Pentecost column

Pentecost is the long season of the church year, as some would count it as moving all the way to the end of the church year in the fall. The season of the spirit, of the spirit touching the church, stretches out in time. Its start often seems forced to me. We move easily into Christmas and Easter, but not this core Sunday of the Spirit touching the disciples and their hearers. We may wear red; the hymns are always good on the spirit of Pentecost, but it van seem a vain attempt to try to manage the energies of the spirit into one special day, instead of seeing the spirit permeating life every single day.    .

Some speak of the day as the church’s birthday, or coming out party. No longer were the disciples locked in fear behind their private gathering, but moved out into a public profession of their way of life. Of course, the distribution of the Spirit rested on each gathered disciple. then, we have the remarkable vista of people with the babble of different languages all understanding the words of Preterit is as if a spirit t United Nations translator allowed them to hear the same message in their own capacity.

I see Pentecost as the opportunity for diversity to be centripetal. Instead of differences making it seem that we fly off in all directions, Pentecost accepts differences but creates relationship. The assigned lectionary readings illustrate this. In Numbers 11 Moses finds that the spirit has spread to other speakers in the camp, beyond the seventy elders God had touched. . Instead of seeing it as a threat, Moses is more than happy to share the spirit of God. This follows Moses realizing that the burdens of leadership were too much for one person to bear. In I Cor. 12, Paul exalts the presence of different gifts in a community, if they can channel those gifts for the common good (v.7).  On a weekend after our partial moving from a worldwide climate agenda, Ps. 104 stands on a simple religious principle of god the Creator. The teeming diversity of life it celebrates is a sign of divine preference. There God’s spirit, the breath of life, animates and renews all things (v.30). I’m struggling through an allegedly simplified book by the physicist Brian Greene. One of the few things I am grasping is that the universe works with a good deal of precision and latitude at the same time. God has built in tolerance into the natural order.

Listen to an eminent theologian: “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.” ― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life:

Life is rarely, if ever, static. The spirit of Life then is always on the move. The spirit adapts to our time in life. the Spirit pervades all of creation. Yes, we are a vital part of that creation.  We are not on our own. We live in a web of enspirited relationships.