Pentecost - Holy Spirit, breathe fresh life into us

Scripture: Acts 2:1-21 or Numbers 11:24-30  • Psalm 104:24-34, 35b  • 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 or Acts 2:1-21  • John 20:19-23 or John 7:37-39

Especially during this time of pandemic and divisive rhetoric, Debi Thomas, in her truly remarkable “I Will Pour Out My Spirit,” gives us a lesson of wisdom and hope as she reflects on the Scripture on this Pentecost Sunday. Click the link “I Will Pour Out My Spirit” to read her essay. Here is a snippet.

“Like the disciples in our Gospel reading for this week, we are huddled together behind locked doors, waiting for Jesus to come among us and say, “Peace be with you.”  Waiting for him to breathe on us.  Waiting for him to speak the words we need so desperately: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  

Pentecost — from the Greek pentekostos, meaning "fiftieth," was a Jewish festival celebrating the spring harvest, and the revelation of the law at Mount Sinai.  In the New Testament Pentecost story Luke tells, the Holy Spirit descended on 120 believers in Jerusalem on the fiftieth day after Jesus's resurrection.  The Spirit empowered them to testify to God's saving work, emboldened the apostle Peter to preach to a bewildered crowd of Jewish skeptics, and drew three thousand converts from around the known world in one day.  For many Christians, Pentecost marks the birthday of the Church.

The story Luke describes is a fantastical one, full of details that challenge the imagination.  Tongues of fire.  Rushing wind.  Bold preaching.  Mass baptism.  But at its heart, the Pentecost story is not about spectacle and drama.  It’s about the Holy Spirit showing up and transforming ordinary, imperfect, frightened people into the Body of Christ.  It’s about God disrupting and disorienting our humdrum ways of engaging the sacred, so that something new and holy can be born within and among us.  It’s about the Spirit carrying us out of suspicion, tribalism, and fear, into a radical new way of engaging God and our neighbor...

But even in that atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, some people spoke, and some people listened, and into those astonishing exchanges, God breathed fresh life.

Something happens when we speak each other's languages.  We experience the limits of our own words and perspectives.  We learn curiosity.  We discover that God's "great deeds" are far too nuanced for a single tongue, a single fluency.

I hope that the Pentecost story compels us, because it's a story for this time, this moment.  As we continue to face the coronavirus pandemic as people of faith, we will be tempted to grow complacent, or to despair, or to turn in on ourselves and forget that we are part of a much larger whole.  We live in a world where words have become toxic, where the languages of so many cherished "isms" threaten to divide and destroy us.  The troubles of our day are global, civilizational, catastrophic.  If we don't learn the art of speaking across the borders that currently separate us, we will burn ourselves down to ash.”