Today is Pentecost

Today we celebrate Pentecost, and as I was trying to explain to Alex what it was all about (including why we were all supposed to wear bright red clothes to church today, an innovation in our local parish that creates a really nice effect), I remembered a sermon that Margaret Farley preached two years ago at the annual CTSA convention. I think there is a thread here I want to remember to work with. I want to think about what it might mean to trust the Holy Spirit enough to believe that there could be an underlying, not yet perceived (“already, not yet”), unity amongst our many different languages for religious experience and even more so, for truth. What would it mean to have that trust? I think, for me at least, it would mean that sharing my understanding and experience of the Christian narratives would in no way preclude — would in fact INVITE — people to share their own narratives. And some of those narratives would be Christian, but some — perhaps many — would not be. Still, somehow the sharing, trusting in the Holy Spirit’s creativity and power, would lead to that for which we long, when Christians imagine the Reign of God. That got me to pondering the whole question of moving from the Tower of Babel where unity of voice/language was something God decided needed to be confused, to the occasion of Pentecost, where suddenly everyone could understand each other — even while speaking very different languages. I think there is a thread here I want to remember to work with. I want to think about what it might mean to trust the Holy Spirit enough to believe that there could be an underlying, not yet perceived (“already, not yet”), unity amongst our many different languages for religious experience and even more so, for truth. What would it mean to have that trust? I think, for me at least, it would mean that sharing my understanding and experience of the Christian narratives would in no way preclude — would in fact INVITE — people to share their own narratives. And some of those narratives would be Christian, but some — perhaps many — would not be. Still, somehow the sharing, trusting in the Holy Spirit’s creativity and power, would lead to that for which we long, when Christians imagine the Reign of God.

In other words, there would be a need to share our stories — what some people call “evangelism” — but that need would not be understood as imperial, colonial, triumphal, or any of those other adjectives that have ended up over time contributing to seriously oppressive structures. Instead, we would be sharing our stories to better understand them, and like any kind of learning, the more we share them, the more the stories (and we) would be transformed.

I think this, for me, at least today, is a promise of Pentecost.