PENTECOST SUNDAY C

[cappie]

One of my favourite hymns is “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” by Fr Frederick Faber one verse of which says: “But we make God’s love too narrow, with false limits of our own. and we magnify its strictness with a zeal God will not own.” I think, in part, this is one reason why we might not know God in God’s fullness. We are guilty of making God small enough to fit into the confines of our lives and into the confines of our minds, instead of allowing myself to enter the breadth and depth of God.

In some ways, the Pentecost story of flaming tongues is about this very same breaking down of barriers. God will not be confined by a certain language and so becomes transcendent of it. Suddenly, the words we are using are one and the same. And this is not an erasure – it is not a homogenous system imposed by an empire on another people. Rather, it is a wide-open embrace – God meeting us, exactly where we are.

And in this way that God meets us, language seems particularly significant. We speak of our “mother tongue” not just because language is learned from our parents, but also because there is something about language and the culture it perpetuates that is soul deep. It connects us to our mothers, and grandmothers – it connects us to our ancestors.
This is the way God speaks to us, and longs to have relationship with us. In God’s fullness, we are swimming in an open ocean, connected to something that feels like home. In the ways that are soul-deep, that connect us to who we have been, who we are, and who we will be. In this moment of Pentecost, when tongues of fire appeared over the heads of the disciples, God breaks down the barriers between what is divine and what is worldly, between what is sacred and what is pro face, between what is me and what is you.

Suddenly, we can understand each other perfectly. Suddenly, I see you for who you really are, for the perfect image of God in which you are cast and there are no barriers.  Because we have allowed God to be big and deep and wide and broad, God is doing a new thing.

 I miss God because I do not expect or look for the new things that God does. I do not look for creation anew.   I expect to meet God during my daily moment of prayer, maybe, but forget to see Divine fingerprints in the kindness of a stranger. I miss the ways that God is always with me because I confine God with limits of my own. I stop seeing God travelling with me because I build walls around where God “should” be. I dictate where I think God “belongs”.
Instead of building up these walls, we are challenged by today’s Gospel to be open to seeing the Beloved in new ways. Jesus asks us to open our eyes wider and see anew where God is in our lives. In doing so, we must heed Jesus’ advice, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” I find a certain irony in having the lectionary paring together a reading about flaming tongues of fire with a reading that commands us not to be afraid. Sometimes, the new movement of God can be scary. It can be unfamiliar, and it takes us outside of who we think God to be, to open us up to who God is. As our barriers are broken down, we must hold on to the promise of God, “Peace I give to you – my peace I leave with you.” When our barriers and limitations are broken, there will be an element of the unknown. And yet, in this unknown, we will be embraced –  feeling as if we have finally come home.

1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.

2 There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Saviour,
there is healing in his blood.

3 But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

4 For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

5 If our love were but simpler,
we should rest upon God’s word,
and our lives would be illumined
by the presence of our Lord.