Religion and Change

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.
Acts 2:17 = Joel 2:28

I have just been reading a novel in which one of the characters is said "to believe in change as if it were a religion" (The Accidental Tourist). Some in the church today seem to think that change is a religion or has taken the place of religion. A few years ago I asked a colleague in the priesthood what she considered to be the main issue confronting the church. She replied simply, "Old church, new church."

Now the story of Pentecost is all about religion and change, but its message, as I understand it, is not that incessant change is the solution for our religious doldrums. On the contrary, it is the other way around: fruitful change comes about through religion, as John Wesley understood religion: the experience of God. (Today we mark the 300th anniversary of Wesley's birth on June 8, 1703.)

Change, in the sense of human transformation, is not produced by liturgical commissions or episcopal conferences. Such change is produced by God, and, like all God's wondrous works, it comes about suddenly and unpredictably. The Fourth Gospel plays on the fact that the same Greek word, pneuma, means both "spirit" and "wind."

The spirit/wind blows where it will,
and you hear the sound of it,
but you do not know whence it comes
or whither it goes.
John 3:8

The apostles, gathered together in the upper room in Jerusalem, heard a sound from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind (Acts 2:1-2). Luke's concern in this narrative seems to be the miraculous reversal of the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). The Jewish pilgrims who have come up to Jerusalem from all over the Roman world to celebrate the feast of Pentecost hear the apostles speaking in their own several languages (Acts 2:5-11).

This miraculous gift of tongues marks the beginning of the Christian mission, when Peter preaches the good news of Jesus to the assembled multitude (Acts 2:14-36). Those same apostles who had abandoned their master in his hour of need (Mark 14:50 par), those same apostles who had fled from Jerusalem in despair after the crucifixion (Luke 24:13-14; 20-21), those same apostles who had hidden behind locked doors for fear of the Jews (John 20:19), those same apostles now preach Jesus openly, without fear or shame. This is real change; this is genuine transformation, and it is the work of God, not of man. It is the fruit of divine grace.

Baptism, according to the Fourth Gospel, is being "born of water and the Spirit" (John 3:5). Confirmation means receiving the Spirit anew, even as the apostles received the Spirit in the upper room (Acts 2:4). But these awesome events, alas, have become routinized; they are viewed as simple rites of passage, with no unpredictable, let alone shattering, consequences.

Yet despite this social overlay, God is still at work in these sacred rites. If we open ourselves to the refining fire of divine grace, our lives too can be changed, as were the lives of the apostles on that first Christian Pentecost.

June 8 , 2003