“Mary at Pentecost”
By Rev. Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, December 8, 2024
Reading: Acts 1:12-14 & 2:1-4
Some of you look worried. I understand why. We just read Acts, chapter two, and now Reverend Jason's letting the Pentecostal preach about Pentecost. You never know what's gonna happen, do you? I had a friend ask me yesterday, Dayle, are you going to pound on the pulpit when you preach this week? A mischievous grin appears on my face. I might. Could be fun. Some of you are probably looking forward to it, aren't you? You're thinking, hey, I'm just waiting for him to say the word so that I can clap my hands and stomp my feet and start running up and down the aisles.
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't have a charismatic revival meeting planned for today. What I do have planned to speak to you about is two things that you might think don't quite fit together: Mary. Pentecost. Not only do those things not easily fit together in our minds, but they also both seem very foreign to us, don't they? I mean, we can kind of talk about Mary at Christmas, she's a nice lady, virgin mother of our Lord, if you want to be all creedal about it. But we don't do all that other stuff, do we? I mean, we're not really into Mary. That's for the Catholics with the rosaries and the icons and the statues and the devotion. That's what they do. We don't do that.
Then on the other side, you've got the Pentecostal stuff. Well, we celebrate Pentecost, don't we? The birth of the church, the coming of the Holy Spirit. It gets a bit weird when we start talking about tongues, not quite sure what they are. And then we leave it alone and run away from it as fast as we can because that's what the Pentecostals do. That's not what we do. We're the mainline Protestants. We're in the middle. We're the rational Christians, right? We don't go to either of those two poles. We don't go all the way over there to Mary with the Catholics, and we don't go all the way over there to the...tongue-speaking Holy Spirit stuff with the Pentecostals. We keep it nice and reserved in the middle.
And yet, when you read the first couple of chapters of Acts, it seems that both of these poles aren't quite so polarized as we make them out to be. We see them both appear in the same place because, according to the text that we just read, it seems that Mary, the mother of our Lord, was present at Pentecost. And you might ask yourself, what on earth was she doing there? What was Mary's role on the day of Pentecost during the birth of the church? And what does that tell us about who we are and how we are to function as a church? Good question, I'll answer it for you, but we need to go to the story itself.
So, what happens? Well, Jesus died on the cross. He rose again three days later, revealed himself to the disciples and many others. And for 40 days, he was living and breathing and talking and teaching the people of God who believed in him and in his resurrection. Until one day he says that they need to go to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is going to come and give them power to be a witness to the nations. Then the skies open up. Jesus ascends into heaven and they're all standing thinking, okay, now we have to do what Jesus said. So, they go to the Upper Room. Many believe that this is the same Upper Room where Jesus instituted Holy Communion with the bread and the wine, but we can't know that for sure.
The disciples are all there together, the twelve. And the women and Mary and Jesus brothers, and they're praying and diligently seeking God when suddenly there's a sound like a mighty rushing wind that fills the whole room where they're sitting. Divided tongues like fire appear and a light on each one of their heads. They're filled with the Holy Spirit, and they start to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gives them utterance.
Amazing scene, isn't it? When I talked about this at Bible study on Tuesday, I asked them, how does this make you feel? What do you think it would be like to be there? One person said, it sounds magical, out of this world, awe inspiring. And then somebody else says, it sounds a bit frightening. Loud noise like wind, fire appearing out of nowhere. I've heard of a natural disaster, but this sounds a bit like a supernatural disaster. What on earth is going on in this room?
Something they had never witnessed before. And they've witnessed a lot, these people, haven't they? They've been walking around with Jesus for the past few years. They've seen him raise the dead, heal the sick, cast out demons, turn lepers clean, give sight to the blind, help the lame walk, feed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes, walk on water. Then when they killed him, he rose from the dead too. They've seen just about everything. But not this.
We know they didn't know what it was because when the writer describes it, it doesn't even put it into words. They say that it was a sound not of a rushing mighty wind, but like a rushing mighty wind. They were not tongues of fire upon their heads, but something like tongues of fire appeared on their heads.
One thing we learn when we're reading the scripture is that when the Holy Spirit shows up, it's something you can't quite describe. It's something you've never seen before. The Holy Spirit comes, and you have to try to put God into words to describe something like what God is because God is always beyond what we know. Another symbol we use for the Holy Spirit is the dove, right? But if you read that text carefully, it does the same thing. When the Holy Spirit descends, the Bible says, he descended like a dove, not as a dove. God, in Augustine's words, is always greater than we can describe.
So, in this room, there's a loud sound, there are bright lights, there's heat, there's different languages, and you imagine there's something in the middle of fear, excitement, and confusion as they're trying to figure out what's going on. These disciples have no idea what happened. No one in this room has witnessed anything like this before, except... for one woman.
Mary had already had an encounter with the Holy Spirit, hadn't she? Unlike everyone else who was in the room that day, this wasn't the first time that Mary had come into the immense and overwhelming presence of God. This wouldn't be the first time that Mary, the mother of our Lord, had been filled with the Holy Spirit of God. After all, she had walked around for nine months with God's very presence inside her body. She had borne the entire deity of God in her very womb. And so, while the other disciples were standing there trying to figure out what was happening, Mary might have had a smile on her face as she said, I remember this. Something really cool is about to happen. Just you wait and see.
