Acts 2:1-11 (RM) or 1-21 (RCL; Psalm 104; I Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 or Galatians 5:16-25 (RM) or Romans 8:22-27 (RCL); John 20:19-23 or John 15: 26-27, 16:12-15 (RM) or John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15 (RCL.)
Some years ago when I was teaching college-level theology, I used to have great fun with this passage from Acts chapter 2. I would read it loudly, with vigour and increasing energy,
“We are Parthians, Medes and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Egypt and Libya near Cyrene! We are Jews and Jewish converts from Rome! We are Cretans and Arabs! We are Romulans, Klingons, Borg! Yet each of us hears them speaking in our own tongue!!!”
Then I’d visually scan the class.
Some students would look up from their laptops with a vague “Wait, what?” look on their faces. With some it wouldn’t register. But often a few would break out in mile-wide grins, and I knew that I had found the Trekkers in that class. As the course went on, every once in a while I’d play to them, dropping an obscure Trek reference into a lecture on some aspect of liturgy, delighted that for a few seconds I had them relaxed, smiling and totally on board.*
The point of course was that the mission of the ecclesia gathered in the name of the risen Christ was to all peoples in the known world, not only to Jews and fallen-away Jews. The first century church had a hard time hammering out this point. Peter had described in Acts 10 how he had to overcome his revulsion at Gentiles, whom he saw in his dream as “unclean animals,” before he could answer the call to travel to the home of Cornelius the Roman centurion to preach the story of Christ.
Paul, who would go practically anywhere, and Peter represented two opposite interpretations of the church’s mission – internal (as in, only to Jews) or external (to anybody, Jews included.) They finally reached a truce at the Council of Jerusalem in 50 C.E., affirming the mission to preach the Gospel to all the peoples of the known world.
The Lukan writer has shaped this story to reflect the way the universal mission of the church was understood some years after the lifetime of the historical Jesus. His list of nationalities doesn’t reflect where the Christian faith would actually be planted in the later chapters of Luke, but seems to have copied a pre-existing list of the major nations of the world at that time. The point had to do with the ethnic universality of this faith in a relatively obscure Jewish prophet and miracle-worker, a faith expressible in a wide range of languages and local dialects.
But the Star Trek reference isn’t all that far off base. Look at the stunning cosmic imagery, the incomprehensibly broad and breathtaking scope of the Spirit, portrayed in our liturgical texts for the major feast of Pentecost. The antiphon of the Responsorial Psalm is,
“Lord, send out your spirit, and renew the face of the earth.”
The Pentecost Sequence that precedes the Gospel in the Roman Missal embraces both the cosmic dimension and the richly personal one:
“Come, Holy Spirit, come! And from your celestial home shed a ray of light divine! … O most blessed Light divine, shine within these hearts of yours, And our inmost being fill.”
Our Gospel reading from John 20 shows this cosmic Spirit emanating as a physical breath from the risen corporeal being of Christ, somehow present and perceptible among his friends gathered in the locked room. The second reading from I Corinthians anchors every form of ministry in the all-pervasive and perduring Spirit:
“There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit … in everyone.”
The energy and dynamism of the Spirit gives energy and strength to all our ministry work, all our social justice projects, all of our hope.
Only in Hollywood would one think of evangelizing the Klingons, never mind the Borg. But human imagination today grows out of the fact that our understanding of the universe, though paltry, trains our technology on distant phenomena and stares into vast infinite reaches, far beyond the vision of our ancestors. The Hubble Telescope, as we’ve mentioned before, detected traces of two trillion galaxies, and the Hubble is now obsolete.
What is this Spirit that fills physical space utterly incomprehensible to our tiny human minds? and at the same time, fills and transforms human hearts down through the generations on this tiny, fragile planet? Our ancestors were awestruck. And, even though we know so much more scientifically, so are we.
© Susan K. Roll
*In my final year of teaching, I started a “Theology and Star Trek” discussion group. What great fun 😉
This is an edited version of the Reflection from Pentecost 2021.
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
The line from today’s reflection that has stayed with me is: “The energy and dynamism of the Spirit gives energy and strength to all our ministry work, all our social justice projects, all of our hope.” Many thanks.