Acts 2.1-21: Waiting for the Wind

Just last week several tornadoes went through the city where I live. There were more than a dozen throughout the state. No matter how close we are to Pentecost, no one was interested in having that wind blow through. We always get caught up with Pentecost's sound of wind and tongues of fire (Acts 2:1-4), but when we get that (through powerful tornadoes and downed, sparking power lines) it's more frightening than anything else. Which might be closer to the disciples' response to Pentecost than we'd like to think. 

Though it could have been, the wind of Pentecost was not the destructive whirling wind of a tornado or hurricane (we get those, too, where I live). It was a wind that did something - that blew the disciples' minds. That blew them out of the house where they had been hiding and into the street where they told the story of Jesus Christ. It was a wind that did something. It demonstrated God's power by empowering believers to be witnesses. 

What does wind do in our world? It turns turbines that create power. It cools off a sultry summer day. There was a time when it was wind, in combination with the sun, that dried clothes hung on the line. It was hard to find clean water for washing and almost impossible to find  a breeze that would dry the clothes inside the people-packed buildings. Clotheslines were stretched between buildings, clean laundry was clipped on, and then it was the wind - even as a small breeze - that, along with the sun, helped dry the laundry by moving the fabric to aid in evaporation. The wind had a purpose - it caused a change to the thing it touched.

Ernest Lawson. Harlem Flats (Back Lot Laundry). 1907.

 San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. 

Are we positioning ourselves so that the wind of Pentecost can move us to action, can change us, can help us witness to the story of Jesus Christ? 

Luke and Acts: Something Promised This Way Comes

In the liturgical calendar, May 31, 2020 is both the celebration of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21) and the day marking the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-57). It's an interesting mix. Both are important in their own right, but it's an interesting idea to consider them together. What do these days have to say to one another?

One episode is at the beginning of Jesus' story; the other is at the end. Jesus is present in both stories in a spiritual sense but not walking the earth in either story. Mary, the mother of Jesus may be present in both stories. Though Acts doesn't mention her presence, artists often depict Mary in the midst of  the disciples on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is also physically present at Pentecost and was also active in the early stories in Luke's gospel.

What both episodes recognize is a promise fulfilled. At the Visitation, Elizabeth rejoices that that "the mother of my Lord" comes to her. Elizabeth recognizes that the promise of the Messiah has come. She also recognizes Mary's faithfulness in believing the promise: And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promised Spirit.

Jyoti Sahi. The Pentecost.1983.

Jyoti Sahi draws the stories together in the painting above. In the middle of the flame-like colors of Pentecost and under a descending dove is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary appears to be seated. Where you would expect to see her midsection clothed in white, however, is a mandorla. Mandorla is the Italian word for almond, which describes that seed-like shape. The shape is also called a vesica piscis. In images of the Visitation, Mary's belly is often defined by a shape that is at least reminiscent of the mandorla. Within that shape is Jesus (and in the example linked here, check John's reaction). The mandorla in the painting reminds us that Mary is the mother of Jesus the Christ. Because it is an image of Pentecost, we remember that the church is called to be the body of Christ in the world. 

Pentecost is the seed of the church. The promised power has come. It's not the first of God's promises that have been fulfilled. One more time, the fulfilled promise of God means life and growth. We should all be leaping for joy.  

Genesis 11.1-9: Talk and Tools

You might even have been able to hear them singing as they were building:

The more we get together, together, together

The more we get together the happier we'll be

But not everyone was happier with everybody getting together to build a tower to heaven. So language was confused (Genesis 11:1-9). No one could understand each other any more and building slowed. Slowed. And ultimately stopped. The tower was left to the ravages of time as surely as Ozymandias' vast and trunkless legs. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Perhaps the tower builders didn't know the story of Adam and Eve, whose lives were changed when they sought to be like God. Perhaps they knew but believed that their story would be different. 

Perhaps that's just human nature - to want to leave works and legacies and reminders that you walked the earth. That you were here. Pieter Bruegel saw the tendency in 16th-century Antwerp (Belgium). He paired the commercial development and urban sprawl of Antwerp with the Biblical story of the tower of Babel. 

The artist was commissioned to create several documentary paintings of the construction of a canal in Antwerp, so he put his learnings about construction to work in this large composition (approximately 45" x 61"). On the tower you'll see workers pulling boards up by ropes, horses pulling sleds piled with bags of something, workshops for creating building materials and tools, stonecarvers picking away at rock, ladders leaning against walls and boards spanning chasms.

