "Conversion may take place suddenly, between one moment and the next, as happened on the occasion of the first Pentecost, and it would be an event that completely changed one’s life. Conversion may also be a slow, years-long process, that gives form to one’s life only at maturity."

It is this latter kind of conversion, not the flash of lightening kind, that most of us must strive towards. One could almost say that this is our purpose as religious people: to make a turn, to undergo a change of heart for the better.

For Transylvanian Unitarians, the concern with right relations and spiritual maturity is one of the main emphases of the communion service or Lord’s Supper which they share on this and only three other days of the liturgical year. It is a completely human ritual. The bread remains bread and the wine remains wine. It is a common meal done in memory of Jesus, as spiritual exemplar, and for the purpose of building up the beloved community of memory and hope. During the communion service the minister looks each communicant directly in the eye, as if peering into his or her soul, and offers a simple blessing, "Isten aldja meg," "God bless you."

There is nothing supernatural intended, and yet one could argue that there is a transcendent or mystical element to this celebration in that it often takes us beyond ourselves and our individual lives and reminds us of our shared or communal life. It is a reminder of how we should be in relation to one another. It leads us toward a renewed vision of the beloved community.

Rather than being obsolete or meaningless, this kind of ritual reminder is perhaps more necessary than ever before. Has the world ever needed more than now a deeper sense of community? Have the world’s peoples ever needed more than now a new understanding of right relations with and among each another?

Would that tongues of fire might descend upon us to help us carry our message love, inclusiveness, and compassion to a wider audience! Would that we could find better and more effective ways to communicate our belief in a world community where peace, liberty, and justice for all might finally prevail. What could possibly be more important that? What could be more religious?

We Unitarian Universalists have an important gospel, too, the word gospel meaning simply, you will remember, "good news." Our good news is and has always been that God is love, that there is an essential unity at the heart of all things, that we are one people, not divided, and that there is salvation, that is, healing and wholeness, for all, not just for some. That is our liberal gospel. According to our gospel, all, as my friend and colleague Scott Alexander is fond of saying, all are welcome at God’s table. The feast is set for each and every one of us, not just for some select few.

We desperately need that hopeful and inclusive message today, when so much is wrong in our world, when people are so divided, when there is so much violence and bloodshed that we hardly dare to turn on the news in the morning.

Writing in her "Pentecost Sermon," Kinga-Reka Zsigmond says that,

We have seen too many things done by those called Christians, and we reject sins born during the two millennia of Christianity. The inquis- itors thought themselves Christians, as well as those who sent witches to be burned. Those who carried the blacks from Africa to America and sold them on slave markets considered themselves Christians. What is more, even the Nazis considered themselves Christians.

The Christianity that follows Jesus is the religion of love, and love excludes hatred. I think that because we were born Christians and many time[s] Christianity has been used only as a mask, we need a conversion.

Conversion does not mean to speak all the time about belief, and it does not mean to be proud of it, because then we ridicule the most wonder- ful connection of human life.

It has to be understood spiritually. The spirit dwelling in us, and our intention toward the world and other human beings have to be purified.

Conversion is the most beautiful miracle of human life. It is a revelation that elevates one and makes one free and happy. It is the revelation that one has to serve only God, that we have to live only under the spell of the spirit and not of money, fame, power, and violence.

At the moment of conversion I shall become a devoted brother of my fellow human beings. Their honest brother, who does not fear to reveal his or her faults and virtues, who is not a hypocrite and who always wishes well-being to others.

Conversion means also responsibility, because we know that people can be misled. Those in need are especially vulnerable to being exploited. Divine things may be made light of. Metaphorically, the water of the well may be poisoned.

[But] when converted, we become guards of the well of life, and of the purity of life. In this way we may show our faith, day after day, through our deeds, for faith is in fact dead without deeds.

"The message of Pentecost is this," writes Kinga,

because there is a lot of chaff among the wheat, because we know how fragile the world and human beings are, as we are being converted from the weakness of the world, let us remain in God’s and one another’s love. If we are surrounded by unfaithfulness, if we are attacked, if we are despised, under every circumstance let us remain God’s true children or try to become one of them.

As we draw near to the end of another church year, may we take this commitment to heart, and may we carry it with us during all the blessed and blessing days of summer which lie ahead, so that when we return, we shall do so with light, and be just a little bit closer to the world of our dreams than we are today. So may it be. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock