For Wilshire Baptist Church
This past Sunday at Wilshire I wrote the Preparing for Worship essay in the weekly worship folder. Months earlier when I volunteered to write it, I didn’t know it would be for Pentecost Sunday. I also didn’t know the next Sunday would be Father’s Day. Most important, I didn’t intend there to be a connection, but there is.
In the worship folder, I wrote about “The Miracle at Pentecost,” a giant painting on display for years at what is now the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. I told how I first saw it in the 1960s as it was being painted and it stirred my imagination about what Pentecost was and what it means. What I didn’t have room to tell was how I came to know about the painting. Talking to my mother this past week, she confirmed my fuzzy recollections.
My father was working downtown as a purchasing agent for a food company, where he had dynamic relationships with the salesmen from whom he bought cardboard cartons, glass bottles and plastic margarine tubs. He’d often eat lunch with them, and one day one of those salesmen took him to see “The Miracle at Pentecost” painting.
Well, I can just imagine how my father came home that evening all excited about what he had seen and eager for us to see it too. Just the size of the painting — 124 feet long by 20 feet tall — would have been enough for him to load us all up in the car first chance we could to see it. But as a regular Sunday School teacher, self-taught Bible scholar and a voracious reader of all things Biblical and spiritual, he knew the subject of the painting — the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Temple in Jerusalem during Pentecost — made it a must-see, and so we went to see it.
As I wrote Sunday, the painting — or mural as some have called it — was still being completed by artist Torger Thompson and some assistants in a metal building where the museum stands today. For a nominal donation you could go inside the building, entering through a small lobby, and sit in what amounted to athletic field bleachers and look at the painting. We went to see it more than once and sometimes there would be someone on scaffolding working on it.
The painting was finished in 1969 and they built the museum around it and added narration, lighting and sound effects. The seating was improved and when you entered, you sat across from a wall of curtains. The lights were lowered, you could hear the curtain slide open, and little by little the painting came to life. There was orchestral music and then a narration began with the Old Testament prophets speaking of a messiah, continuing on into the New Testament with the birth, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
As the story of Pentecost was told from the book of Acts, different characters were illuminated and identified, and then the sound of people talking and animals rustling increased in volume until the room shook with thunder and wind and flashes of lightning as the Holy Spirit arrived. The pinnacle of the 30-minute presentation was when the theater, as it was, filled with the sounds of people talking in every language imaginable and Peter explaining to all that this was the presence of the Holy Spirit as promised by Christ himself. When the presentation was over – capped by a choir singing a verse of “The Church’s One Foundation” and some final narration – the entire painting was illuminated and you could sit there and gaze at it for a while. The life-size renderings of the characters and the artist’s use of light, shadow and perspective gave the painting an amazing three-dimensional quality to where it felt like you could enter the scene yourself.
Surprisingly, this week I found the audio of the presentation along with pictures and liner notes from an album on YouTube. I learned the soundtrack was composed by innovative Christian musician Ralph Carmichael, and the narration was spoken by renowned actor Robert Lansing. Technical professionals from Dallas, Hollywood and New York put it all together, with funding for the entire enterprise provided by a foundation led by Mattie Caruth Byrd of Dallas’ pioneering Caruth family.
I saw the painting and the presentation a few more times as a young adult and took visiting out-of-town friends and family members to experience it before it was destroyed by a fire in 2005. I remember feeling a palpable ache inside for what had been lost, except the only thing lost was that amazing work of art. The gift of the Holy Spirit, shared with me by my father, is eternal. He started that chain of experiencing and sharing the story of Pentecost and it became a key moment in my journey of faith.
The narration I heard back then and heard again this week ends with these words:
“And the Holy Spirit of God, who changed frightened disciples into men of strength, who worked miracles of love, forgiveness, and peace in those who believe, is in the world today, dwelling in the lives of those who welcome His coming. Come, Holy Spirit. Come.”