It's been a while since I've posted here. But like the rest of the world, we've been doing a lot of things differently over the last couple of months.
I regret having let go of the work I began here so long ago before Holy Week on a non-violent, non-scapegoating, good-news understanding of the cross, Good Friday and the atonement of God and world through Jesus. I hope to get back to it, because it seems to offer a way of seeing through and resisting a lot of the scapegoating, exclusionary politics that troubles the world right now, and especially of peeling away at least a little of the purportedly Christian mask of the alt-right.
In the meantime, though, Pentecost calls.
How do you understand the Spirit of God, especially the way Jesus talks about it and shares it with his followers after he is raised from death?
I used to think of Pentecost as an in-church kind of thing. A kind of enclosed celebration among the special, and a divine blessing of the few. The "birthday of the church" that we turn into a happy party for ourselves.
It seemed to fit with what I used to focus on in the story in Acts 2:
- the believers gathered together in one place;
- the Spirit coming like wind and fire into the room where they were;
- the true believers suddenly overwhelmed by glossolalia;
- and the rest of the world around them (including the "merely religious" and "not-spiritual-enough" folks near them) left gaping at the gift and grasping at straws in their attempts to understand and rationalize what was happening.
Either as you read of it in Acts 2, or experience it today?
These days two other things capture my attention in the story in Acts 2.
One is the public rather than private nature of the occasion and the gift. Yes, the believers come to participate in the Spirit of God in their private space. But as soon as they find themselves empowered to speak by Spirit, it is soon clear the whole point of the gift is not for them to feel good and special within that space, but for them to share something good and special out there, with and for all people across boundaries and barriers of language and nationality that normally would inhibit conversation.
The other is what is shared -- the substance itself of the conversation that begins, and the actual content of the message that Spirit speaks through them to the world.
I used to think Peter's Pentecost sermon was basically an invitation to join the church. To believe in Jesus as they did, sign on to the proper teaching and doctrine, and come in to enjoy the party too. RSVP.
But when I read the story more carefully, and with first-century Judea rather than two millennia of Western Christian tradition in mind, it seems that what Peter talks about is
- how amazed and challenged people were by Jesus' life and work of creating a new kind of community in the world -- open, inclusive, healing, accepting of "the other" and supportive of the poor and weak, all those things that God's prophets always talk about, and that imperial, top-down, exclusionary political and religious authorities and privileged classes and cultures don't like;
- how Rome and Jerusalem conspired to kill him, to show they really are still in charge of the world, and that their way of organizing the world for their benefit is still in effect;
- how God didn't quite agree with that, and instead raised Jesus from the dead, showed him and his way to be the real way ahead, and that the Spirit that animated Jesus is now set loose and at work in the world among all kinds of people, to carry on God's transformation of the political and religious landscape that first drew people to Jesus in the first place;
- and doesn't that thrill your heart enough to want to be open to (and opened by) that Spirit too, wherever you are and whatever community you belong to?
- RSVP
Makes me think that Pentecost is not so much a private party of the elect, as a public rally for the outsiders, the powerless and the poor. Not so much the birth of a church for some, as the birth pangs of a new world intended by God for all.
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