The Day of Pentecost: Grasping at Truth

Acts 2.1-11
Psalm 104:25-35

Romans 8:22-27

John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

I have the privilege this weekend to be spending it with our diocesan iconographer, Joyce Tanner, on an icon course sponsored by Art and Soul right here in Hanford.  In the last decades the icons and the iconography of the Eastern Churches has become more commonly widespread in the west; and not simply the images themselves, but there has been a discovery and incorporation of the Eastern Churches’ devotional and prayer practices surrounding icons.  That notwithstanding, Christianity has always struggled with the appropriateness of images.  The 6^th, 7^th and 8^th centuries, particularly in the East, saw a powerful iconoclastic (literally, “image-breakers”) movement, which pointed out both Judaism’s and Islam’s absolute prohibition on producing any images and believed Christianity should have followed suit.  The “image breakers” were formally anathematized and images declared licit for Christian devotion at a Church Council in 843.  Still, the various “reformations” of the Western Church in the 16^th century introduced a whole new wave of iconoclasm, and has left among many Christians a distrust of images; fortunately this is not the case for Episcopalians.  I say fortunately, because images – properly understood – are foundational to theological language, they are essential in our poor attempts to say anything about God.  Without them we falter into the pits of literalism and fundamentalism.  They liberate us from the world of the definitive or purely intellectual and draw us into a more immediate experience, challenging what we think we know.  As Peter Pearson writes in his book, A Brush with God:  “Icons challenge our perception of what is real….An image points to reality but never exhausts the reality to which it points.”  And so we can think of an icon, an image, as a window which, as we look through it, challenges our ideas about what we believe to be true, or what we think we see before us; a window which allows us to look through it to a more distant reality.  Without such windows, encountering the ineffability of God, the ineffability of ultimate truth becomes impossible.

We need images to speak about God, we need images to speak about God working in our lives.  What Christians who hold to the primacy of the Bible – the Word – and decry images fail to recognize is that words are images too; and the scripture readings for the feast of Pentecost particularly are resplendent with them.  Paul uses images of labor pains, childbirth and adoption in order to begin to comprehend the ongoing process of creation made manifest in us “who have the first fruits of the Spirit”. (Romans 8:23)  In telling the story of the first Pentecost, the writer of Acts uses images of a violent wind and of fire to convey the disturbing nature of the Spirit, and the image of speaking in various tongues to convey God’s will to knit together all people, to convey the comprehensiveness of the Good News as it transcends the divisions of language and cultures.  Like icons, these images fall short of the reality which they seek to represent – an icon of Our Lady is not Our Lady – and yet what other language have we but images with which to approach truths too deep, too mysterious to be fully comprehended?  The deepest truths can never be fully plumbed, their ultimate meaning never fully grasped, and yet God has ordained and gifted the created order, even the works of human hands and minds to be vehicles by which we can approach truth, vehicles by which parts of that truth can be revealed, even experienced.  Ultimately, this is what it means to believe in the incarnation: that because God revealed himself definitively in the human and created person, Jesus of Nazareth, we can trust creation as a continuing vehicle of God’s revelation.  Moreover, that we are made in the image of God the creator, and that we human beings ourselves can create images of all kinds which in their beauty or power, in their magnificence or simplicity can tell us something of the truth of God, of the truth of the divine economy, of the divine glory.

The Pentecost event points to the profound mystery that somehow God has entrusted the his mission of reconciliation to human beings whom he has called into partnership, and that God has shed abroad his own Holy Spirit in order to empower us.  How awesome – in the classical sense of the word – is that prospect.  It is a mystery; because no matter how we approach it and attempt to grasp its full meaning we always fall short, or – if we are fortunate – fall deeper into its ramifications and significance, into its demands and challenges.  When we come into the presence of that mystery and begin to sense its call,  it may feel as if our entire lives have been set on fire, it may feel as if a violent wind is sweeping through our minds, blowing away past failings, past dreams, out-moded plans, inadequate understandings.  In our desire to participate in God’s plan we may find how far need to go, we may recognize the hard work, sweat and tears it may require in order that God’s vision may truly become our vision, in order that something new may come into the world.  We may feel ourselves as if “groaning in labor pains” with the whole of creation as we await the redemption promised.  And so we use the images of wind and fire, of child-birth and adoption – images taken from our experience of the created order – and we use them to articulate our feelings, while the whole time knowing they can only weakly point to the true reality they seek to represent, the true reality in which we seek to participate.

Images, icons, symbols, they are the language – albeit the imperfect language – of ultimate truth, the vehicles through which we can make any attempt to come into the presence of truth, explore its manifestations, while at the same living with the knowledge that in no way can we ever completely grasp it, but rather only approximate it.  Peter Pearson notes, “All our images of God, heaven, the angels, the saints, whether in poetry, prose, ritual, music, or icons, are our limited attempts to speak the unspeakable.”  Now, certainly, there is a problem when we begin to think our images are the realities to which the point – we call that fundamentalism, or more appropriately idolatry, the concretization of an image.  But that is perhaps a sermon for another day, another time.  Today, we contemplate images – verbal or pictorial – as imperfect, but reliable vehicles of truth.  We are invited to contemplate them in their multitudinous forms as windows enabling us to look into the distant horizons of reality, to participate even if only partially in the truth they seek to reveal to us.  They offer us – again, as Pearson describes it – “a glimpse into things through God’s eyes and invite us to enter into the mystery of a world made new by the light of God’s presence.”  Spend some time with an icon, with an image and contemplate truth by its light,  allow yourself to fall into the mystery offered and pray that its partial truth and by his Holy Spirit God will little by little “guide you into all truth”. (John 16:13)