Co-missioners,
In this final week of the current Easter season we send you a couple of brief notes by our editor.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Two Pentecost Notes
by Jerome Burce
Passing observation as we approach this coming Sunday—
1. Let’s Get Real
Are the liturgical savants still telling us that Pentecost is the third major festival of the church year? If so, they’re correct in theory, though in practice not at all, at least not in the U.S. Lutheran circles that I’m familiar with. I beat the Pentecost drum for thirty-four years as a pastor at congregations in Connecticut and Ohio. I was surrounded by colleagues who did this too where they served. We all got the same reaction. The saints would smile politely. Then they’d go about their business as usual which, in late spring or early summer when Pentecost fell, did not include time set aside for special festivities at church. As it was, schedules were already crammed with field trips and graduation parties and the kids’ ongoing athletic obligations and even, perhaps, the first weddings of the season, etc. etc. So “sure, Pastor, we’ll be there if we can” the dear ones said, the implication being that the preacher shouldn’t be at all surprised if attendance come Pentecost was scarcely more than it usually is.
Mechelen St – Jan Lucas Franchoys Descent of the Holy Spirit 01
From Wikimedia Commons
I and others spent too much time wringing our hands over this, a folly I admit to for the sake of today’s crop of pastors who I pray will be more sensible than we were. The people we serve—or rather, the people we get to serve, as the Holy Spirit keeps pushing us to say it—are enmeshed in a natal culture that dishes up Santa Claus at Christmas, an egg-bearing bunny at Easter, and not the slightest thing at Pentecost that would make the day worth pausing for if you weren’t a hard-core church nut. No wonder our kids and their parents ignore the day. Comes then a marvel to underscore with them for the rest of the year. It’s that the Spirit they dissed on the Spirit’s big day isn’t dissing them in turn. This, it turns out, is simply not the style of the one and only God of whom the Holy Spirit is a person. It’s not the style of Christ Jesus, this other person of God who breathed the Holy Spirit into his near-dead disciples on the first night of Easter (John 20:19ff) and, fifty days later, unleashed it on the world (thus the book of Acts). God’s style, mirrored by Christ as Luther says (LC:3rd Art.:69), is to endure his chosen ones beyond all reason and to wrap them in a forgiveness that will not quit even when they quit on him. Peter the Denier tasted that forgiveness in all its impossible richness on Easter night. So did his feckless companions. So do their baptized heirs of 2025. This most certainly includes the ones who won’t be in church this Pentecost because other things seemed more important.
Comes the joy I was too doltish to grab hold of in my days of active service. The pastors of these missing folks will get to spend the rest of 2025 flashing God’s style whenever the missing ones do show up. They will serve the Holy Spirit, God and Lord (see Luther’s great hymn) by wrapping these folks in the word of Christ that forgives their sins and invites them to believe that this is so. And when they do believe it, these pastors will look for ways to give the Holy Spirit the credit and praise for making this happen. Again and again they will underscore the Gospel of the God who in all that three-personed way of being and doing refuses to give up on a single one of us.
Which, come to think of it, is flat out wild. Scandalous too, considering how every Christian group out there has given up if not in theory then certainly in practice on other sets of baptized folks whom they find quite unforgivable. This cannot be what Paul was imagining when he spoke of being led by the Spirit (Gal. 5:18). But more on this some other Thursday.
2. Spotting the Spirit—in France of All Places! Etc.
As someone else observed in a conversation this week, gatherings of ELCA Lutherans have a stubborn habit of attributing the decisions they reach, whatever these may be, to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Do Missouri Lutherans do this too? I’m too out of touch with that tribe these days to hazard a guess. It’s enough to notice as the conversation partner did how we of the first tribe wind up blaming God all too often for the bad decisions we arrived at ourselves. That’s what happens when we insist on pretending that “the Spirit told us to….”
Now I mention this merely by way of underscoring a point Luther makes about the Holy Spirit. You can trust that it’s there when Christ is at the center of the conversation. You can spot the consequences of the Spirit’s work when people are grabbing hold of the forgiveness God has authorized in Christ and made available to us through Word and Sacrament. For a refresher in all this see Luther’s treatment of the Third Article of the Creed in his Large Catechism. Do it tomorrow, maybe, as a piece of your own Pentecost preps.
Jochen Teuffel
And in the meantime I point you to a fascinating development I learned about this week through a Facebook post by Jochen Teuffel. Teuffel is a pastor and theologian in Bavaria who taught for several years at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Hong Kong. If you read German, you might want to check out his teeming website. In the post I caught, he drew attention to an article in the May 26 edition of The Economist about a sudden increase in the number of adults who are being baptized in the Catholic churches of France—10,384 this past Easter alone. This was a 46% increase over Easter 2024 and “almost twice as many as in 2023.” Infant baptisms increased dramatically too, again, twice as many as last year and—if I read correctly—ten times more than on Easter 2019. Imagine the joy at Higgins Road if stats like this were suddenly gushing from ELCA congregations.
Ed Schroeder was fond of Luther’s notion of the “Platzregen,” the idea that God in his inscrutability turns the Gospel faucet on or off in this place or that, or to use the metaphor that made sense in the sixteenth century, that the Gospel falls as if from a cloud that moves from place to place as God directs, here dropping its rain and there withholding it. Ed seemed pretty sure that it was drought time in Europe. I can hear him wondering now if God has graciously dispatched a little cloud to hover over France for a spell. This in his view would explain what’s going on there. The Economist, of course, groped for other explanations as their secular dogma obliged them too. What they came up with as possible alternatives to God’s involvement was as unsatisfying as you’d expect.
I for one have always been reluctant to wave the Holy Spirit banner over things the likes of me have ginned up. In this particular case I want to run the banner up the pole. When people show up in any numbers whatsoever to be baptized, the Holy Spirit gets the credit. So too when they confess their sins and meet their crucified and risen Lord in Holy Communion. All of us are people who “cannot by [our] own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ [our] Lord and come to him,” only “the Holy Spirit has called [us] through the Gospel, enlightened [us] with his gifts, and sanctified and kept [us] in true faith.” To see the Spirit in action in 2025, forget what happens at those synod assemblies or district conventions. Look at France instead. For that matter, let’s look at the people we’ll be with this Sunday as they sing their hymns and say their prayers and count on God to hold them in his peace and love through Jesus Christ their Lord. And if I should miss this week’s vision of the Spirit in action because I was the ingrate with other things to do, let me look for it all the more intently when I show up next week in the company of some Jesus-trusting saints.
Enough. To all who read these words, a joyous Pentecost!