The tower is based at least in part on the Colosseum in Rome, which at the time Bruegel painted was an abandoned and weed-covered ruin. Bruegel was making the point that what the Romans considered a masterpiece of engineering and architecture was now nothing to brag about. Perhaps the same fate awaited Antwerp's great plans for building and expansion. 

Pieter Bruegel. Tower of Babel. 1563. Vienna: Kunsthistoriches Museum. 
Google Art Project allows a really close zoom onto the details of this painting. Click here.

At the lower left, Nimrod has come to check the progress of his tower. Some of the stone cutters have stopped their work, bowing down to the king. One of the cutters has abandoned his tools on top of the stone on which he was working. But he has left the handle of the hammer and several of the spikes facing toward us. All we have to do is walk into the picture, pick up our tools, and help build this remarkable tower. 

Should we? Should we have walked in and picked up those tools if we were in the Biblical story? Should we have done that if we lived in Bruegel's 16th-century Antwerp? What about now? Should we pick up those tools and go to work with people we may not understand? Human language is never unconfused. The miracle of Pentecost isn't one of speech. It's one of hearing: each one heard their own language (Acts 2:6). The Holy Spirit facilitated hearing. The problem of communication remains.

Bruegel created a second (larger!) version of this subject. Look at Art&Faith Matters on Facebook to see what differences you can see.

For additional thoughts on Pentecost, click here, here, here, or here.

Cultural aside: Is it just me...or does the Bruegel painting look more than a little like Minas Tirith in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies? The source of that structure is supposedly Mont St. Michel, but it feels at least a little bit Bruegel to me. 

Ezekiel 37.1-14: Bones and Sinews Waiting for Breath

Ezekiel 37 is a visually tempting passage. Just ask J.R.R. Tolkien (and Peter Jackson), who invented his own resurrected army of dead bones in Return of the King. Ezekiel also knows as he stands looking at an expanse of dry bones spread across the floor of  a valley. The idea that life can come from what is clearly lifeless is universally appealing.

Italian painter (and architect and inventor and civil engineer and sculptor and ninja turtle and...) Leonardo da Vinci captured the beauty and function of human bones and sinews in his many anatomy drawings. The importance of the figure in Renaissance art made an understanding of human anatomy a necessity for any artist. Leon Battista Alberti, a 15th-century art theorist, instructed artists that they should understand and paint the human figure as it is in nature: a skeleton and musculature that is covered with skin. For Alberti, drawing an external appearance was not enough. Artists needed to understand how the human body worked - bone to bone with connecting muscles.

Leonardo began his anatomy studies in service to his art, but the subject became a separate interest for him. Over several decades in Milan, Florence, and Pavia, he himself dissected more than two dozen corpses. He developed a process of illustration that represented the parts of the body in transparent layers so that the student could understand not just the look of various bones, muscles, and organs, but their function as part of the whole system of the body. Leonardo never published his anatomical drawings.

Leonardo da Vinci. (Left) Skeleton of the trunk and shoulder. Pen and brown ink with wash modeling over traces of black chalk. Royal Library, London, 19012R. (Right) The muscles of the right shoulder. Pen and brown ink with wash modeling over traces of black chalk. Royal Library, London, 19003V.

But no matter how beautiful, how useful, how instructive Leonardo's drawings are (and they are all three of those things), they can't match the amazing moment when God breathed the breath of life into the bones on that valley floor. Bare bones. Sinews on bones. Yes, we are fearfully and wonderfully made, but what a moment when God breathes on us the breath of life!

For additional thoughts on Pentecost, click here, here or here.
For additional thoughts on Ezekiel and the valley of bones, click here.
For a variety of places to see vast collections of bones, visit the Art&Faith Matters Facebook page here.

Acts 10.44-48: Even the Gentiles

The Acts reading for Easter 6B is a little out of order, liturgically. The 10th chapter of Acts is after  Pentecost, but the Revised Common Lectionary places the reading during Eastertide. The disciples have received the Holy Spirit...and so have other people. And that's the problem. The Holy Spirit has been poured out...even on the Gentiles. Some members of the community of faith aren't sure what to do with that.

On the other hand, some are exactly sure what to do. Nothing. Do not give any credence to the idea that the Holy Spirit would ever come to "them." But Peter disagrees. He argues that the Holy Spirit can, indeed, be poured out even on Gentiles. The wording of his characterization of the anti-Gentile faction in verse 46 is different in different translations: Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, (KJV) Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. (NIV) Do I hear any objections to baptizing these friends with water? (MSG). The NRSV offers this: Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people... 

