I must confess that calling Pentecost the birthday of the church seems a bit too tame for me. I don’t mean that Pentecost is something else because it was on this day, a long time ago, that a group of Jesus followers gathered in prayer and had something incredibly important happen. When we call it the birthday of the church, our focus shifts from the powerfully mystical events that happened on that day to a desire to bake a cake and sing some songs.
It’s not surprising that we tend to tame things, especially those things that seem beyond our control. Why focus on flames of fire landing on heads or people beginning to speak in languages from around the world (which all make us a bit uncomfortable) when we can just throw a party.
We like a good party. We don’t like mystery and we struggle with a God that seems more invisible than present among us. When we start focusing on the mystical and the supernatural and the mysterious, we begin to feel overwhelmed. Control, not cleanliness, seems to be closest to godliness.
Yet, in its wisdom, the Church puts us face to face with the Holy Spirit, because you can’t have Pentecost without the Holy Spirit, and we start talking about the third person of the Trinity, there’s part of us that worry that we’ll start breaking out in speaking in tongues or handling snakes. That’s just a bit unseemly for most of us.
But God is a kind of unseemly God, isn’t God? We want to make this day a sort of general celebration that keeps everything safe. But, as Rachel Held Evans has written, “No one lives in general—not even Christ or his church. The Christian life isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of propositions, but about following Jesus in the context of actual marriages, actual communities, actual churches, actual political differences, actual budget meetings, actual cultural changes, actual racial tensions, actual theological disagreements. Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one. The reason the Bible includes so many seemingly irrelevant details about donkeys falling into pits and women covering their heads and Cretans being liars and Jews and Gentiles sharing meals together is because, believe it or not, God cares about that stuff—because God cares about us.”
But we would rather keep all of this under wraps so we don’t lose control. We have our ancients to thank for this since the early church seemed to be more about control than power. In fact, even the word Church has been manipulated so that we can keep everything in its right place. One of the first examples happened when biblical translators made a decision to change the Greek word for Church, Ecclesia (which means a people, a congregation or movement) to the Germanic word Kirche (which means building). If you consider church is nothing more than a building, then if you control the building, you control the people. You can do that when Church is Kirche but you can’t when it is a movement or ecclesia.
Pentecost is the day that, despite our efforts to control, God spoke right into that and said, “Nope. Try as you may, you can’t control the Spirit.” Jesus gave us a warning about the futility of control when he told us that the Spirit blows where the Spirit wants, not where we think She ought to. And so it was on that first day of Pentecost. We can only speculate what it was like but the writer of Acts describes the scene as “out of control. We read of “flames of fire” landing on the heads of those gathered and people speaking in languages representing all people groups around the world. They weren’t just babbling but proclaiming that God cares; God loves and God is about the business of bringing hope to a world grown accustomed to violence, greed and hatred.
I find it ironic that since that day, we have struggled to understand what it was that happened. It hasn’t gotten any clearer in our day and age. How many of us say on Sunday mornings, “it’s time to go to church?” If the church is the people, then you won’t find it on your gps. If you want to see what the church was created to be, how we are supposed to live, take a peek at Acts 2:42.
Compare that to a church in the Czech Republic, that is made from the bones of about 50,000 skeletons. Upon entering the church, you are confronted with tens of thousands of skulls, skeletons, and bones. The walls and ceiling are covered with them. A giant bone chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The pulpit and baptistery are decked out with skulls.
The church was originally a monastery with a cemetery nearby. In 1278, the abbot of the monastery travelled to Palestine and returned with some dirt from the hill of Golgotha. He sprinkled this dirt in the cemetery, and when word of his actions spread, the cemetery became a popular place for people to bury their loved ones. Around the year 1400 a Gothic church was erected within the cemetery, and something had to be done with all the bones that were unearthed during construction. The bones could not be discarded or burned, for this would show dishonor for the dead. So, the bones were stacked in a lower chamber of the chapel. Over the years, the cemetery had to be expanded several times, and frequently, in times of war and during the bubonic plague, mass graves were dug, and thousands of people were buried at one time. Frequently, old graves were dug up to make room for new burials, and again, all the old bones were stacked in the chapel. Eventually, in 1870, a woodcarver was hired to put some order to the mass of bones, and from them he created massive bone archways, garlands of skulls, and a chandelier which contains at least one of every bone in the human body. A fascinating building but is it the church?
I’m pretty sure we won’t replace the Icons in Transformation with a bone-made chandelier but at least people would come in to peek at it. But lest we are tempted, I think it would take too much effort to make sure all the bones would stay in place. But if we can admit this, the church spends time, money and human resources to make sure everything holds together, even if we have two by fours and shingles rather than bones and skulls.
There is nothing wrong with making sure light bills are paid and our buildings and grounds remain in good repair but I wonder if through our diligence we keep things under wrap, trying to control God and God’s Spirit. What would happen if we just let go? What is it we would stand to lose, or gain? We live in what feels like precarious times. As the great theologian Woody Allen said: “More than any other time in history, [humankind] faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
The author Jeremy Myers reminds us that we “have been raised to new life in Jesus Christ. Our bones have been knit together to do amazing and beautiful and wonderful things! We are part of God’s church, God’s plan for this world. We have a leading role in the most amazing story ever told. We have been brought back to life so that we can carry forward the story of God. What will we do now? I, and all creation with me, cannot wait to find out. Rise up, O church of God! Have done with lesser things; Give heart and mind and soul and strength to serve the King of kings.”
Myers, Jeremy. Skeleton Church: A Bare-Bones Definition of Church (Close Your Church for Good, Preface) (p. 58). Redeeming Press. Kindle Edition.