LIVING PRAYER PERIODICAL: Pentecost 2024: The latest edition of the Daily Prayer Project’s Living Prayer Periodical is available for purchase! Pentecost is this Sunday, May 19, so grab your copy soon. The booklet provides a distinct liturgy of scripture and prayer for each day of the week, through August 31, as well as art with accompanying reflections, songs, spiritual practice essays, and, new this issue, a poem! I curate the art and poetry for the DPP. The cover image is cropped from a painting by the Guatemalan artist Juan Francisco Guzmán (it’s reproduced in full in the interior). And the poem we feature, which I wrote a short commentary for to help readers engage it more meaningfully, is “Not Like a Dove” by Mary F.C. Pratt; I’m grateful to the directors for taking a risk with this unusual, even difficult, poem, which rewards those willing to sit with its imagery over time.
+++
SERMON (text only): “When the Spirit Comes” by N. T. Wright: Preached May 23, 2010, at Durham Cathedral, where he was bishop at the time, this Pentecost sermon by the esteemed N. T. Wright is a rousing call to stand, like Jesus, at the place where heaven and earth collide: in the Spirit. Here are two excerpts:
- “The point about Pentecost is that it’s the point at which two worlds collide and look like they are now going to be together for keeps. The two worlds are of course heaven and earth. . . .
The whole point of heaven and earth in Jewish thought is that they are meant to meet and merge. And the point of the gospel story as Luke has told it in his first volume is that Jesus had come to bring the life of heaven and earth together. That is the meaning of the ‘kingdom of God’. Thy kingdom come, he taught us to pray, on earth as in heaven. The disciples, we may presume, had been praying that prayer, among others, in the fifty days since Easter. And now the prayer is answered.” - “When the Spirit comes, the Spirit will prove the world wrong [in how things are run] . . . which is not a comfortable message, and it’s not meant to be. But if we can at least recognise that discomfort, and see it as the thing you should expect when the two worlds collide, we can put our shoulders back, take a deep breath – in other words, breathe in God’s breath – and get on with the task to which the New Testament commits us but in which . . . we feel a strange reluctance.
Of course we can get it wrong, and of course we will find it awkward. But how much more wrong would it be not to try! How much more awkward, when God finally brings heaven and earth fully together, will it be to discover that we had continued to live in the split-level world when we were invited, by Ascension and Pentecost together, to dare and to risk the possibility of bringing them together in our own lives and in our own witness! Because of course none of this is in the last analysis ‘about’ us. If we are embarrassed at the heaven-and-earth conjunction, we are forgetting that we are not, after all, the centre of attention in all this. Jesus went on to say that the Spirit would glorify him, not us: he will take what belongs to Jesus and declare it to us and through us to the world.”
+++
MUSIC:
>> “All Flesh” by Steve Thorngate: This playfully serious song is rooted in Joel 2:28–29, which Peter quotes in his sermon at Pentecost: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days I will pour out my spirit.” Thorngate wrote it several years ago, but this recording, new this year, is the first he’s released, and it’s available only on Bandcamp for now.
>> “Ruach” by Delvyn Case, performed by the Mivos Quartet: Inspired by the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, this sacred concert work for string quartet, writes composer Delvyn Case, “bring[s] to our awareness many different ways ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ can become sonically and dramatic present. Throughout the piece the performers are asked to make various kinds of breath sounds with their instruments and their own voices, blurring the line between music and sound. Overall, the piece emphasizes idea of the spirit as a powerful force that is surprising, shocking, and fundamentally resistant to control.”
>> “Sweet, Sweet Spirit” by Doris Akers, performed by Ruah Worship: Consisting of siblings Joshua Mine, Julia Mine, Erika Grace Izawa, and Marian Mine, Ruah Worship from Japan performs original worship songs as well as covers. I especially love their a cappella arrangements of Black gospel songs. Here they sing a song by Gospel Music Hall of Famer Doris Akers (1923–1995), about the sweetness of the Holy Spirit, who revives communities and fills them with love.
+++
ART INSTALLATION: Fanions et Carillons by Pinaffo & Pluvinage: I learned of this kinetic sculpture by the French artist duo Marion Pinaffo (b. 1987) and Raphaël Pluvinage (b. 1986) in a Colossal article in February and thought of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Fanions et Carillons, French for “Pennants and Chimes,” was commissioned by Fontevraud Abbey and was on display earlier this year in one of the abbey’s twelfth-century chapels. Inspired by the historical striking clocks of churches, the automaton comes to life every half hour, sending fourteen pennants of blue, red, pink, and purple swinging and swirling.
On their website, Pinaffo & Pluvinage write of the piece, “Although its mechanics are simple and rudimentary, using rotational or pendulum movements, it doesn’t produce the sound of bells, but rather animates fabrics. A set of 14 inert pennants awaken in turn to create ephemeral forms that mutate, respond and compose. Like a harmony of chimes creating a melody, this ensemble creates a choreography lasting a few minutes at regular intervals.” Whereas one might associate a certain rigidness and predictability with clocks, in this piece there’s a freedom, with the pennants moving at different rates and occasionally reversing direction.
+++
ARTICLE: “Painting Pentecost: Painter Sawai Chinnawong saturates the outpouring of the Spirit with the colors Thai art traditionally associates with the holy” by Amos Yong and Jonathan A. Anderson, Christian Century: Adapted from the book Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity (Baylor University Press, 2014), this article explores one of the Pentecost paintings of Thai Christian artist Sawai Chinnawong, who adopts and adapts a Thai Buddhist visual vernacular in terms of color choices, design elements, and the gestures and postures of figures. I’m appreciative of how the painting shows both men and women, and even a child, present at Pentecost and being recipients of the gift of the Spirit, as they surely were.
(Related post: “Pentecost art from Asia”)
Some Christians are uncomfortable with art that transposes biblical events into other cultural contexts. But I think it’s a beautiful picture of the global character of the gospel, which has taken root in countries all over the world. As the authors write, in addition to celebrating a historic event, Chinnawong’s Pentecost “prompts us to see this as another event altogether: the outpouring of the Spirit in a room in 21st-century Bangkok rather than first-century Jerusalem. Chinnawong sets the scene here not out of disregard for the historical particularity of the original event but as a means of imagining and visually praying for the Spirit’s presence in his own historical moment. For Chinnawong, the Holy Spirit’s filling is not isolated to a single event, a particular moment, or one place but may be repeated at any time and place and for any people. Thus the circle of believers being filled with the Spirit is repeatedly repopulated and renewed.”
Art & Theology 