Pentecostal Fire

We all know the story of Pentecost: the disciples assembled in prayer, as the Lord Christ had commanded; the mighty blast of wind, bursting the closed doors and shuttered windows open to the world; the heaven-sent flames, setting afire the hearts and minds of those over whose heads they danced; and the miracle of “tongues.” Everyone who heard the first Whitsunday sermon heard it in their own language. Those tongues were the first, but not the greatest miracle of Pentecost. That day the uncertain disciples were transformed into bold Apostles—men who were “sent” (apostle in Greek means “someone sent”). After that Pentecost they would never be the same. From that day, the world has never been the same.

So much of who we are traces to that day, but we’re often uncomprehending. Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday, is, we commonly say, the “birthday of the Church.” It’s the day the Holy Ghost came with power (dunamis in Greek, the word we get “dynamite” from) to the Church, but we seem to have forgotten. We keep the feast, but extinguish its dynamite.

So some Christians, well-meaning but untutored in the Faith, try to recapture the Pentecostal fire by re-kindling some of the fireworks. They “speak in tongues,” declare hopeful prophecies and end up following strange doctrines. They do it because at many times and in many places, the One Church has not lived the Pentecostal promise.

We are timid tenders of the Pentecostal flame. I speak as one of the most timid. I look to my own failings first and with most certainty.

Pentecost isn’t about waving hands in the air or knowing I’m “saved”; it’s not about a smug assurance that my spiritual insights are better than yours. The Pentecostal fire kindles humility and charity. It teaches me that my knowledge and understanding and spiritual experience is relevant to my salvation only as much as it the knowledge and understanding and spiritual experience of the One Church on which the Fire first came. The Pentecostal Fire teaches me that salvation—my personal salvation—isn’t about me.

Pentecost calls us to say, “it’s no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.” The Holy Ghost moves us to put ourselves in His hands—or better—to throw ourselves into His burning flame—a Fire that burns but does not consume. The Twelve Apostles sent by the Holy Ghost, twelve men of modest means and talents, carried the Pentecostal torch and set the world on fire with it. Twelve turned the Roman Empire upside down, and took the Gospel to places which had never heard the name of Rome. They threw themselves into the Pentecostal flames and paid for it with their lives. The fire they passed on still burns today.

They passed it on to us. It burns in the Church, though we often don’t know what to do with it.

The Church—One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic—is the keeper of the Pentecostal fire, but we sometimes become caretakers rather than fire-bringers. Nothing wrong with caretakers, but the Fire wasn’t given us merely to tend.

We are meant to be fire-bringers. Men and women who've been given the Light to spread it. To bring the flaming torch of the Spirit into places where darkness reigns: into lives where faith is gone, to men who are too timid to live, to women who’ve lost their high calling, to a whole world that thinks it’s an end in itself.

The Fire of Pentecost enables us to see beyond ourselves: first, to God Whom we must worship; second, to those around us whom we must love. It’s not easy, it’s not meant to be. You were not created, redeemed and sanctified just for your personal salvation and satisfaction. What a squinty view of the Fire that cleanses and renews the cosmos! We were created to be—each of us—living torches of the Holy Ghost, fire-bringers to a world content to live in darkness and call the darkness light.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“Why Stand Ye Gazing Up into Heaven?”

The Feast of the Ascension of Christ is the feast of His Going Away. The old and delightful iconography of the feast makes a point of it: the Lord Jesus feet are protruding from a cloud that has removed Him from their sight. He’s outta here.
He’s outta here, though, for a reason—rather, for several reasons: all of them good but one demands some pondering.

You know that after His Resurrection, the Lord Christ came and went as He pleased, to the extent that He walked into rooms with thick walls and locked doors, appeared and unappeared as He wanted, and, as I’ve mentioned, His friends were often initially unsure as to Who He was when He did show up. Scripture tells us repeatedly they took Him for a ghost, so He walked and talked with them in the sunlight, sat down and ate with them, gave them His hands still marked with nail prints to poke their fingers through. Whatever had happened to Him, this was no ghost. On that certainty they were willing to bet their lives—which, as the matter of fact, every one of them did.

