Pentecost is here! Whose got the Spirit?! We do! I am not one to overuse emphatic punctuation in my writing. However, if there is one time of year when the use of exclamation points should be embraced, it would now during Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is not only one part of the Holy Trinity. She is that divine spark that resides in our hearts and consciences inspiring us to manifest God’s Kingdom here and now. This truth about our faith must be exclaimed not only within our churches, but also to our fractured and fragmented world that cries out for healing and redemption. Every year to conclude Easter, we testify that God is still with us and that we are a Spirit filled people.
I love Pentecost, and I don’t just mean to say that I love bright, red pants and blinding orange shirts. I love being intentionally reminded in our liturgy and lectionary that we are living into our covenantal relationship with God. In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that he must go so that the Spirit, the Advocate, will come. He even adds that the Spirit will always be with us.
Is the Spirit not in our community or what?
We felt the Spirit on May 13th, which was both Mother’s Day and Youth Sunday. She was present in the singing of our children and the preaching of our young adults. The Holy Spirit is present when we witness outside of the ICE facilities in Burlington and Boston. She has compelled us to be a part of the sanctuary movement, which heeds the biblical mandate to welcome the immigrant. The Holy Spirit is both embedded in our doing and our discerning.
She is operative in prayer and silence when we seek to listen to the new ways in which God is calling us to be Church. When we walk with the Spirit, our hearts stay open to what God might have in store for us, which is always something bigger than we could have initially imagined. The Holy Spirit empowers us to embody joy and awe and wonder. May we pray with hopeful hearts that the Holy Spirit, the reason for Pentecost, accompany us in our daily living!
Paul Shoaf-Kozak,
Intern
