Christmas and Easter are obvious major church days. Pentecost is decidedly less so. One of our thoughtful members at First Presbyterian asserts that this new century is the century of the Holy Spirit and is frustrated with how we work with the Holy Spirit.
I have never been satisfied with the liturgy of Pentecost. We read it as a day when the doors were blown open, so we try to induce a sense of “holy chaos.” So we tell everyone to wear red, the tradition liturgical color for the work of the Spirit. We may try balloons, or read in different languages, or liturgical dance. Then we move back to the usual service the very next week.To me, it feels as if we are trying to impose a certain sense of the Spirit, even demanding that we can call down, initiate, a spiritual experience.
For over a century, we have seen an upsurge in “pentecostal” groups that emphasize and experience different aspects of the work of the Spirit, as divine gifts.I will not judge those experiences. I will oppose one element that I detect in some of the rhetoric, that such experiences should be normative for Christians. Not long ago, i attended a national discussion on the Holy Spirit for our denomination. I was struck by how much people wanted to share a charismatic experience, but how little they wanted to do to explore other vital elements of the spiritual experience.
Finally, the readings for this Sunday include Ps. 104, one of the great creation psalms. the psalm encourages us to move beyond the aesthetic response to a pretty sunset into the u full expanse of creation and glimpse the workings of the Spirit.Indeed, one could claim the Spirit as the connective tissue between the human and nonhuman elements of the natural world.perhaps we could also use natural images as images of power, instead of a focus on photo-worthy natural beauty, in our own backyard. The early French explorer, , Father Pierre Francois de Charlevoix, wrote of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, "I believe this is the finest confluence in the world. The two rivers are much the same breadth,.. but the Missouri is by for the most rapid, and seems to enter the Mississippi like a conqueror, through which it carries its white waters to the opposite shore without mixing them, afterwards, it gives its color to the Mississippi which it never loses again but carries down to the sea ..." At the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers the volume of water in the Mississippi nearly doubles,
God’s spirit acts as a confluence. Consider using a variety of natural image sot help ease you in consideration of God at work in the creation. god’s world pulses with life and breathand energy, Spirit, every second of existence. Let me close with a quote from the theologian Jurgen Moltmann as he turns 90- "The gift and the presence of the Holy Spirit is the greatest and most wonderful thing which we can experience - we ourselves, the human community, all living things and this earth. For with the Holy Spirit it is not just one random spirit that is present, among all the many good and evil spirits that there are. It is God himself, the creative and life-giving, redeeming and saving God. Where the Holy Spirit is present, God is present in a special way, and we experience God through our lives, which become wholly living from within. We experience whole, full, healed and redeemed life, experience it with all our senses. We feel and taste, we touch and see our life in God and God in our life."
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