They knew that He’d been dead “as a doornail,” to use that great old Latin phrase. Now not only was He alive, He was alive beyond what they understood “being alive” to mean. Their Lord, Who’d wrestled with death and won, was surely here now would set everything to rights. Forty days after His Resurrection, He met one last time with His disciples (they didn’t know it would be a Very Long Time before they would see Him again). “When they had come together,” St Luke tells us, “they asked Him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ ”

They still didn’t get it. They were hoping the Lord Who created the heavens and earth would raise an army and kick the Romans out of Palestine. They didn’t understand He was calling them to overturn not only the Roman world, but every human thing that puts itself in the place of God.

So Jesus led them to the top of the Mount of Olives. There, “as they were looking on,” says St Luke once again, “He was lifted up and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” He was gone.

He wouldn’t walk on the Galilean seashore anymore, pray with them in Gethsemane, no more would they hear Him spin out a parable. He was gone. Why?

If He remained with them, their faith, and ours, would have focused on the Amazing Man who died and came back to life. He might have globe-trotted like the Dalai Lama, or ended up 24/7/365 healing the sick, raising the dead and in continual demand as a marriage and family counselor.

He left them so the Truth He’d planted, the One Church He founded, could come to be. No more would His hands be the only hands to heal, His voice the only one to pronounce forgiveness or teach His followers to pray. His hands, His voice, His love, all of which a thirsty world still craves, now come to that world through us.

His disciples looked up longingly toward the cloud, but He was gone. He didn’t stay because His kingdom is not of this world: our hearts, as His disciples today, aren’t meant to be focused here any more than theirs were. The Only-Begotten Son became one of us to lift our gaze from the beauty we can see to the Beauty our unresurrected eyes cannot see. One Day, He will come again, in glory we cannot imagine and power we cannot comprehend. He will come for us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“We Have Seen the Lord!”

On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene encountered the resurrected Lord in the garden outside His tomb. She didn’t recognize Him and took Him for a yardworker.

The evening of that same day, two of the Lord Jesus’ disciples, walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus seven miles off, met a Stranger Who walked and talked with them. Though their “hearts burned within as He opened the meaning of the Scriptures,” they didn’t know Who He was.

After those first days, the disciples returned to Galilee, their homeland. Again and again they saw Him, but didn’t recognize Him.

Yet, when the Lord spoke Mary Magdalene’s name, when He blessed and broke bread at the Emmaus Inn, when He called to His disciples from the shore of the Galilean lake, they did know Him. They knew who He was, not by how He looked, but by what He did.

They didn’t recognize Him because He looked different. His body was changed. Not by the scourging and nails, the bruises and cuts, but by His Resurrection. The Lord’s body was no longer subject to cuts and nails and bruises. His transfigured body was the body of the New Adam, the First-born from the dead. The Lord Jesus emerged from the tomb with the body He had so long before intended for us—for Adam and Eve—an immortal body, no longer in the clutch of suffering or death. “Jesus took a body subject to decay,” wrote St Athanasius the Great, “that our decaying bodies would be clothed with immortality.”

When Adam chewed the pomegranate (or ate the proverbial apple) from the Tree of Good and Evil, he forfeited the chance to eat from the Tree of Life. Both his body and soul, made for immortality, began to change. Having turned from perfect communion with God, the thing for which he was created, Adam unwittingly chose decay, suffering and death. It’s the choice every son of Adam and daughter of Eve (excepting one), has made ever since.

Christ took our nature to change our nature. Again, St Athanasius: “He became like us to make us like Him.” He took our mortality to give us His immortality.

That immortality is not a “spiritual” immortality, a ghost-like survival of the soul after death. The Creed is insistent: “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.” Your body. Mine. We aren’t souls trapped in bodies, as Buddhists believe; in us, the spiritual and earthly meet. It’s that way on purpose. God made us that way. He intends for us an immortality of body and soul. It’s what God meant for us all along. Adam and Eve, and you and I, flubbed it. So God became one of us, to lift us to Heaven. The upcoming feast of the Ascension is a feast of the lifting up of our humanity to God.

