Pilgrimage and Pentecost

Sermon for Pentecost, May 31, 2009

Episcopal Church of the Holy Family, Jasper, GA

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson

A pilgrimage is a journey with a destination that has special meaning for you.  You leave your present home behind for a time, and you travel to see someone or someplace that you expect will change you in some way, or, perhaps, will confirm and strengthen your ties or roots to a particular place.  Pilgrimages aren’t purely for entertainment, and often, to reach your goal, you expect some discomfort, you expect to go to some trouble.  The destination and the anticipation are worth it. 

Most pilgrimages have a religious component. You could call many of the people in Jerusalem on that first Pentecost “pilgrims”.  They were following the guidance of the Torah and making one of the prescribed trips to Jerusalem that God commanded faithful Jews to make.

I made a pilgrimage this spring with a group of 20 pastors from all different Protestant denominations and many different states.  We were in Nazareth.  We were in Bethlehem.  We were in Jerusalem.  None of those places are much further apart than Jasper and Ellijay and Atlanta.  We rode in a comfortable bus, and our longest trips were a couple of hours.    But walking from Bethlehem to Nazareth, or even to Jerusalem would be daunting.  Depending on the time of the year, the weather can be extreme.  The hills are at least as steep as those in our mountains, but the terrain of Israel was deforested hundreds of years before Jesus walked there.  It is rocky, dusty, windy, and ruggedly beautiful.  You would stay fit if you walked the way Jesus and the disciples did.  It would be a big commitment to follow the guidance of the Torah about pilgrimage back to Jerusalem for the major religious festivals.  It would have been beyond the capability of most people.   Yet people made the journey when they could, in the company of friends and family, and it was a time of fellowship and celebration.  It was a way of drawing nearer to God and being obedient.  Pilgrimage is something that faithful Jews are commanded to do.

For Muslims, also, pilgrimage, hajj, is one if the five pillars of Islam.  Everyone longs to make a trip to Mecca in his lifetime, and all able-bodied Muslims are commanded to make this pilgrimage in their lifetime if they can afford it.   There they pray at the mosque that is built at the site of the Kaaba, a cubic granite structure that may have been there from the time of Abraham.  When they return, they are honored in their communities as hajji, or hajja.

Christians, of the three Peoples of the Book, are NOT commanded to make a pilgrimage.  I think that the most powerful insight I gained from my pilgrimage to the Holy Land this Spring has to do with this major difference between our Christian faith and Judaism or Islam.  We are not commanded to make a pilgrimage because of what happened at Pentecost. 

Last week, Father Ted preached about the Ascension of Jesus and he said that Ascension is the time when we become aware of the shift in the way the church understands time and space and eternity.  Jesus, having been crucified and apparently defeated by the powers of evil and death of this world, and having been raised to life on the third day as a sign that the powers of evil and death could not defeat him, appeared to his followers during a suitably biblical 40 day period.  Then he told them to wait in Jerusalem for what Luke called “the promise of the Father,” for they were to receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and to take the story of the Kingdom of God and tell it beginning in Jerusalem, and going out concentrically to the uttermost parts of the earth.   He led them out onto the Mount of Olives, just outside of Jerusalem, and, reminiscent of Elijah, he was taken up out of their sight. 

So they waited; and while they waited, they went back to that upper room where, just before his crucifixion, they had shared a final meal with Jesus and he had showed them that in breaking bread and sharing wine he would be present.  In that upper room, they had gathered, fearful and disheartened after his death, and there Jesus had appeared so unexpectedly on the evening of his resurrection.  Then he had appeared there again a week later and Thomas, too, was able to share in the joy.   So that is where they waited again.  I wonder if they figured that Jesus would be back again like the previous time, strangely undeterred by locked doors.  

Just as they could not have expected the presence of the Risen Jesus, they could not have anticipated the presence of the Holy Spirit as they experienced it that day.  John’s Gospel records a conversation between Jesus and his disciples on the night before he was crucified.  Jesus tried to prepare them for this shift in how he would be present to them.  His words are, to my mind, some of the most beautiful and eloquent in the entire gospel.  He says:

       Because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.  Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.

This Advocate, sometimes also translated “Paraclete,” is, in Latin and Greek, respectively, One who is called to stand alongside another to lend strength and to defend a cause of truth and justice.  Jesus promises in that same passage, that he will not leave his disciples orphaned.  They will not be alone.  He will continue to be present. 

But exactly how he will be present, they should not expect to be able to understand.  Time needs to pass.  Things need to happen for it to begin to make sense.  

So the disciples are gathered in the upper room, and the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of God, falls upon them unmistakably.  God’s presence is powerful, as Jesus promised it would be.   The disciples can’t keep from speaking about God’s wonderful works.  They are like the young men and women in the prophecy of Joel, who see visions and dream dreams of God’s mighty presence.  Their joy and their power are contagious.  Three thousand people, residents of Jerusalem and pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean alike, are swept up in this event that we recognize today as the birth of the Church.

St. Paul, in Romans, writes of the Spirit of God--making us present to God, making God present to us!—in a way that is too deep to express in mere words.  This is a closeness to God that transcends the closeness of two bodies.  Jesus, in the Spirit, is closer to us, his followers, than he was when he sat at table with his twelve disciples. 

Paul also speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ.  It took the departure of Jesus for us to reckon God’s presence in this new way.  When we have the Spirit empowering us, dwelling closer than our own breath, then We are the Church.  We are the Body of Christ. 

We are the Body of Christ as much here in Jasper, Georgia, as when we travel to the Holy Land to put our feet on the stones that Jesus walked in Jerusalem.  Walking those ancient roads in Palestine and the streets in Jerusalem gave me chills at times, I admit.  Especially standing on the Mount of Olives.  Especially standing with my feet wet in the Sea of Galilee.  But the greater miracle is that miracle of Pentecost: Jesus is here; the Spirit is here, with us, standing alongside us to strengthen us for the one pilgrimage that we all must take, the pilgrimage of following Jesus here and now.  The pilgrimage of being Jesus’ hands and feet, going to those who are hurting and bring wholeness, stretching arms out in love to those who have lost hope.  

It is a pilgrimage that sees baptism as a kind of launching-off place.  Pray for three precious girls: Emily, Adeline, and Pearl, who will be baptized at our 10:30 Eucharist.  When they have that water of life poured upon them, when they have the sign of the cross made on their foreheads with oil, they will hear these words of power: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  They will have joined us on the only pilgrimage that is demanded of the Christian, a pilgrimage that does not necessarily require us to leave Pickens County.  It is the pilgrimage of living here and now as the Body of Christ.  He is here.  He is among us.  We, the Church, are his Body.  We follow him here.