Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
June 8, 2025
Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21
On this Pentecost Sunday: Come Holy Spirit …
and enkindle … in the hearts of your faithful … the fire … of your Love.
Notably, that familiar opening prayer does not call for the Holy Spirit to keep our hearts politely interested during our engagement with the Word of God. Rather, the petition appeals directly to heaven’s Pentecostal fury that sounds like “a violent wind” and appears in “divided tongues, as of fire.”1 Acts 2:3. The prayer asks for this powerful Spirit to make kindling of our hearts – the blazing of wispy, dry weeds – those small, thin sticks that catch to a crackle with barely more than a spark. The prayer asks God’s powerful Spirit to set our hearts on fire: urgently, completely, flashing fast and noisy.
I am among those who find reassurance in the predictable rhythms of our liturgical tradition, and in an out-of-control world, there came a moment2 Feeling the story would direct too much energy and attention away from the sermon and toward me, I did not share it aloud: I halted that pattern of prayer when my family experienced a house fire. One of those unlikely accidents reported on the local news, a lithium battery – which we had dutifully stored with other dead batteries for depositing at the next of our town’s “household hazardous waste” collections – degraded and spontaneously combusted. Thankfully, we were home, the fire alarm sounded, and the firemen’s long hose quickly extinguished the danger. Other than a lost closet, a big mess, and breathing God only knows what in that smoke, we were fine and incredibly fortunate. when I yielded aspiration for authenticity; I began to start my sermons with a different prayer. Adapting a favorite psalm passage recalled from Compline3 From Psalm 31, as rendered in “Compline,” The Book Of Common Prayer (1979), p. 129., I reconciled my preference for Christian worship singed no more than medium-rare, and in the days anticipating Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion – in the chaos surrounding him and those he loves – he describes something similar of “the Advocate.”
Jesus commends to the disciples a Holy Spirit who is a counselor, a companion, and a comforter: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to the you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”4 John 14:27.
Even so, I understand Jesus does not suggest that either he (or we) have tamed a feral force. Surely the Holy Spirit remains wild, more powerful than we can imagine. And Jesus describes how this Holy Spirit burns … how the Holy Spirit consumes as chaff any selfishness remaining in our world and worldview … how the Advocate forges us for God’s fulfillment.
Growing up in Shreveport [a reference that, from here, feels like pointing toward “Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene”5 Acts 2:10.] my family lived in the back corner of a new subdivision outside of town. Given that “summer” in Louisiana persists for most of the year, during junior high I launched a thriving yard-mowing business. In the late ’80s, that neighborhood’s developer poured new streets each fall, where brand new houses – new prospective customers, my friends – were constantly moving within reach of my enterprise.
With the encouragement of both my parents, I paid $10.75 to the good people at Insty-Prints6 Tip of the cap to my friend Max’s dad, who ran that business on Market Street. to run business cards for me, and I was at these new neighbors’ doors – winsome collateral in-hand – before their moving vans had opened their trailers. I soon had more yards than I wanted, and if I was not the richest twelve-year old in the Ark-La-Tex, I sure felt like it.7 When high school approached, I brought on a partner – another boy my age, who lived down the street – and I began to learn the complexity of sharing financial incentives with other humans.
I still consider comprehensive lawn care among the skills I have sharpened most finely in my lifetime, rivaled only by auto detailing and free-throw shooting. Between the edging and the weed-eating, the mowing and the blowing, I like to shape a yard until it appears as a perfectly squared sheetcake of green. Neither success nor excellence came easily, however.
On the first day of summer after my Fifth-Grade year, my father marched me into our backyard, showed me how to crank the lawnmower; briefly demonstrated how to mow; fixed himself a brown beverage in a red-plastic cup on the tailgate of his truck; and then left me to get after it while he retired inside to watch sports on TV.
“This is no big deal,” I thought to myself … just before I couldn’t get the mower cranked. Pulling that *expletive-expletive* cord, jostling the choke and adjusting the throttle, sweating and cursing and, eventually, anger-crying in the Louisiana sun. Exhausted, I finally went inside to ask for help.
“Dad! It’s broken. Will you fix it for me?”
“Nope. It’s not broken. Figure it out.”
“It is broken.”
