The Holy
Spirit is active, empowering, courage giving, and the great chronicler. We as
Christians, tend to focus our Pentecost celebration on the dramatic aspects of
the Acts narrative: tongues, flames, and crowds and different languages. What
if this year we focused on what is called the fruit of the coming of the
Spirit? On the power to forgive, on the gifts given to all for the common good,
and on our unity as God’s people?
I think
focusing on these things will help our brothers and sisters both in our congregations
and in our world, connect with their own longings, with how the Holy Spirit is
at work in their hearts and life, and with how each of us is truly an agent of
the Spirit in the world. At the cornerstone of our power to be proclaimers of
forgiveness is the reality of our oneness in Christ. Our oneness is the first
fruit of our salvation, and it connects us to a tapestry of fellow forgiven humans,
a people who know what it is like to begin again.
We come from
different places, speak different languages, live from different cultures, and
live into our forgiveness in different ways. The Spirit’s coming reminds us of
our commonality as God’s creation and on the power of our unity in the midst of
our differences. Our different gifts, through our different stories, provide
fertile ground for the common good for all creation, a reminder of the creative
promise of God at the beginning of time. Pentecost reminds us to claim our
particular gifts and to allow ourselves to be propelled by the baptised
community to become agents of God’s forgiving message knowing that it is too
good to withhold from anyone..
The Spirit’s
coming has cosmic consequences. People from all places and all times gathered
on that day according to Acts. People, from all walks of life, live around us,
work with us, and might even enter our spaces of worship. The Spirit sent to us
by God is hovering, ready to unleash its saving power on all people. We often
think of the work of the Spirit in such limited and restrictive ways.
Yet the
narratives for this day speak of bounty, awe, wonder, and limitless hope!
Thinking in this way should inspire our congregations to look around and see
the ways that the Holy Spirit is active around them so that they can shine a
light on that work and join the Spirit’s work in their neighbourhoods, places
of work, and homes. What might this mean for us today? If we look at forgiveness
we can see it is not an easy task. It requires time, effort, and a
recalibration of the relationship. A slow forgiveness might in the end be a
healthier one. What are some of the ways that we can model the slow yet
deliberate work of forgiveness and reconciliation?
That is a
vital situation in our world today as we face the continual aggressive
behaviour of one nation to another let alone one human to another. We only have
to look at the behaviour of one or two of the leaders who see themselves as
global leaders but exhibit greed, deceit and the such like. It would be easy to
give up as we watch the plays being made around us to climb to the top of the
heap. Yet, the work of the spirit to which humans are called to participate in,
is the deliberate work of forgiveness and reconciliation. That forgiveness and
reconciliation can spread then like the ripples spread after a stone is dropped
in a pond.
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