Any objections sounds benign enough. Stand in the way may be a little more disruptive. Forbid water and withhold water are definitely combative. In engineering terms, the community of faith might be seen as building a dam. That's the subject matter of William Gropper's mural for the Department of the Interior. Created for the Works Progress Administration, the mural shows the massive amount of work undertaken to build projects like the Grand Coulee Dam and the Davis Dam. Human workers are frozen in heroic poses as they exert physical effort. Industrial machines like cranes lift and place segments of the dam that have been constructed elsewhere. Time, energy, labor and money are being invested in the creation of this dam.

 William Gropper. Construction of a Dam. 1939. Department of the Interior, Washington, DC.

There are good reasons for building a dam. Holding water hostage - water for crops, people or baptism - is not one of them. 

For thoughts on John 15:9-17, click here.
For thoughts on the Ascension on the Art & Faith Matters blog, click here. For the Ascension on Facebook, click here or here.

Acts 2.1-21: A Day for...Weddings?

Pentecost lectionary readings focus on the day of Pentecost with its locked doors, rushing wind, tongues of fire, preaching and conversion (Acts 2:1-21). So it's interesting that Pentecost has more than one association with weddings, which are not mentioned at all in the text. Pieter Brueghel's painting "The Whitsun Bride", below, calls attention to an old folk practice and an alternate name for Pentecost.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger. The Whitsun Bride. 17th century. Private collection.

The folk practice was the adornment of a village "bride" with particular flowers followed by a parade through the village with the children "begging" as on Halloween. The parade took place the week after Pentecost, which is also called Whitsunday. The ceremony highlighted the Whitsun flower, pinksterbloem (which also means "a girl foolishly attired"), which may be one of several flowers blooming around the time of Pentecost. The combination of weddings and flowers brings to Pentecost more a feeling of Spring, fertility, and new life that is often more associated with Easter than Pentecost.

English poet Phillip Larkin tied weddings to Whitsun in his poem "The Whitsun Weddings". The poem recounts a train journey to London that might be real, imagined or conflated from several actual journeys. The day is Whitsunday, a day which offered a tax advantage for weddings making it an especially popular day for weddings. Several newly-married couples board the train on which the poet (or the persona whose voice is speaking the poem) is traveling.

The day's name, Pentecost, refers to the fifty days that passed between Easter and the day of Pentecost. But Pentecost also was called Whitsunday, contracted from White Sunday, presumably emphasizing the white garments of catechumens who were baptized on Pentecost. However, in England, the root of "white" became confused with the root for "wit" and the association changed from the white of baptismal garments to the wisdom dispensed by the Holy Spirit.

Today we think of Pentecost as "the birthday of the church" rather than a day particularly associated with weddings. But every liturgical day has a history of observance that may take its meanings well outside what we find in the text. How does the association of Pentecost with weddings change the way you think about the day?

For additional thoughts on Pentecost, click here, here or here. For thoughts on Genesis 11:1-9, click here.
How might you picture the power and presence of Pentecost winds through photography? Click on the Art&Faith Matters Facebook link here. 

Acts 2.1-21: About the Fire

The story of the Christian Pentecost (don't forget that the reason everyone was in Jerusalem was to observe Pentecost - or Shavu'ot - as established in Leviticus 21:15ff.) is pretty straightforward, if you can call a sermon that yields thousands of baptisms "straightforward." The disciples are gathered together when the Holy Spirit comes upon them in ways they can see and hear (wind and tongues of fire) and then in ways that ultimately lead them to speak (Acts 2:1-21). For today's celebrations of Pentecost, worshipers are encouraged to wear red, and it isn't uncommon to see streamers or balloons or kites or other objects that can catch a breeze as part of a processional. It is a celebratory day.

The part of the story usually handled most abstractly is the fire. Candles may be lit, but the ability to capture actual tongues of fire on the head of each worshiper is a logistical challenge unless your church is CGI-equipped. So those tongues of fire become streamers or ribbon halos or crowns. But what if you think a strip of red or orange crepe paper doesn't tell the story of the Holy Spirit as fire? That's a problem. Some contemporary painters broaden the presence of the Spirit by showing human figures swept up in swoops of the reds, yellows and oranges of active flame. But another problem can come when the extent of the flame makes the human figures look like they are sinners writhing in Hell rather than Galilean fishermen witnessing to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

How do you think of the Holy Spirit as fire? It is a fire that burns to ash? Is that what will happen to the disciples and their Pentecost fervor? The day is a flashover that will eventually burn itself (and them) out? Perhaps you perceive the Holy Spirit as a carefully portioned tongue of fire, given in reasonable measure to each disciple.