The first time Mary encountered the Holy Spirit in the Bible is all the way back in Luke, chapter one. Sometimes when we think about Mary conceiving Jesus, we imagine something very benign. You know, maybe there's sparkles falling from heaven and boom, she's pregnant. But the Bible says that this is what the angel said to Mary. The angel came to Mary and told her that she would bear a child. And she says, “How can this be since I do not know a man?” And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the highest will overshadow you.” Also, that “The holy one who is to be born will be called the Son of God.” That's incredibly powerful language, my friends. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the highest will overshadow you.” And “the one to be born will be called the Son of God.”
That word “overshadow” is far more powerful than we set our minds to when we read that text, because it's actually quite a rare word in the Bible. It's only used about nine times. Three of those are each of the synoptic gospels describing the cloud of transfiguration. But the first time we see that word appear in scripture is when God descends upon the tabernacle.
In the book of Exodus, chapter 40, we read what happens when Moses has finished constructing God's home among the people of Israel. They'd been traveling from Sinai, had received the word from God, the 10 Commandments on the tablets of stone, they'd made a covenant with God, and God had instructed them to prepare a place where God's name would reside. Meticulous detail, everything measured exactly, a place prepared for God and only for God. This place was to be set apart, it was to be holy, so holy in fact that only the high priests could enter a certain part of it once a year when they'd made specific sacrifices. This place had been built and it was ready to receive the presence of God.
This is how the Bible describes it: “Then the cloud covered the tabernacle of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tabernacle of meeting because the cloud overshadowed it, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.”
Saints, the power of God was so strong in this place that the prophets could not even enter for the amount of God's presence that was there above this tabernacle. In other words, when the Bible uses the word overshadow, it's saying that God has come down from heaven in might and glory and power. Something amazing is happening that you've never seen before.
Now that we understand that, maybe we understand a bit more about who Mary really is. Because it can't just be that she was a nice lady who God chose to be his mom. It must be that Mary was sacred, holy, and set apart vessel made specifically to carry and bear God's presence upon this Earth. I want to put it to you today friends that Mary is in the New Testament exactly what the tabernacle was in the Old. She is the place where God's word resides. The place where God's name rests, the place where God decided to make himself manifest in the world.
That's interesting. But what on earth could that possibly mean for us? Sure, Mary, or the tabernacle is an image of Mary. Sure, Mary's a really important figure in the Bible, but what does that have to do with Pentecost?
Well, here's what I think. I think that she was there to do for the disciples, for the women, for the brothers of Jesus, exactly what she had been doing throughout her entire life. She was there to bear God's image in the world, to birth the Church of Jesus Christ, to teach and to let them know what this thing is that is coming because she knew, and they didn't.
Mary was nurturing, raising, caring, and making sure that when she was no longer there, these people were going to continue with the word that God had given them. There's a reason why we say, blessed is she among women. Because other than the disciples, she's the only one mentioned by name. When we see pictures of Pentecost, we imagine 12 men sitting in a room with fire on their heads and maybe a dove in the sky. But no, these 12 men were all turned watching the woman who knew the Holy Spirit, who could guide them in prayer and in worship. And so, they were devoted in prayer and supplication, the Bible says, together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Friends, I want to put it to you today that Mary is not only an image of the tabernacle, but she's an image of the entire church. Because just as she was set apart, a place where no one could enter, so that God alone could inhabit her and make himself manifest in the world, just as she bore the living word within her and spent her life telling everyone to do whatever Jesus said. Just as she was there at the final moment when Jesus died, when everybody else turned their backs. That my friends is exactly what the church is called to do. Are we not the body of Christ? Are we not the temple in which God resides? Are we not a place set apart only for the worship of God? So that God alone can reside within us, so that the Holy Spirit might overshadow us, so that everywhere we go, Christ goes from within.
This is what the church, my friends, is made to be. This is the image we find at the tabernacle. This is the image we find in Mary and this who we're supposed to be today. So, what was Mary doing at Pentecost? Sometimes I like to think of those tongues of fire as a kind of passing of the torch. She was saying to the 12, to those who were gathered, “I know this sounds like wind. I know those lights that are above your head.” And this is the last time we hear Mary's name mentioned in the scriptures. Because after this, it was the church's job to carry the presence of God.
How do we do as Mary did? We set ourselves apart. We make sure that this sanctuary, this holy place is somewhere where everything we do is for the glory of God and God alone. We live our lives in such a way where God's presence will go with us everywhere we go and touch the lives of the people we meet. We the church are called to be like Mary.
Some people take issue with this idea of perpetual virginity. They think that the idea of the virginity of Mary is to suppress the desires of women. But that's because we pay far too much attention to sex and gender these days. When you read Mary's story, you're not reading the story of ideal woman. You're reading the story of the ideal church, because we are all supposed to be vessels for God's presence. We are all supposed to carry Him within us and travail and feel pain and labour until the kingdom of God is living and walking and breathing in our community around us. May we learn from Mary. May we be like Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.