Pentecost Sunday

I did not grow up in a Christian tradition that made a big deal about Pentecost Sunday. In fact, my tradition did not even acknowledge Pentecost Sunday. Besides Christmas and Easter, the rest of the Christian calendar was largely forgotten. As an adult, I find this sad. For Christ followers, Pentecost is a HUGE holiday. We should throw parties and celebrate. In fact, it is one of our biggest holidays that has not been appropriated by culture. You see, on Christmas we celebrate Immanuel: God with us. On Pentecost, we celebrate the scorching tongue of fire, the Spirit: God in us. My friends, this is big news! God is not simply roaming among us and we are left to search for God’s presence, the Spirit of God is alive in each one us. For us, this arrive is amazing, wonderful, and terrible. Of course, I do not use terrible in the sense of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I mean terrible in the sense of its literal meaning: inciting awe or great.

            Take a moment to read through the Pentecost Story in the second chapter of Acts. If we did not know it before, surely we know it now the God who appears in these pages of scripture is neither docile nor tame. This God is not a safe, predictable deity we might imagine. “No, this is the God whose loving sometimes takes the form of scorching.”[1] This is the God whose appearance takes the form of divided tongues, as of fire… and these tongues to not appear to the disciples as some sort of hallucination that comes after eating too much stale Chinese food. No, these tongues of fire rested on those followers of Jesus who hid out in a house together.

Before Jesus left them, He promised the Spirit of God would come to them. Jesus described the Spirit as a Comforter or an Advocate. I can only imagine what the disciples must have been expecting at the appearance of the Spirit of God. If it were me, my first thought of a coming Comforter might have thought of a gentle breeze or a babbling brook. I would not have imagined the Comforter as a rushing wind or a blazing fire. But, perhaps that is the point.

In his book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes a conversation between the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. In this scene, the Beavers are taking the children to meet the great Lion, Aslan. Naturally, the children are a bit concerned about this revelation because they are sensible children and know enough to know that of all the animals one might choose as a helper or a companion, the Lion is at not at the top of the list.

Aslan is a Lion – the Lion, the Great Lion [explained Mrs. Beaver].

Ooh  said Susan  I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.

Safe? Said Mr. Beaver haven’t you been listening to what Mrs. Beaver has been saying> Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.

When the long expected Comforter appears, we are reminded that comfort is not necessarily comfortable. Instead, the Comforter comes to makes itself know in our lives and communities…in the places where we face the most difficult, most raw, most searing challenges. In the presence of the Comforter we find the deepest blessings we could ever imagine or know.

I leave you with this blessing from the dear writer, painter and pastor, Jan Richardson. I pray that as we celebrate Pentecost with the colors of fire: reds and pinks and yellows and oranges, we will dare to allow our minds and hearts to be opened, that we will dare to redefine comfort and allow ourselves to be wholly changed by that which seems uncomfortable.

This Grace that Scorches Us: A Blessing for Pentecost

By Jan Richardson

Here’s one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.

It is stubborn
about this;
do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.

To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.

Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief.
Bring your fear. Bring your weariness,
your pain, your disgust at how broken
the world is, how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting, its wars,
its hungers, its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.

I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.

But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.

See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom

or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you

this is the reason
we were made,
for this ache
that finally opens us,

for this struggle, this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.

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[1] Jan Richardson, Painted Prayerbook: Pentecost, This Grace that Scorches us.