A Dream Remembered | A Sermon for Pentecost
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on the Day of Pentecost (B), May 23, 2021.
Ezekiel 37:1-14, Acts 2:1-21, John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15; Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Jonathan Rogers, an author whose identity lies in the deep South, shared that the seed of his most recent novel was a story a friend told him many years ago about his grandmother. Here is that story.
His grandmother grew up in California to a Scottish father and a German mother. She was a pretty typical California girl, but there was one unusual thing about her: she dreamed of kangaroos. She had never seen one in her waking life. There were no kangaroos in the wilds of California, of course, and there was no zoo in her little town. Did she see them in books? Perhaps –except that the first time she saw a kangaroo in a book, she recognized it from her dreams.
When the girl had grown into a woman, she learned some secrets about herself. She wasn’t a California native. As it turned out, she was born in Australia. And her mother wasn’t her [biological] mother . . . When [she] was only two or three, her nanny [fell in love with] her employer, the grandmother’s father, (a Scotsman who had immigrated to Australia with his wife). [They ran away together,] and they took [her] with them. They started over in California, telling [her] nothing about her origins. She dreamt of kangaroos because she had seen kangaroos in an earlier life she couldn’t remember. [1]
Rogers writes, “That story fascinated me from the first day I heard it. The girl had a clue to her origins, but in the end, she couldn’t really know where she came from unless somebody told her.” [2]
Regardless of where we are, who we are, how we are, we share a common blind spot: isn’t it true for all, for each of us, that somebody else has to tell us where we came from and how we got there. Somebody else must birth us and name us.
The day of Pentecost is an occasion of praise. And, even more specifically, a certain sort of praise. A praise that illumines an origin story long lost, and yet, momentarily regained, retold, remembered.
On Pentecost, pious Jewish peoples gathered in Jerusalem from across the world and heard the unexpected: Jesus’ disciples, uneducated Galileans, speaking in their own languages. A tremendous, miraculous happening to be sure, and yet a happening that gets us only halfway at best. It is what the disciples were saying that transformed Pentecost from miracle to an event of apocalyptic proportions.
In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power. Or, in the language of the King James Bible, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. (Acts 2:11).
God’s deeds of power –the wonderful works of God– this was the message of the moment. This is what suddenly became heard, became known, across relatively impenetrable language and cultural barriers. Barriers suddenly gone in shocking fashion.
Episcopalians don’t use the word apocalypse near as often as the Southern Baptist tradition, the tradition that brought me up. This is probably, like so many things, a baby with the bathwater situation. Apocalypse has become synonymous with the rapture, with a “in case of rapture car may be unmanned” mentality, a belief in a literal and verifiable end of days -end of life on this planet as we know it. And yet, we lose too much when we lose an understanding of biblical apocalypse.
Richard Rohr writes, “What apocalyptic means is to pull back the veil, to reveal the underbelly of reality. It uses hyperbolic images, stars falling from the sky, the moon turning to blood . . . It’s not meant to strike fear in us as much as a radical rearrangement. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the end of worlds—our worlds that we have created. [3]
That is what was experienced on Pentecost, the great reversal of the confusion of languages that originated with the Tower of Babel. Not the end of worlds, but the worlds that we created.
Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves (Gen. 11:4).
At Babel, humankind sought to originate its own story, sought to create its own world, sought to control a narrative that was never its own but was always God’s. And in the words of Ellen Davis:
the inevitable consequence of that strategy of self-aggrandizement is social fracture. [Because, of course, the result of that was God acting to confuse their language so that they could no longer understand one another. And this] linguistic confusion of Babel is the beginning of the world as we know it, in which individuals and nations are separated from one another in mutual incomprehension and often hostility, each desperately trying to make a name for themselves. [4]
On Pentecost, we remember “the very first act of the Holy Spirit in undoing that ages-old legacy of Babel.” [5] The very beginning of the end of that world which we created. And this is why Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd with apocalyptic imagery in the words of the Prophet Joel:
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Acts 2:20-21).
Davis continues, “The gift that the Spirit poured out on Jerusalem was the gift of mutual understanding, so that people from all over the world were again united in a common project –this time not in making a big name for themselves, but rather in making a big name for God.” [6]
Speaking about God’s deeds of power; the wonderful works of God.
For a moment the veil lifted, and words of praise rang out –words reminding all who heard them of their origins, of where they come from and how they got there. Words reminding them that, try as you might, you cannot make a name for yourself that departs from the name given you by God.
In that way, praise is the most profound kind of freedom, because it is a recognition, a declaration, of God’s sovereignty at all places and at all times.
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures (Psalm 104:25)
The praise of God called them back to their origins as one human family created and sustained by God. And not just them, but us too. Saint John draws the Fourth Gospel to a close with these words stating his ultimate purpose:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name (John 20: 30-31).
He’s speaking to you. And to me. This story is our origin story. We are witnesses to these things—these things that may seem dry, dead and gone, belonging to a time long past, to events in someone else’s story. These things that, when approached with a posture of praise –praise in both times of joy and in times of tumult and trial— approached this way, these things come alive, flesh and blood, calling to us, reminding us of our shared story, of where we came from. Like a dream remembered of a reality long forgotten, but which lives within us nonetheless.
Calling us to leave the worlds that we have created so that we can live into the world which was created for us –a world which names us and claims us in His name.
Amen.
*Image courtesy of Pete unseth, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Jonathan Rogers, “The Origins of the Charlatan’s Boy,” The Habit Blog, 20 May 2014, https://thehabit.co/1693-2/.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “This Is an Apocalypse, Week Seventeen: Apocalyptic Hope,” Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, 26 Apr. 2021.
[4] Ellen Davis, “Finding Strength in Praise,” Preaching the Luminous Word: Biblical Sermons and Homiletical Essays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 134.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
