Hallelujah! It’s here. The Day of Pentecost has finally come again. It’s my favorite, you know. Well, of course you know. I won’t let you not know. And, besides, as you often hear me say, Pentecost is never far away…even if it seems not near enough to suit me.

 Why, you ask? For a few reasons, the first of which is the wonderful surprise of it all. Religious life should have surprises, early and often. Don’t you think? The kind of surprises that draw us out of our certainties and limits, and into the realm of what is possible and beyond our knowing. Oswald Chambers once wrote, “The God who made birds did not make bird cages.” On the Day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God was set free to fly where it will.

 Another reason—as our XYZ Acts class knows—is that the Pentecost story in Acts 2 takes us out of the experience the apostles have with Jesus and into their own experience of what his life and power can mean in them and in the world. Hey, and WE are those followers, too. Like them on that day, that power and Spirit can give us bold proclamation in acts and speech it makes us able for.

 The experience of the Holy Spirit is a bit of a pivot, if you will. In the Christian calendar, it marks the shift from “the Story of Jesus” to “the Story of the People of God.” It is also the promise of power redistributed; from what the power and spirit of God in Jesus Christ was able to do, to what the power and spirit of God IS able to do IN US, real time. All of us. Note the extraordinary diversity of that list of nations present. No respecter of persons, this Spirit. More possibilities than we can imagine, omni-competent, face fantastic, wicked smart and well-resourced as we surely are.

Still another reason to love Pentecost is that it answers the question “So Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead—so what?” It does not, however, answer definitively for everybody and always. Instead, Pentecost offers the experience of that day—the confusion, the astonishment, the awe—as a question to live with and live in. If the Resurrection is real, it will be visible in empirical forms in and through us. Can we know how? Perhaps, but only if we can open to and receive what is possible beyond our knowing. If we can be Pentecostal.

OK, that was a mouthful. 

Join us for worship this week, if you can. We will be singing in tongues, and hoping to see you and be seen in our gathering. The Phoenix Sewing Bee will present a Veteran’s quilt to James Holley, this by way saluting those who have served our country and especially those who gave their lives, as is appropriate this Memorial Day weekend.

Love and hugs,

Rev. Liz