Sir Duke, Mardi Gras, and a New Spirit

     The year – 1977. The place, New Orleans, Louisiana, the home of a lot of great jazz. I was there, along with three fellow sailors, for an intercollegiate sailing event, the annual Mardi Gras regatta. So truth be told, we had made the thirty-hour drive as much for the legendary partying as for the sailing. At any rate, we were new to the Big Easy, and come Tuesday morning, Fat Tuesday itself, we set out to drive over to the big parade, Rex, the grand-daddy of them all, the one that ended up down on Canal Street near the French Quarter. But in this era before GPS and cell phones, we got lost, and so we eventually just ended up parking and started to walk. It soon became apparent that we had landed in a part of New Orleans where white folk just did not live or frequent. A big tip-off of this was that everyone we saw was black. Now you have to know that the four of us were all white, from the suburbs, from the North. We considered ourselves to be tolerant and open-minded, and even had friends who were black. But we also had memories of the racial tensions that had violently surfaced during the riots of the late ‘60s, less than a decade earlier, and of course New Orleans was by no means integrated. In fact, as far as we could tell, all the Krewes, the clubs that put on the masked balls and the parades in the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday, were exclusively white. And so despite our cherished open-mindedness, we just knew that we were where maybe we would not be welcome.

            And so we come around a corner, and suddenly are engulfed by a huge crowd.  Pressing forward into us, but not even aware of us, it seemed – all anxiously craning their necks and peering up the street. And then it hit us, right smack upside the head, a blast of music – that tremendous trumpet chorus that kicks-off Stevie Wonder’s just released hit, “Sir Duke.”  

            And then here comes one marching band after another, each topping the previous one in enthusiasm and precision marching – no, that’s not quite right – this was a parade with soul, and while the marchers might be said to have kept formation, in fact they were all dancing down the street. And that soul was infectious – we were all dancing in the street. The parade – all black. The crowd – all black – save for us four blessed white folk who happened to stumble into a place where white folk who thought they knew better would not go. And there was not a shred of racial tension, of apprehension, of fear – we were all, for that short, wonderful morning, bound together by a spirit of joy and community.

            I believe the truth of what happened that day in New Orleans captures the flavor of what that first Pentecost is all about. By “truth”, I don’t mean so much as what “really happened”, but how it felt, what the various elements where, what is seemed like, what it looked like, what it sounded like. The chaos, the amazing variety of peoples that make up the crowd, peoples gathered from all over the nation, from all around the world. And from this diversity, a new community, a community of peace and harmony and joy surely ignited by God’s presence.

            That’s a big part of the meaning of that first Pentecost. At the beginning, the in-crowd, the insiders, the band of like-minded followers of Rabbi Jesus, they are all huddled together in that upper room together, afraid and powerless. And then they are bowled over by a “sound like the rush of a violent wind” – like a might trumpet blast of “Sir Duke” – and they are filled with a new spirit, a spirit that thrusts them out where they otherwise would not be, out into the street among a whole world-wide diversity of peoples, and the Spirit empowers them to reach out across all barriers that divide. Through the Spirit, bridges are built and crossed in a moment, and no longer is there isolation, separation, segregation – now everyone is on the same page, everyone understands one another, no longer are people kept apart by nationality or race or color or gender or background.

            Thomas Merton, in his book Opening the Bible, summarizes the meaning of Pentecost in this way: “That into the confusion of man’s world, with its divisions and hatred, has come a message of transforming power, and those who believe it will experience in themselves the love that makes for reconciliation and peace on earth.”

            This is the jazz of Pentecost. That breaking out of the old forms, that setting aside of the ancient rules, that infusion of spirit that creates new and exciting patterns of the life that really is life, that transforming power that sets us dancing forward together.    The Creator, who in the beginning moved over the waters of chaos and brought forth light and life and a new order, creates still, sending the Spirit to inspire and reconcile and empower and transform.

            So no wonder that some of the onlookers think these Spirit-filled folk were drunk on new wine! Sober folk remain indoors, sober folk stick to their own community’s knitting, sober folk stick to those they consider their own kind.

            But this is what the Spirit does: God’s spirit then, and God’s spirit now, pushes us out from the familiar into the unknown, it shifts our focus from ourselves and our clan to our brothers and sisters who are waiting to meet us out there beyond the comfortable confines of home and club and church, it calls us to wider fields of ministry.

            So on this birthday of the church, this anniversary of that first Pentecost when the church was breathed into life on the rush of the winds of the Spirit, the question for us is the same as it was for the church way back then: “What does this mean?” 

            What would it mean for us in our individual lives, if we were to wonder how we might take this transforming power that is God’s gift to us and let it move us in new ways? What if we were to let God’s empowering spirit pull us out of our self-centered funk, or let it help us let go of that old grudge, or let us seek the forgiveness that we know we need if we are to move on, or motivate us to let go our attachment to all the stuff we think will save us but which we know, in the end, is really just stuff?

            Pentecost happened long ago, and yet Pentecost happens still. The question for us is whether we will reamin on that sidewalk watching, or get out into the street with the wonderful diveristy that God has blessed us with, and dance.

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