PENTECOST

Pentecost Quilting by Linda Schmidt

Acts 2:1-21
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 7:37-39
Psalm 104:25-35, 37

The Gospel for this Sunday is unusually brief. That is because our attention has to focus on the reading from Acts if we are to celebrate the powerful experience that the disciples underwent on Shavuot, a Jewish festival that occurs in late spring and commemorates God’s gift of the Ten Commandments.

The Christian festival which arose from that 1^st century Shavout takes place fifty days after the Resurrection, hence the name ‘Pentecost’. Commonly regarded as ‘the Birthday of the Church’ it marks the moment at which, following Christ's Ascension the first Christians were inspired by the Holy Spirit in a way that  transformed them into His  Body on Earth. So to celebrate Pentecost is to claim this extraordinary privilege – to be the incarnation and enduring presence of Christ for all humanity. It is also an awesome responsibility, however, since with the privilege come spiritual dangers. Chief among these is the possibility that the way we exercise that privilege makes Jesus Christ an object of the world’s contempt or indifference rather than a figure of hope and veneration.

Unhappily, this has often been the reality. Christians have been so divided, so much at odds with each other, that the glorious commission given to the Apostles has lain hidden behind a screen of intolerance and narrow mindedness. Pentecost presents us with an annual opportunity for real spiritual renewal. Its images of wind and fire invite us to spread our sails to a Spirit that will take us out of the doldrums into which we have fallen, and to burn much more brightly as the ‘lights of the world’.

In an alternative reading for this Sunday from the Book of Numbers, Moses laments the spiritual lethargy of the Israelites and cries “Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!". There could hardly be a more appropriate prayer for Pentecost.