Pentecost

Beloved in Christ, 

In John’s version of Pentecost, Jesus’ followers are hiding in a locked room for fear of the civil and religious authorities.  Having just seen those authorities torture and summarily execute the one they follow, they are rightly afraid they might be next. 

Jesus finds them in their fear. He shows them indisputably that the power of the living God can raise his brutalized body to a new and unimaginable kind of life. And, having established that, he breathes on them the full power of that living God.

In a year when many among have been forced to lock themselves inside for fear of the authorities, this story lands in a new way. Pentecost promises that Jesus always finds the fearful in the places where they are locked away. Jesus always stands with us in our fear, comforts us, and tethers us to his own resurrected body with the power of the Holy Spirit.

But this Spirit that is given to us is not merely a comfort in our fear. It’s a Spirit that sends us out, into the midst of an ever fearful world, to join Jesus in breaking through the locks formed by cruelty, injustice, and those bent on clinging to their own power at any cost. 

Fear not, beloved, the full power of the living God is here, among us, right now. It calls us to go with Jesus to all the fearful, painful places in the world. It cajoles us to go with Jesus to the broken places in our own hearts. It compels us to use our whole life to join God in bursting through the doors and barriers that keep people from knowing God’s ecstatic embrace of love. As we keep the feast on Pentecost this Sunday, allow yourself to be swept up in that embrace, and set you on fire.