S10 #01 - A free-religious reading of the story of Pentecost - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-free-religious-reading-of-story-of.html

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The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
 
Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

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The story of Pentecost, a name which simply refers to the 50th day after the Passover Festival during which Jesus was executed, has always been taken as a story about the foundational moment of the Christian Church in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ death and putative resurrection and ascension into heaven. It’s the day when Christians believe THE Holy Spirit (notice the use here of the definite article THE here), so it’s the day when THE Holy Spirit was believed to have come down and taken over God’s work from the person of Jesus.

Now, ttoday I’m going to push strongly against that Christian reading, and suggest that this myth might better be understood, not as about the beginning of Christianity — a new religion —, but about the beginning of a dynamic, creative, inquiring and free spirituality among the first followers of Jesus.’ 

But first, let me remind you of the Pentecost story which is found in The Acts of Apostles. Here it is in David Bentley Hart’s translation:

“And, when the day arrived that completed the fifty after Passover, [the Apostles] were all gathered together in one place; and suddenly there came a noise like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting, and there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them, and they were all filled with a Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now staying in Jerusalem were Judaeans, devout men from every nation under the sky; and on the advent of this noise the multitude gathered, and were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying [to one another], “Look, are not all of these who are speaking Galilaeans? And how is it that each of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised—Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and those living in Mesopotamia, both Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia; Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya abutting Cyrene, and visitors from Rome; both Judaeans and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them declaring the great deeds of God in our tongues?” And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, “What does this portend?” But others, ridiculing them, said: “They are full of sweet new wine.” 

And then, in a short speech by Peter, one of the twelve Apostles, he denies that they are drunk and quotes from the Book of Joel to prove this, saying: 

“And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams” (Joel 2:28). 

Importantly, he immediately adds that this would be true even of slaves, whether male or female. So whatever this story is about, it really is about “all [human] flesh”, not just a select national, economic, political or religious class of people.

OK. What continues to strike me about this story is that there is no single flame present, nor any single language being spoken. There are multiple flames, multiple languages, and at least in those who gather outside the room, multiple nationalities. Notice also the use of the indefinite article in connection with the Holy Spirit, i.e. David Bentley Hart points out that Luke writes, “all filled with A Holy Spirit”, not THE Holy Spirit. So, in other words we are hearing about an event that is highly pluralistic nature.

What I take it we are witnessing in this myth is a small group of people, each individually inspired by something that is clearly their own, who are suddenly waking up to the value of learning from each other’s singular inspirations, even as those different inspirations are being expressed in a variety of languages. And here, I think, we may extend “language” to include not simply different natural spoken languages, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin, but also the “languages” of religion, politics, art, music, fishing, tax-collecting, carpentry, and tent-making etc., etc.. True, the Apostles’ individual inspiration was occasioned by a single teacher whom they shared, namely, the Rabbi Jesus, but it’s vital to remember that Jesus seemed to have taught that whoever had faith in him would not only be able to perform works similar to his own, but would be able to go on and “perform greater works than these” (John 14:12). In other words, his teaching was designed to inspire and liberate them to become the best kind of individual human beings they could. As the Japanese Yuniterian and advocate of free-religion, Imaoka Shin’ichirō points out, Jesus, like all of the other great free-religious teachers, both expected and wished for those around him to surpass him, and he certainly never intended to establish an institutionalised religious organisation labeled as Christianity with himself as its founder. The point to understand about Jesus as this kind of free-religious teacher is, again as Imaoka-sensei observed, that they never “lord it over their students. They do not seek to create disciples or followers for themselves. If they create anything, their effort is always to cultivate people who will surpass themselves. That is to say, they actively enter into the midst of their students and devote themselves to the collaborative work of mutual refinement of character.” 

So, I take it that the Pentecost story is not about a new religion being created — in this case, Christianity — but rather about the creation within a local, small community in first-century Palestine, of a new dynamic, creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality dedicated to the collaborative work of mutual refinement of character. This is a collaborative spirituality which can be only be developed through constant conversation between people with different passions, different fires, and who speak different languages. 

Now, I know of no better description of this kind of conversation than that written by Michael Oakeshott in his 1959 essay, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (in “Rationalism in Politics”, Liberty Fund, Carmel, 1991, pp. 489-490). The words of his that you are about to hear, and with which I will finish today’s thought for the day, have for a long time now formed the basic model I try to encourage the Cambridge Unitarian Church to embody in its own free-religious conversations. And, today, on Pentecost Sunday, I also want to suggest that it is this kind of free-religious conversation that was being described in the Acts of the Apostles. That this kind of conversation was eventually suppressed by most forms of later Christian belief is, surely, a matter of huge regret. It is, of course, sad to say that this suppression of free-conversation has also occurred within so many other religious traditions as well . . .

But let’s not linger upon this sadness here and, instead, simply ensure that we continue to play our part in encouraging this kind of conversation, not only within our own community, but also in wider communities who lie outside our church’s walls, just as occurred some 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.

So, here, now, are Oakeshott’s words on free-conversation, in which he says, its participants . . .

“. . . are not engaged in an inquiry or debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubt, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter; not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another” (‘Rationalism in Politics’, Liberty Fund, Carmel, 1991, pp. 489-490).

May the dynamic, creative, inquiring, free and liberative conversation continue . . .