Tis the season. Pentecost Sunday brings it out in me. I notice looking over my recent blog posts that some topics get pursued (repeated?) if not in systematic orderly coverage, then in themes that will not quit, Pentecost definitely one of them. In the Bible it's that worship service that got blown about by a window rattling wind from heaven and what seemed like tongues of fire (Acts 2:3) touching each participant. It's a theme I have lusted after my whole lifetime. It never was lost on me during my twenty plus years of pastoring, and always on my mind when that season came around during my subsequent two decades of long haul trucking, and now in my thinker (yes that thinker still) even in these retirement years. So, perhaps understandably it rears its head once again this year.
Tis the season. After Christmas and its commercialized celebration there is the Epiphany, soon thereafter followed by Lent's forty days plus Sundays of self reflective discipline, followed by Jesus' Palm Sunday riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, and that by the intensified agonizing week of the Passion culminating in the gory Crucifixion and then the glorious Resurrection on Easter Sunday. After a late winter - early springtime church season I am attuned and ready for that burst of heavenly wind and fire. To me it's a natural - exactly what I would expect to light the fire for anyone who might have even a smidgeon of interest in the faith, or church, or religion, those distance terms sometimes used by a casual populace.
Now from my retired vantage Pentecost demands my attention (See Pentecost Still, June 3, 2020) not because it works its way around year after year in cycled calendars (read Julien, Gregorian, or Lunar etc.), but because Pentecost is the fresh burst that absolutely WILL get our attention. I recall from my years of pastoring a number of baptisms on that day, not necessarily because it was the baptism day but because it was a good day for baptism, a most appropriate day to celebrate the willingness of candidates to commit to a faith journey which is - a faith journey - the journey that needs all available help. Why not in context of the faith community and indescribable Holy Spirit outpouring?
I am therefore a fan of the church year as per lectionary scriptures (It will show up Revised Common Lectionary in Google). On many occasions in sermons or in writing, I have declared my open bias that a preacher's leadership is best exemplified by attention to subscribed scriptures rather than 'sermon series' or hobby horses. It is a way of being in community with other churches - neighborly. Preaching needs to be focused on God, not on the preacher. After all, the Bible gives no hint of who had been preaching prior to the fiery outpouring.
This morning I was in Zoom gallery listening to a young lady speaking to her fellow church members in her church. Very eloquent and springtime appropriate, she began with a garden image, planting tomatoes and other vegetables; some will come up, some will not. When the harvest comes we will be grateful and enjoy the delicious fruit and also fully aware some did not even germinate. In this early season we do not quite know which will be the winners or the dead in the ground. She went on to address rather pointedly the circumstance in their church, at present in the search for 'the right pastor.' She told her elders 😊 they may not find the exact perfect fit. She also told her church that this does not at all mean they are doomed. The sermon became an amazing proclamation to keep on trusting the wonder working power of the Holy Spirit. The search may take longer than earlier anticipated and in the meantime some new and unexpected things may also be revealed! Needless to say, my heart burned within me listening to this young lady. She has it right.
Westernized Christianity has spent this last century learning the good life. We came into this North America with our theology figured out - several different doctrinal lineages fought and persecuted into obedience and streamed into a few Catholic and Protestant denominations, and then we pushed the Indigenous and the African Americans into their corners, and then built our churches. It seems to me a new Pentecost is again poised above us. Our North American history needs review, as does South American history. North American Protestantism, especially evangelicalism, is becoming cult like, increasingly dependent on the perfect CEO preachers. South American Catholicism, because of its accommodation of extractive developers in the Amazon rainforests, now has the whole planet in a climate crisis (see Beloved Amazonia:The Apostolic Exhortation and Other Documents from the Pan-Amazon Synod. Orbis, 2019). The Church, either Catholic or Protestant, as per present organizational parameters does not have the full answers required for this world's physical and spiritual survival.
In and among some of this self incrimination I cannot but note the well known and oft quoted O.T. scripture spoken by the prophet Micah,
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly[a] with your God (6:8).
And also another, this one from the N.T. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21).
Looking at today's churches, whether as participant or observer (many former participants now observers in this corona season), it is obvious that the preaching and the pastoral care within churches is absolutely essential. In and among these times-a-changing do we even know what else we need? More than smoothly delivered sermons the Church needs help with its eternal and temporal role. God's Word will be most clearly understood if coming from a Holy Spirit enabled fellowship of believers. I am thinking that group gathered in Acts 2 and also thinking of my tradition, the Anabaptists, claiming simply 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”(Matthew 18:20).
Pentecost enabled that Jewish fellowship to be able to understand each other (whether Parthians or Medes or ..). Coming from various places and in habit of religion (Feast of Weeks) the ordinary habit erupted into thunderous insight, suddenly understanding each other's accents and lingos - like e-translate plus the willing Spirit (?). Only a few chapters later (Ch 10), one of them, Cornelius suddenly experienced in further measure the inclusiveness of this gospel he had just learned and there in Caesarea a revival moved through the community including both Jews and Gentiles.
Maybe it's a little more than us 'two or three' Mennonites at least baptizing our young people when the time is right or speaking in tongues like the Pentecostals. Maybe it's us and the Pentecostals considering 'those others' who do not know Jesus as savior, but sincerely desire his teachings as one of God's prophets among us. Pentecostalism for 2021 is probably more than inter church. It is probably interfaith. As of yet we have not seen all God has in store for us.
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