Christ’s body changed after His Resurrection. He is now, as St Paul says, “the man of Heaven.” His Resurrection transfigured His body from an earthly one to a heavenly one. One day, pray God, your body—and maybe even mine—“will be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” to be like His. No longer will we be subject to suffering or pain, but that’s the least of it. We’ll be changed to what we were intended to be, not what we’ve made of ourselves. And the Gospel truth—the Gospel Joy—is this: on that Day, we’ll see Him, and recognize Him, and know Him as He is—and He will call us by name, because He knows us, too.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Forty Days for Easter

For forty days after His Resurrection, from Easter morning till Ascension Day, Christ was with His Disciples. We celebrate the forty days, calling them Eastertide. Through the season we sing Easter hymns, exchange the ancient Easter greeting, “Christ is risen! Alleluia!” and are anciently free from days of fasting and abstinence.

Lent was the time for fasting and penitence; now is the time for joy. In the Gospel appointed for the Third Sunday after Easter, the Lord Jesus says so plainly. Speaking to His disciples at the Last Supper, He tells them “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.”

Happiness and joy aren’t the same thing. We’re happy when we find a steak restaurant where “medium rare” really is medium rare, when we receive a letter from an old friend, telling us we’re loved and missed, when we watch as a mama duck teaches her ducklings how to fly. I’m happy when I find my reading glasses. Life is rich with occasions of happiness and flashes of delight.

Christian Joy is something different. Happiness and delight are discoveries—they come and go—but joy is a deep, underground spring, always there, constantly flowing if rarely perceived. Joy and peace are intimates, profoundly related. If happiness lightens our spirit, our anima, joy graces the soul.

Joy is not a sudden discovery but an abiding gift. St Paul counts it as a high gift of the Holy Ghost. “Your joy,” the Lord Christ says to His disciples, “no man takes away from you.”

He was telling them this, on the night in which He was betrayed, because their joy was about to be snatched from them. Within a few hours, He’d be arrested. They would abandon Him and run away in terror. He’d be beaten and mocked, tortured and killed. His broken body would be buried. His shivering disciples would go into hiding. His words about joy were driven from their minds by iron nails and shrapnel-tipped Roman whips.

Then-Easter.

Forty days of Easter, forty days of being with the One Who was dead and now is alive. During those forty days He taught them and their minds began to understand what He’d been saying to them all along. He healed their guilt, freeing them from their sorrow. He taught them the Faith they thought they already knew, breaking the Bread with them and opening the Scriptures to them. Those forty days of Easter became the foundation of the rest of their lives.

They can be the foundation of the rest of ours, too. No less than them, we’re His disciples. We sometimes are as clueless as they were to the meaning of His words. Like them, we sometimes run away and hide for fear.

The most abiding gift of those forty days of Easter was joy. The disciples came to see, some maybe gradually, some maybe all at once, but all with a certainty, that their Lord, Jesus, the Victor over death, had not only overcome death and hell Himself, but He’d destroyed its power over them, too—over all who would ever be His disciples. You and I and “as many as have been baptized into Christ” are free. Not only free from death, but called to joy.

The Joy of Christians is Jesus Christ Himself. Not a sentimental, saccharine joy that gushes about how meek and mild He must be, and so we’ve got to be milquetoasts, too. Joy is no effeminate or adolescent virtue. It’s the virtue of those who’ve been squeezed through the wringer, put out to dry, and who’ve found grace in the breath of the breeze in which they were hung. Joy comes from knowing with a certainty that we belong to God, He’s doing with us what He wants and nothing else matters. That is “the peace of God which passeth understanding,” the pax God holds for all, and the joy which is the Spirit’s high gift.

That’s a feast of forty days, joy a lifetime can’t adequately celebrate.—Fr Gregory Wilcox