We approach the Sunday of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter…Many refer to Pentecost as the birthday of the Church…the day the church received the Holy Spirit, according to Luke, the writer of Acts. The writer of the Gospel of John tells us that the disciples received the Spirit on the day of Resurrection…so which is it? We of course know of accounts of the Spirit long before Pentecost and Easter…It is the Spirit of God that moves over the face of the deep in the very beginning…the birthday narrative in Genesis….It is God’s Spirit that delivers the people of Israel from their Sojourn in the desert…God’s Spirit that resettles them after captivity in Babylon…The Spirit of God that inspires Mary’s revolutionary song…It is the Spirit that lives and moves among us…bringing creative energy…like fire, like wind…two poignant metaphors we know well enough….and surely there are many more.
I get all kinds of spam, as you do, but there is no worse spam than religious spam….One “Christian” marketing group says their research shows that 56% of people who call themselves Christian have never experienced the Holy Spirit. They don’t bother to define such an experience…we can probably imagine how they would define it…some ecstatic mountaintop supernatural close encounter…but my answer to them is that this 56% of respondents must not be paying attention. We are all of the Spirit, same DNA…embodying the life force…in every breath…in every instance of mitosis…in every meal shared…in the apprehension of beauty…at every touch…the Spirit is present bearing our world and we in it toward a perfect end…the end seen in glimpses in the means of our world becoming…the Spirit the very imagination of God which we share, creating and recreating the world…the wounds notwithstanding…the wounds not left behind by the Spirit, but honored as well…made whole in the end….the Spirit ever present…on the move, imagining the world into being….there is no choice in the matter…only choosing to pay attention.
I have said often that prayer is best defined as the art of paying attention. It is in our paying attention to each other and our world that we recognize the Spirit among us and in us. According to the Talmud, a fifth century compendium of Rabbinic teaching, the fifty days between Passover and the feast of Weeks, which corresponds precisely with our Christian fifty days between Easter and Pentecost, represents in Judaism a figurative lifetime of growing in the Spirit, maturing into the life of God….in truth fifty days a lifetime, an eternity in the life of God… not a dramatic singular moment…but every moment…sometimes a subtlety, often mundane and simple…and sometimes like wind and fire, these moments…Look for the Spirit everywhere, for there the Spirit will be, and so will we…as the Spirit has always been.
