Miller, Mary Jane. Pentecost, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59680 [retrieved May 28, 2024]. Original source: Mary Jane Miller, https://www.millericons.com/.

RCL Year B, The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35 and 37, Romans 8:22-27, Saint John 15:26-27 and 16:4b-15

If you have ever slipped into a church, knelt, and have begun to pray, and discover that you have very little to say to God, today may be your day, the day that you discover that the Holy Spirit has been given to you, perhaps without your knowing it. For today we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit showered upon Christ’s disciples who received the gift of the Holy Spirit without knowing what was happening to them.

For us, the Day of Pentecost marks the end of Christ’s glorification and the resumption of what our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers call “ordinary time.” We are about to set foot in the part of the Christian year which mirrors and parallels what it is like to live with the gift of the Holy Spirit in a world where God seems to be absent and seems to be uninvolved.

Saint Paul refers in today’s Epistle to this “ordinary time” when he writes, “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption.”[1] He is describing that “ordinary time,” of having the gift of the Spirit but without the perfect completion of God’s will for himself and for the world in which he lives. The tension of having the Spirit and living in an imperfect world leads Paul to groan, and that is the world in which you and I live every day of our lives.

When I was in Seminary, many of us wondered out loud why it was, with all the services, all the prayers, all the Christians, and all the Eucharists, that we still had conflicts, misunderstandings, competition, and gossip which was at times untrue. This is the very problem Paul faces in the Epistle today.

His answer to the problem is that we have the gift of the Spirit, which includes the hope that in time God’s perfect will, will be done. When we kneel and do not know what to pray, the Spirit “intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”[2] When we kneel and do not know what to pray, “God…knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”[3]

Saint Paul comes to terms with the tension of having the Spirit and living in a wicked and evil world by understanding that the Spirit prays for us and prays for us according to the will of God for us.

In other words, when we feel powerless and incapacitated, the Spirit intercedes on our behalf: the prayer that we do not even know how to pray is being offered for us by the Spirit who prays according to the will of God. On the cross and in our daily lives, God reaches us and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

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[1] Romans 8:23.

[2] Romans 8:26.

[3] Romans 8:27.