Maybe it helps to borrow the characteristics of another scriptural fire. What if Pentecost's tongues of fire are like the flames of the bush where Moses received his own commission from God? What if the fire of Pentecost is fire that burns but does not consume?

(Top left) Moses by Elden Tefft. 1982. Smith Hall, University of Kansas  (Top right) Charles L. Marshall. Burning Bush, University of Kansas. http://www2.ku.edu/~build/cgi-bin/moses (Bottom) Chagall. Moses and the Burning Bush. 1966. Musee national Marc Chagall, Nice, France. http://en.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/chagall/

Seeing the Pentecost fire in that way might help us prepare for a season of Pentecost rather than a day of Pentecost. The fire does not go out but neither does it consume us until there is nothing left of us.

And yet the fires of the bush and Pentecost are not exactly the same. Or perhaps the fire is the same but the relationship between God and humans is not. Moses stood at a distance, warned from coming closer, watching this miracle of fire as he heard the voice of God. In the Pentecost story, this fire rests on each disciple individually. They are no longer spectators, they are partakers, sharers of the fire. The fire is not a spectacle to be observed but a part of who they now are.

In both events, the fire is associated with God's promise to "be with". To be with Moses as he goes back to Egypt to free God's people. To be with the disciples as they dream dreams and see visions and make disciples of all nations. Fire that burns but does not consume ensures that disciples will not, on their first Spirit-filled day, go out in a blaze of glory. Rather it sparks a witness that against all cultural and societal odds will grow Christ's church. Come, Holy Spirit.

And here's your connection for flame and wind on Pentecost...when laying a fire, light the upwind side so the wind blows the flame into the "fuel".

For additional thoughts on Pentecost, click here, here or here. For thoughts on Genesis 11:1-9, click here.

Suddenly A Rush of Wind

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, 

and it filled the entire house... (Acts 2, Pentecost ABC). 

How would you characterize the wind of Pentecost? Is it a gentle wind that freshens and cools? Is it tornado-like in its force? Does it blow down what is in its way? Does it provide sailing currents for birds and butterflies as they fly along? How would you describe the wind of Pentecost?

Of course there isn't just one wind, there are many. Each is  associated with a particular direction. One place to see all the winds together is on a wind rose, a graphic tool used by cartographers and meteorologists. The wind rose organizes the winds according to their direction of origin. Wind roses may show as few as four or as many as 32 winds.

In the classical world each of the four major winds was named, personified and given particular attributes that made them recognizable. Eurus, the east wind, is shown as a young boy with his cheeks puffed out, blowing a gentle breeze. Zephyrus, the west wind, is also a young person whose face looks merry. Perhaps that is because he is bringing gentle spring breezes. Boreas, the north wind, is shown as an old man and brings the cold north wind. He is often wrapped in a cloak and may have an unpleasant look on his face with his beard crusted with snow and ice. Notus, in Latin called Auster, is the wet south wind of late summer storms. He may look disagreeable as well. Often in his hands is a vessel from which a stream of water flows. The water may be populated by frogs, grasshoppers and other creatures associated with moisture. The chart below shows all the winds, giving several translations of each wind's name and giving each wind it own personality.

Tabula Anemogra Phica Seu Pyxis Navtica by Jansson. Amsterdam 1650. 

http://www.oldmap.co.uk/Anemogra.php

In Athens, the Tower of the Winds (built 100 - 50 BCE) gives form to eight winds, one on each side of the octagonal structure. Built as a timepiece (sundials are on the sun-facing sides of the buildings, and a water clock was inside as a back-up on cloudy days), the structure was extant when Paul was in Athens (Acts 17). The winds are at the top of each wall. 

The eight winds are: North...Boreas...Man wearing a heavy cloak, blowing through a twisted shell;   Northeast...Kaikias...Man carrying & emptying a shield of small round objects; East... Apeliotes ...Young man holding a cloak full of fruit and grain; Southeast...Euros...Old man wrapped tightly in a cloak against the elements; South...Notos...Man emptying an urn and producing a shower of water; Southwest...Lips...Boy pushing the stern of a ship, promising a good sailing wind; West...Zephyros ...Youth carrying flowers into the air; Northwest...Skiron...Bearded man with a bronze pot full of hot ashes and charcoal.

Is one of these how you picture the wind on the day of Pentecost? Young, old, happy, grumpy, pleasant, scouring. How would you characterize the sudden rush of wind?


For additional thoughts on Pentecost, click here, here or here.
For additional thoughts on Genesis 11:1-9, click here.

On the Art&Faith Matters Facebook page, more on Eurus, the east wind, from the Tower of the Winds. Click on the link.