The Cusps of Things

Reflections on the Lectionary for Pentecost

Pentecost, El Greco, 16th-17th century. Image taken from Wikipedia, in the public domain.

A long time ago, in the 1990s, I used to work at a summer camp. At that camp there was a cabin where those of us who were counselors could go for our one hour off per day. There were snacks, books, games, and couches to lounge on. I remember that there was a game of Trivial Pursuit in that cabin. The game was already old in the 90s, and a lot of its questions were hopelessly outdated, but we still leafed through the cards, quizzing each other in our free time. (Life could be boring before the internet). One question in particular has stuck in my mind ever since. The question asked, which company is the world’s largest buyer of silver? The answer, when the game was made in the 1980s and even when we were playing it in the 1990s, was Kodak. Silver was used in photography, and every time you took a photo you were consuming a small amount of silver, in the form of silver chloride, spread thinly over the film to react with the light through the lens. (That explains why film was so expensive).

Today, the answer to that question would be different. Kodak is still in business, but it went through a major bankruptcy about ten years ago, and it’s a shadow of what it used to be. It has managed to survive, but that survival has very little to do with the things that once made it the world’s largest user of silver. Kodak makes digital cameras, capitalizes on its past reputation by lending its brand to other photography-adjacent companies, and (during and post-pandemic) makes medical supplies. Almost nobody except professional photographers still use silver to take pictures anymore; we use our phones. The world’s largest user of silver, meanwhile, is a murky question these days. I did some research, and the results are unclear, but it seems likely that the world’s largest user of silver today is probably either a Chinese solar panel manufacturer or a medical supply company.

I think about that example a lot, because it points to the difference time makes. What was true about silver in the 1980s and 1990s is no longer true today. Then, Kodak was a behemoth and almost nobody made a living from solar panel manufacturing. Today, Kodak is surviving by licensing its brand, and it’s not uncommon to drive by acres of solar panels every day. Time makes all the difference.

Pentecost is about time and the difference it makes. The Book of Acts as a whole is a story about space and place—the story of a nascent movement and its expansion and movement from humble beginnings in Judea into some of the most important places of the ancient Mediterranean, including Rome itself. Acts is obsessed with geography and distance. But the story of Pentecost is different. Pentecost certainly plays with the theme of space and place, which you know if you’ve ever tried to read Acts 2:9-11 aloud, stumbling over the names of all those localities and ethnicities. But it’s really a story about time—about the unfolding of one thing after another, the sequence of history, and the rise and fall of expectations.

That’s true of most of the texts in this week’s lectionary readings; they’re all about time. These texts speak to the cusps of things—the moments when the world shifts subtly or dramatically, or the times when something altogether new comes into view. With the exception of the Psalm, these lectionary texts are all apocalyptic, in the literal sense of the word: they describe an unveiling or a revelation—something hidden being made known. (Even the Psalm speaks of sending forth spirit and renewing the earth).

Sometimes in my most frustrated moments, I wonder what it would be like to work in an industry or a field that isn’t dying. I’ve never worked for Kodak, but I feel like I probably know something about what they felt like, watching digital photography take off and watching the sales of film plummet through the floor. The two “industries” I’ve worked in (if you can call them that) have been churches and theological education. These two realms are closely linked, and both have been hit hard by declining religiosity, disinterest in institutions and authority, and pandemic-era shifts in the ways people spend their time. In theological education, the rumor mill spends a lot of its time whispering about which schools are struggling, which ones might be going out of business, and which ones are miraculously sitting on large endowments that might help them survive. (It doesn’t help that higher education in general is currently passing through a time of intense crisis). The church world, meanwhile, might be in even worse shape—at least in the Mainline Protestant communities where I have spent a lot of my time. Churches are closing all the time. Just the other day I got an email advertising an “estate sale” for a church nearby; they are closing their doors and putting up for sale all the things you find in an old church building—random flower vases, mismatched silverware, furniture, and lamps. Even among the churches that are not closing, a near-pervasive struggle and malaise surrounds the church world. It’s rare to find a congregation or a denomination that’s legitimately growing or thriving. For a lot of churches, the best you can do is to piece it together and hope something changes.

That’s the thing—things change. That’s what the story of Pentecost is about, and that’s what the other lectionary texts this week are about too—Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, Paul’s words about the groaning labor pains of creation in Romans, and even Jesus’ words in John about the coming of the Spirit of truth, the Advocate. These are all stories of dramatic changes. They are all descriptions of moments just before and just after something important happens, when everything gets turned on its head and all the conventional wisdom goes out the window.

