Pentecost

And so we begin this Christian Aid week on Pentecost a week already full with headlines about world disaster and war.

Pentecost is the day in which a new creation begins. Often churches have been criticized on being too concerned with the spiritual aspects of faith and irrelevant to the world – especially when faced in innocent suffering or disaster. On the other hand Churches and many individual Christians have also been criticised when the faith has been reduced to a collection of academic treatises and intellectual ascents. This Day of Pentecost serves as a correction to both tendencies and speaks into a world where disaster and injustice, oppression and greed in many places still hold sway. There has never been a truer truism when someone once the division between world and the kingdom of God not only is found in the sometimes extreme cases in our world, but also runs straight through the heart.

The home of the Spirit is not in the intellect, the realm of concepts and ideas, not in the exciting or inner sanctum of Spirituality, but it is the guts, the deep core where our passions have their spring – the place of conflict, confusion, vulnerability and desire.

Pentecost is not an appendix to our faith – it is very much at the centre – alongside that of incarnation of Christ – heaven coming to earth; death and resurrection of Christ – the joining up of past, present and future – the ascension – earth going up to heaven – Pentecost – the beginning of the new creation. For in that story – in that drama – Pentecost refuses to let us remain bystanders – too observe the event or story from some critical and safe distance, we are caught up in the very real moving, live and dangerous drama of God in the world.

To be filled with the Spirit is not just to speak in tongues and prophecy and have wonderful worship – great those things are. To be filled with the Spirit is to have your heart broken by the same things that broke Christ’s heart. It is too have you heart beating to the same pulse and rhythm as God’s heart beats and pulsates.

With the coming of the Spirit upon the gathered few, who met in safety and collected holiness – they are shed out into the Streets. They begin to live a life hinted at by Christ – they begin to put flesh on the bones of his words. They live out a life that they have had limited preparation for. They commit themselves to a wildness and vulnerability that will cost them dearly: the contour of their lives will change; their reputation will be endangered; their possessions will transfer ownership and take on new meaning; their lives will become open to the pain and suffering of others as well as the hope of something so profound; they will suffer themselves and many will lose their life; they are on the cusp of something new.

This is their story and it is ours too. We are called to enter into the continuing drama of God’s new creation in the world. To enter into the realities of this world with all its hopes and greatness and all it suffering and disaster.