"An Elemental Spirit"

 

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost

May 24, 2026

 

            Tom Lehrer graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor’s degree at the age of 18 and his Master’s degree one year later.  He taught math at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and UC Santa Cruz but he’s mostly remembered for his comedy songs.  Learning one of those songs could earn some extra credit points from my high school physics teacher.  I never got past the first few lines, unfortunately, and can’t do even those without notes, but here’s part of it:

“There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum, and osmium, and astatine, and radium
And gold, protactinium, and indium, and gallium,
And iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium…”

Then he runs through the rest of the periodic table and finishes:

“These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard

And there may be many others but they have not been discovered.”

 

            I definitely would have earned the extra credit if this song had cited the elements as they were identified by classical Greek philosophy of the sort familiar to a Greek physician by the name of Luke who traveled with an early Christian convert and missionary by the name of Paul.  Luke, who wrote a gospel that carries his name and a book about the Acts of the Apostles, would have known this list, too: “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”.

 

            Luke tells us how, shortly after Jesus ascended to heaven on the fortieth day from his resurrection, Jesus’ disciples had gathered together

 

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” [Acts 2:2-4]

 

The Holy Spirit had come like wind and like fire.  When Peter tried to explain what was going on, he reached for the words of the prophet Joel, who had said,

 

“In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out 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.

Even on the male and female slaves,

in those days I will pour out my spirit.” [Joel 2:28-29, Acts 2:17-18]”

 

“Pour out” – there’s the water to go with the air and fire, the wind and flame.  And the earth?  That is humankind. That is you and me. 

 

            Way back at the beginning, in Genesis, there are two descriptions of creation.  There is the grand, sweeping one, where it all begins with water and the Spirit when

 

“the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” [Genesis 1:2]

 

Then there is the intimate, hands-on version in the next chapter, where

 

“the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” [Genesis 2:7]

 

God calls the universe into being through his Spirit like a wind on the ocean.  God brings us to life by breathing into us, sort of like a rescuer giving mouth-to-mouth respiration.

 

            In John’s telling, when the disappointed and terrified disciples, exhausted and lost after Jesus’ crucifixion, were huddled behind a locked door for safety, Jesus appeared among them.

 

“Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.  As the father has sent me, so I send you.’  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” [John 20:23]

 

And, Jesus being Jesus, he complicated it by telling them that now that they had received the Holy Spirit through him, they had to forgive people the way he does, and the whole business of building up and sustaining and the occasional miracle-working would happen through the very human, dust-of-the-earth bunch like them and like us.

 

            Somehow, in fact, it even adds to the wonder that is God that his works are done by people who are mindful of their limitations.  The miracle on the day of Pentecost was not that the disciples could speak in foreign languages, but that people understood what they were saying.  The miracle is never what we do, but what God does, either with or without us, sometimes through us, sometimes for us, and sometimes despite us.  Luke’s friend Paul observed,

 

“For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.  For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

 

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” [II Corinthians 4:5-7]

 

            Consider this little nugget of trivia: Sir Arthur Sullivan, the man who wrote the music to The Pirates of Penzance, including the tune that Tom Lehrer stole for “The Elements”, also wrote the music for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”.  That may mean something.  It may not mean anything.  But it’s worth pondering, and I had to fit it in somewhere.