Let’s start with Ezekiel. The 37^th chapter of Ezekiel is one of the spookiest, strangest, and most inspiring passages of the Hebrew Bible. The setting is one of the lowest points of Israel’s history, the aftermath of the invasion by the Babylonians, which left thousands of people dead and thousands more exiled and imprisoned. The Lord takes Ezekiel to a valley in which the bones of Israel’s slain lay bleaching in the sun—the untended remains of those who perished at the hands of a powerful empire. God asks Ezekiel a strange and nonsensical question: Can these bones live? Ezekiel’s answer is something of a shrug: “O Lord God, you know.” But God commands Ezekiel to prophesy life to the bones, which he does, and then Ezekiel sees a bizarre vision of bodies remade and reanimated—the people of Israel come back to life.

In this story, everything turns on time. Both despair and hope are temporal in this passage. The loss feels permanent until it isn’t permanent anymore, and renewal feels impossible until it happens. The answer to God’s question, “Can these bones live,” changes from one moment to the next. This is the point of the vision: that the things that seem certain can, with time, become uncertain—or at least differently certain. Ezekiel begins the passage in despair, and by the end I cannot help but imagine that he feels elated. For those of us who spend at least some of our time in different forms of despair, this is a powerful message. Whether we feel despair on a personal level, or feel despair on behalf of institutions, or whether we feel despair over our own place in the world, Ezekiel’s vision is a reminder that nothing stays the same, and that change is sure to come.

Paul’s words in Romans speak to these enormous moments of change. To give shape to something momentous, Paul turns (as he does more often than you might think) to a mothering metaphor. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now,” he writes. Notice the temporal marker, “until now,” and notice how powerful Paul’s metaphor is. Labor is one of the most fundamental times of change that human bodies can experience; labor is a transitional moment when the past has become untenable and the future is still unseeable. The difference that time makes in labor is the difference between a body in pain and a mother; it is the difference between potentiality and reality. Paul ends that same sentence with a nod to the idea that we are waiting “for the redemption of our bodies,” something that I imagine more than a few people have prayed for in the midst of labor. The redemption comes with time.

And Jesus, in John 15 and 16, also points to the unfolding of time and the changes it can bring. Here Jesus is promising an advocate, which he also calls a Spirit—a presence that will come alongside us and accompany us, but also guide us and deliver messages to us. Jesus in John is mapping time—describing the way our experiences will change as God’s presence with us changes.

But Pentecost’s story is the most temporally powerful of them all. It begins and ends by marking time: “When the day of Pentecost had come,” it reads in 2:1, and “Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” says 2:21. In between those two timestamps, the story of Pentecost turns like a hinge in time. It turns away from a past of division and separation, and toward unity and clarity of purpose. The story turns away from confusion and toward knowledge; it turns from defeat to new vigor. Pentecost is a crucial plot point in the story Acts tells, because it reveals that conditions have changed, that possibilities have broadened, the horizons have broadened, and that old ways of reckoning have been replaced with new ones.

Some people see a sequential unfolding to the different expressions of divine presence: first God (the creator, the “father,” the covenant-maker) was revealed, then Jesus, then the Spirit. The Bible and the Christian tradition both push back against that notion, insisting on co-eternity for all three, but there’s something to the idea that these three expressions—what many people call “the Trinity”—unfold in order, one after the other. Viewed that way, Pentecost is sort of like adding the third note to a chord and hearing it suddenly resolve, or it’s like adding sequence to a set of drawings and seeing them come to life as an animation. Before Pentecost, the Jesus-followers were in an in-between time, uncertain of what would come next, bereft of Jesus’ presence and floating along doing the things they once had done with Jesus. That would have been fine. But Pentecost unlocks something else, and pushes the story onward. The citation from the prophet Joel is a reminder that the third note in the chord is related to the first; in that quoted passage, God promises to pour out Spirit upon all flesh. Perhaps in that moment, everything made sense. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, the story reads that way. The tale was always waiting to unfold; all that was needed was time.

In an age of decline for many of our institutions and practices (and industries), it can be easy to fall into the trap of expecting that things will always be this way. We can fall prey to thinking that the status quo will always hold, and that nothing could ever intervene to change things. And for some—like that church holding an estate sale, or like Kodak selling silver-coated film—that might be true. But it’s also true that time always moves onward, and that you never know when you’re on the cusp of something new. Pentecost is a reminder that radical and unexpected change can come at any moment, changing our expectations, changing our lived realities, and changing our purposes. Perhaps when we celebrate Pentecost, we are not celebrating a moment from the past, but instead the conditions of our future: the reality that time is moving us along, and that the passage of time always brings with it the possibility—the certainty—of change.