Pentecost Potential

I feel like I've fallen out of time, more so than usual. I am away at Synod Assembly, and while our Florida Bahamas Synod (ELCA) Assembly has been rather ordinary, other synods have not been.  I still have a cast on my arm, which means I'm not sleeping well.  And we're getting ready for a move later this summer, which makes it hard in so many ways to live in the present.

It's a strange time in the life of the nation to come to Pentecost again. I am hollowed out and exhausted. I've been hollowed out and exhausted before, of course. But my low points rarely intersect with a national low point, the way they are now. We are at a time of frequent mass shootings and global pandemic and higher inflation than we've had in decades.

Pentecost visions are more important than ever, aren't they?

The festival day of Pentecost reminds us that great things can happen when the Holy Spirit takes hold of a community. If we need a reminder of that, all we need to do is to look at the state of the church on Pentecost morning, and then think about the spread of Christianity in the decade after Pentecost.

And Christianity was spread by regular people--sure, there were some superstars like Paul. But Paul came and went, and then regular people had to keep the vision alive.

They did.  They kept the vision alive and expanded on it.   Pentecost both celebrates that fact and invites us to welcome the Holy Spirit in to our modern communities.

Pentecost reassures us with the mystical promise of the Spirit. We do not have to know what we are doing; we just need to be open to the movement of the Spirit. Pentecost promises daring visions; we don’t have to know how we’re going to accomplish them. God will take care of that.

God became incarnate to prepare humans to carry on the work of Kingdom creation. And Pentecost reminds us of our job description, to let the Holy Spirit blow into our hollowed out spaces and to fill us with the fire to dream and the resources to bring our visions to life.