Groaning With

Text: Romans 8:22-27, Acts 2:1-21

This is the season of graduation and commencement. Degrees are conferred, marking the completion of years of intense work and focussed energy. It is the end of something, and congratulations all around. But by calling it commencement, we acknowledge that it is a milestone, or a portal, not a destination. We stop for a moment, we enter new territory, but we are not done traveling.

It is a good day to contemplate the feast of Pentecost.

We live in a realm of the incomplete. Plans made but not yet carried out, expectations not yet met, constructions not yet complete, relationships not yet jelled. Someday, we think, but not yet, I will get my desk in order; I have not yet traveled to Africa; I have not yet made amends to the friend I betrayed; I have not yet worked against injustice. I have not yet accomplished, repaired, or enjoyed all that I wish I had.

This is the nature of things for us creatures. Physics, biology, and theology conspire against closure, against wrapping things up. There is not enough time in the day or days in our lives. Though we feel the moments—great and small—come and go, time continues to push us forward at its own pace, not ours. Creation is ongoing and unresolved.

We are not perfect. The world is not perfected. There is inevitably a gap between what is and what might be. Our ills and those of the world reveal this. War, starvation, greed, sickness, sorrow. A misalignment between God’s intent and actual existence. We suffer. People suffer, and the world suffers.

We dream of a different way.

The events of Pentecost are a commencement. The ministry of Jesus was not complete. What his followers had hoped would happen had not. The Gospel stories are ended. But the book of Acts, from which this story comes, is the second book of a series of two written by Luke. After only a short period of surprise, fear, and grief, the followers carry on. New plans, new hopeful plans. Dreams that conform to the dreams of Jesus. Peter reminds everyone of Joel, who speaks of dreams and visions of another time, a glorious day. I will pour out my spirit, says God, upon all men and women.

Pentecost was a feast day that comes fifty days after Passover. Originally a harvest festival, it commemorates the giving of the law, Torah, on Mount Sinai. It is a commencement. Having been redeemed from slavery in Egypt (the story of the Passover), now the Israelites are given the law to guide and nurture them. A plan for the future and a way of being in the life of God. The people in the story in Acts are in Jerusalem centuries later celebrating this gift.

In a house, in one place, the story says, the followers of Jesus gather. We are not told about their state of mind. Mixed up probably, and disappointed, facing an uncertain future. Suddenly something like wind filled the house and something like fire came to each one, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. It was the baptism of sorts—of fire and the Holy Spirit—predicted earlier in Luke by both John the Baptist and Jesus.

Like the ancient event it echoes, it creates a new community. It creates a project of new dreams. The community is heartened, and its dreams fed, by the coming of the Holy Spirit.

This is, we imagine, the same Spirit that moved over the waters in Genesis at the creation of the world, and the same Spirit that Jesus promises in the gospel of John to send to his disciples. It is the same Spirit whose gift we just prayed would be stirred up in Kim. It is, we teach, the same Spirit as the third person of the Trinity of God.

The Spirit is God’s presence among us. Though not physical, the Spirit seems palpable. Noisy and powerful like a wind. Hot like a fire. Near us. Touching us. The Spirit is our companion. I will send you a helper, Jesus says. What all the portrayals of the Spirit have in common is its single-minded connection with creation and especially with the affairs of people. It seems like the Spirit has an assignment and its assignment is us. Humans, earth, things of the earth. The Spirit has been with us from the beginning of the world.

The Spirit is especially bound up in human suffering. Paul tells us this in Romans. Living in suffering and uncompleted aspirations for the world, all of creation is groaning together. And we ourselves groan—it is the same word—groan inwardly. And the Spirit, Paul writes, groans—the same word again, which implies grief and complaint, matching ours—the Spirit groans deeply with us and for us, beyond words.

The Spirit intercedes for us, Paul writes, a sometimes uncomfortable concept for Lutherans. But the Spirit that Jesus sends he calls a helper or an advocate (like a health care advocate—speaking up for us when we cannot; when we are suffering). The Spirit knows us through millennia of keeping company with us. God searches the heart, Paul says, finds what God seeks in the mind of the Spirit. The Spirit is not other-wordly but especially-worldly. The Spirit speaks for each of us because it knows all of us so well. It speaks not only when we do not know how to pray as we ought, as our version translates it, but when we do not know even what to pray, which is a translation just as accurate and, to my mind, more helpful.

The word for Spirit is “wind” or “breath.” We can think of the Spirit as God’s breath, which is a synonym in the Bible for life. All living things look to God for sustenance, says today’s Psalm 104—all look to God. You send forth your Spirit, it says, and they—we—are created, and thus you renew the face of the earth.

The future is not some predetermined mapped-out route upon which we must walk. But we are not bushwhacking alone through the wilderness, either. The future is not only the narrative we create by living through it. We are not helpless, because we have help. We are not directionless, because we have a guide.

It is a gift, not a defect, that life is incomplete, open-ended. Creation continues; God’s breath continues to renew the ever-changing face of the earth. There is still time. We only hope for what we do not see, Paul says. If all the loose ends are tied up and all the tasks accomplished, then what happens to hope? Hope that is seen is not hope, Paul says.

There is nothing, Paul writes a few verses later, that can separate us from the love of God. We are not alone. The Spirit, our helper, advocate, comforter, is here. And accompanied by that Spirit, unsatisfied, incomplete, off we go.