The Cruel Joke of Pentecost... Today
Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 4:53PM Imagine General Synod, 2009. Mysteriously, prayer gets out of hand.
Hour after hour, late into the night, prayer goes on. Institutional agenda items are forgotten as hundreds of leaders and delegates from diverse backgrounds begin to sense that something is happening.
Nine o'clock AM, last day of General Synod, the doors blast open and out pour hundreds of RCA men and women... eyes blazing, hair flowing back as if straight from a Category Five hurricane.
Folks circle and weave, arms out and palms up... some with hands flailing above their heads. There is weeping, singing, and laughing amid an almost roar of voices and conviction.
Reporters leap into action.
Acts 2:1: "When the day of Pentecost came...." Antique engraving, 1650.
Impatient after days of waiting for edgy quotes about the RCA dialog on homosexuality, media professionals have finally got a story. Not what they expected, but something even more sensational, more juicy... more inflammatory. They go with it.
Sound bites about spiritual "fire" and quotes about "rushing wind" are eagerly recorded. Camera crews pan the college campus for impromptu sermons about sin, repentance, miracles, and "The Last Days. " Frothing religious fanaticism is burned onto network tape and beamed up to satellites in time for the evening news.
Within 24 hours, there's no going back. Lives are changed forever, and the RCA will never be the same.
Within months, follow-up stories recount church splits in Iowa and heresy trials in New York and California. Denominational lawsuits are filed against several congregations that have begun meeting in homes while attempting to sell church property in order to divvy up proceeds among the unemployed.
Pastors and elders have been purged from some communities and have taken to teaching and preaching in parks, sports complexes and shopping centers.
Restraining orders have been issued against many of the most outspoken. Credentials have been yanked, and a special theological commission has gone into emergency session to clarify the nature, times and parameters of Holy Spirit "baptism."
The CRC has pulled from the RCA "Faith Alive" resource partnership. Christianity Today has begun preparing a cover story, and CNN has assigned a crew to investigate how anything so dramatic could happen so quickly to such a respectable mainline denomination.
Lists of names begin appearing on blogs.
Jobs have been lost, families have begun to unravel, religious dialogs have started taking new turns....
Naw.
Wouldn't happen.
God would not have any part in such chaos.
Not today. Not in the RCA. Such a "Pentecost" would be nothing but a cruel joke... probably of the devil.
Besides, it's not needed. The Spirit has already come. We've already been baptized once and for all. Through our lectionary, confessions and creeds, Reformed teaching and preaching is already covering the full counsel of God. Our communities are pretty much missional, and we're well enough already.
Who needs another Pentecost, anyway?
Certainly NOT us. Maybe in Africa or something, but not here.
We'll let God decide.
If He really wants that sort of thing for us, He'll tell us, and then we'll know. Then we'll pray. Then we'll obey and start acting like radicals if we must.
Otherwise, the prudent thing is business as usual.
If God wants something else, He'll let us know.
Pentecost was then -- and this now.
Such are the mysteries of the Kingdom.
-- Dave Cheadle
The 17th century copper plate engraving, "I will pour out my spirit," comes from
"Visscher's Printed Bible," published in 1650
with text in Latin, French, English, German and Dutch.
Below are the English and Dutch rhymes as found on my original. Note: "f" can = "s."
Reader Comments (2)
Dave,
I appreciate the art clips you put in your blog. Interesting to me, how Mary is always front and center in Pentecost art. What do you make of that?
Thanks for your response to my Pentecost post. I've responded on my blog under your comments.
Happy Pentecost!
Steve
Hi Steve, re: Mary in art.
Mary's "central" role in so much Christian art, including Pentecost images, is partly due to the huge dramatic role she occupied in Medieval passion plays, esp. from John's gospel scenes at the cross. These powerful and beloved plays created a Christian "pop culture" (which Roman Catholic theology increasingly reinforced) wherein Mary served as an emotional and "nurturing" counterpoint and balance to all the heavy male roles.
Additionally, some argue that the Holy Spirit's essence leans toward the feminine through several attributes (such as "Healer," "Comforter," "Giver of new life," etc.) in such a way that in Pentecost scenes a centrally placed Mary helps visually state the presence of the third person of the Trinity.
Renaissance artists inherited the power of all the established Medieval Passion Play devices and icons, and exploited and manipulated the Mary figure as one of the most powerful of the lot. Add to this the iconography of "heaven" (so central in cathedral art) where Mary is identified in Revelation 12:2 with the Queen of Heaven, and then it makes sense why Mary gets so much attention in classical art.
Further, the Catholic church commissioned so many paintings, including overstated Countereformation works glorifying Mary in order to make the Reformers appear unsentimentally if not irreligiously rationalistic, that Catholic art more or less established the only "recognizable" images in the market.
Hence, when printers (even non-Catholic) started running woodcuts like the ones that I collect, they reached for familiar Catholic stock images to get the job done in the least number of strokes possible.
These early woodcuts continued to reinforce and deepen expectations for "accurate" representations of Jesus, Moses, angels, etc., as well as for all the most familiar Bible scenes and characters, including Mary.
Later Bible illustrators and religious artists had a choice: either build on the past, or make a statement through deviation. Most pre-20th century artists didn't have anything against Mary per se, so out of respect and commercial self interest, most continued to show her just the way folks expected to find her.
That's a partial answer.... dissertations have been written about this very issue!
Under the Mercy, Dave Cheadle