“Well, then you broke it. Fix it; mow the yard; and then come talk to me.”
I marched back outside defiantly, unsure whether I wanted the lawnmower to crank, so that my competency could be proved; or whether I wanted it to break, so that my indignation could be justified. Whichever might have been better for my soul, by some miracle the mower started, and I mowed the first of many, many blades of grass.
Looking back on those experiences, I am amazed I didn’t lose a foot, or an eye, or something worse: I would dip spark plugs into gasoline when a mower wouldn’t start8 A “trick” my father introduced to me with the commission, “Now, don’t you ever do this.”; I removed all the safety shields from our metal-bladed edger9 *and bolting more than one blade to the edger, so that it created that thicker groove. so that I could achieve a better groove; and I would change the weedeater string with the machine still running, holding its rotating head with one hand and manipulating the wind with the other.
I have an especially clear memory of running out of gas in a neighbor’s yard one Fourth of July, just as a group of families started popping fireworks in the street not far away. Not being immune to distraction, I got involved with the bottle rockets. Sometime later, my client homeowner reminded me of my job I needed to finish.
I recall feeling hurried as I rode my bicycle back to the fireworks and the jobsite, carrying a lit punk in one hand [and yall know what a punk is, right: stick of sawdust and bamboo that keeps an ember of fire for lighting firecrackers, looks like incense …], so I am carrying a lit punk in one hand, and a full gas can in the other … before realizing that I had made an incendiary device of myself. Prioritizing like a true teenager, when I recognized my danger, I dropped the gas can and held onto the smoking punk [because, you know, the fireworks were still more important].
Oh, those days … and oh, these days.
The lying, thieving, death-dealers who occupy our ivory palaces stir an unrelenting chaos intended to exhaust those of us who seek the healing of the world. By this, the corrupt set a trap, establishing a status-quo that temps us to underestimate the strength of our communities, to become skeptics of our devotions’ disruptive power. We fall for this trap: instead of appreciating the subversive power of our Episcopal worship – how that fiery Spirit might be known through the constancy of our commitments – we look past what it means and what it accomplishes for us to dare humility and grace, what it means and what it accomplishes when we gather like this Sunday by Sunday and welcome all people as God’s beloved … welcome all people as God’s beloved … welcome all people as God’s beloved. We lean only into the shield of our prayers’ comforts, rather than trusting the activism of their inspirations.
Increasingly, mainline denominationalism speaks admiringly of a wild God – even demeaning those who would express fear of such a mighty Lord – because we have given into the desire to “fight fire with fire.” We license our hardened hearts, license our judgmental retreat from neighbors with whom we disagree, and we move into the worlds as myopically as those we tell ourselves we are challenging. We use the image of a Pentecostal God as a matter of convenience: dipping sparkplugs into gasoline, we prefer the flash of permission allowing us to behave as badly as those we condemn. So fully do pride and cruelty to cast us, in the rare quiet of our prayers, we face real ambivalence about whether we would prefer the world healed, so that all people would share in our loving God’s highest hopes; or whether we would prefer the world burn to the ground, so that all people would see that we were right all along.
In either case, we tacitly delegate salvation to God’s agency and God’s timeline, and we relieve ourselves responsibility for the Good News. Cussing and sweating and anger-crying, we scream: “It’s broken, Lord! We cannot make those who despise us trade their contempt for love! Every day I feel like a sucker and a fool, loving my enemies, meeting meanness with generosity. None of this does any good. You have to fix it.”
And Jesus once more replies: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to the you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”10 John 14:27.
Trinitarians, no matter the reassuring surfaces of our Episcopal worship … no matter whether we recognize the Holy Spirit power we encounter … on Pentecost and every Sunday, we process to this altar with a lit punk in one hand, and a full gas can in the other – not to set the world ablaze and certainly not to injure ourselves – but to keep lit the thick logs as of winter, warm with God’s love for us, and our love for one another – those stumps we burn during a spring clearing, that smolder hot for the refiner, the crucible that forges us for the transformation of the world: one act of compassion at a time … one Sunday of welcome at a time … one loving foot in front of another, there is no other way! And by those graces we can pray, Come Holy Spirit, and enkindle in the hearts of your faithful the fire of your Love … and we can mean it.
Amen.