It is Pentecost! Today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit as a mighty wind and tongues of fire, upsetting the calm and moving Jesus’ disciples to action. For the past seven weeks, we have been celebrating Easter and the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples, who knew him in the breaking of bread and his coming alive (as it were) in community.
The Easter season as a whole is a coming to terms with Christ’s resurrection—an opening of our minds and hearts to Christ’s presence with us, in us, through us, and our encounters with Jesus in communities of love, support, and mutual care.
And yet, in each of the stories, we’ve encountered the Disciples holed up together. Either in a room, in their boats fishing, travelling the road and conversing in hushed whispers. After Christ’s crucifixion, they have been regrouping and trying to figure out what to do now that Jesus isn’t with them.
In each of the resurrection encounters, Jesus bids them peace, bids them not to be afraid, and encourages them to continue the mission and ministry they undertook together.
Today, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, they are again holed up in a room together. When God’s breath fills the place with a rush of wind and the dancing of the flames of fire that descended on each of the disciples, they are finally emboldened to step back into their role as not only followers but inheritors of Jesus’ mission and ministry. They step out without fear, and proclaim the good news of God’s love for all of God’s children—for ALL people.
One of the things I love about being a parent is how free and fearless my children can be. They’ll go up to complete strangers and just ask, “do you want to play?” Being invited with them into silly games and the freedom of fearlessness, we are given a glimpse of how we also used to be before we grew up and accepted that we had to be a certain way. Yesterday, Luke decided he was going to paint himself. He asked if he could use the face paint, and Jane said yes—only to shortly thereafter find him from forehead to belly button covered in red face paint! They are silly, they are alive, they are free, and they want to share that with us. Whether abandoning our inhibitions and letting ourselves experience the joy of simply playing with them, or watching them do some of the silly things they do, we find ourselves sometimes just wondering, “What are you doing!?” But that’s just it—they’re DOING joy. They’re DOING love. They’re DOING life!
This was the same response the disciples were met with on Pentecost—the people found their freedom and excitement so out of place they mistook them for being drunk. Peter’s explanation may not have held much traction, but the point was well made that through the Holy Spirit, each of us is called as a child of God to share God’s love. Each of us is called as a prophet, filled with the Spirit, and sent out to enact God’s love in our world.
This day of Pentecost, we are reminded that in Christ, we too are called into the freedom and excitement of DOING love. We are called into excitement, we are called into Joy, we are called into being alive! As Paul reminds us, we are called on to remember that we are God’s children. We are called on to remember that the relationship God offers to us is one in which we don’t simply refer to God as “our Father,” but as “Abba” as “Papa.” We are called into the freedom and excitement of being children, of opening ourselves to all the possibilities of God’s presence amongst us, shining from within us and reflected back to us in the faces of all those we meet.
The gift of the Holy Spirit, as promised in today’s Gospel, is a gift of remembering who we are and who we are called to be. It is the gift of being called back into DOING life.
This day, as we and all of with whom we share this planet breath in God’s own breath of life, may we be reminded of the promises we have made in our baptismal covenants, to recognize God reflected back to us in every person we meet, and to enact God’s love in our lives and world.
And may this Pentecost be a day of celebration and joy as we take up God’s call to enact love, forgiveness, compassion, joy, excitement, and to awaken to life again.
Today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit as a wind of chaos, as a fire that ignites our passion and our lives. It is a wind of change that threatens to turn our lives upside down, that threatens to bring us back to life, that threatens to bring us joy beyond measure, that threatens to make us a part of doing God’s love in the world. May that threat become for us a blessed reality as we reawaken to one another, to God, and to life. Amen.
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