About You ...
Pentecost
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
You are so complicated.
When Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution, the best science of his time regarded the cell as the fundamental building block of life, from single-cell organisms to highly developed plants and animals. The human beings are very complex at that level. There are roughly 200 different types of cells in our bodies that must work together in astonishingly intricate ways.
But there’s more. Much, much more.
Within each cell, each individual cell, are trillions of individual molecules and 10,000 to 20,000 different proteins in a given moment. There are up to 400,000 distinct structural types of proteins in the human body.
The human genome, DNA, contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes in its 46 chromosomes. Altogether, the DNA in a human cell contains over six billion base pairs. And each cell contains tens of thousands of messenger RNA sequences. Each cell. The deeper we look into life, the more astonishing its ordered complexity appears.
And there are bodily fluids, minerals, enzymes and trillions of foreign microbial organisms, bacteria, busily helping us live.
That is what we know, today. The harder and better we look, the more complex it becomes.
I have never asked this before and will very likely never ask again, but if you have your phone with you, please take it out, turn on the camera and look at yourself for a moment. If you have someone near you who does not have their phone with them, please allow them to see themselves. Now, please put your phone away but hold your selfie in your mind.
You are infinitely complicated. Your physical complexity is shared to a large degree with everyone else, but not entirely. You are different. There is just one of you. You are unique among the 8 billion people on this planet today and you are unique among the billions more people who have ever lived and, God knows, ever will live.
That’s not just physically true. It is also mentally, emotionally and spiritually true. No one else has your mind. No one else has your experience. No one else has learned what you have learned. No one else has seen what you have seen. No one else has suffered as you have suffered. No one else has experienced the joys you have known. You are who you are, and there is no one exactly like you.
And we are all moving through time. You are not the same person today that you were yesterday or that you will be tomorrow. Our experiences day by day and moment by moment, including this sermon, are constantly shaping us. Physically, we change out billions of cells a day, although some cells remain with us our whole lives.
We are all different, which speaks to the constant difficulties we have connecting with each other. Even our most loving, most important relationships have difficulties at times, as do our rather fitful relationships with the Lord. And that human diversity is precisely what we encounter in today’s reading from Acts.
Let’s be honest. Who among you would want to read that list of nations in our first reading (Acts 2:1-21)? I’m trained in this stuff and can’t be entirely sure if it’s pronounced frij-ia or friggia or fryggia. The point of that list is to highlight and underscore the differences among the various peoples gathered on that Day of Pentecost. Their different languages point also to the many distinctions among their cultures.
The Holy Spirit transcends all of that. He reaches each and every one of them where they are and as they are. In the same way, He transcends every way that every one of us is unique, distinct, and constantly moving through time – for the relatively brief time we are here. All of those billions of cells and trillions of parts of each of those cells, all of our past, exactly who you are, where you are and when you are.
Our very brief Gospel passage from John (John 7:37-39) anticipates that Day of Pentecost. Here, Jesus is at the festival of Sukkot. Sukkot is a Jewish fall harvest festival. It remembers the provisions God provided to Israel in the desert wilderness during the Exodus and looked forward to God’s future provision for his people. The Jewish historian Josephus called it their holiest and greatest festival.
Each morning, the Temple priests would process down to the Pool of Siloam. You may recall that Siloam means “sent” because it has water that has flowed through Hezekiah’s water tunnel, a miraculous engineering feat in itself. It’s also where Jesus heals the man born blind, which is in chapter nine.
The priests would fill large gold pitchers with water and return to the Temple amid trumpet blasts where they poured the water out beside the altar. The water symbolized God’s provision of rain, critical to their crops, and the spiritual rivers promised through the prophets, including Isaiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah.
At the climax on the last day, Jesus deliberately redirects their spiritual thirst to himself. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” Anyone. Everyone. You may not feel very special, but look at what the Lord has done in creating us in such wildly different ways and such individual complexity, and given us Christ and the Holy Spirit to meet us right where we are in any and every moment.
He is, as Peter quoted the prophet Joel, “…pouring out his Spirit upon all flesh.”
Then, as Jesus said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” The more we open ourselves to the life-giving, life-healing power of the Holy Spirit, the more God will pour his Spirit through us.
This is the love of God working its way into his creation in real time: the Father sending the Son, and through the Son pouring out the Holy Spirit upon all flesh — overcoming every barrier among us, meeting each of us exactly where we are, drawing us home to the Father, and using us to reach his people.
AMEN!