PENTECOST
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. – Acts 2:3-4
Happy Pentecost! After this past Sunday, the church enters the long season of Sundays after Pentecost. It takes up nearly half of the liturgical year. The church colors are green, symbolizing the time of growth and nurture that come in this long season where we focus in on faith, development, and being a community of believers. Some churches refer to this season as Ordinary Time – not because it’s boring and dull, although it is a little repetitive. In this case, “ordinary” refers to ordered, as in numbered, since they are simply numbered Sundays in sequence without a church festival to interrupt it.
In most Lutheran traditions, we refer the Sundays after Pentecost instead. This year, there will be twenty-six Sundays after Pentecost. That means roughly half the year is a time to reflect on the gift of the Holy Spirit to believers and what it means for our life and faith.
In my sermon on Sunday, I talked about how the first Pentecost gave disciples the ability to share the truth of God’s works of power in the languages of the many people gathered. It reminds me that a big part of who we are as followers of Jesus is telling the story and including more and more people in it. God has always been at work to include more and more people into worship, service, teaching, and the life of the faithful community. For the first disciples, it meant learning other languages to share and teach authentically.
What might that mean for us today? How, in these many weeks of Sundays after Pentecost, might we renew the Spirit’s call to keep looking beyond ourselves? If it’s not speaking different languages, what other kinds of experiences and understanding could we need to better love and serve our neighbors in Christ’s name? What new – and maybe even scary – change might we live into so that the story of God’s power can get bigger and bigger?
May you know the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, this week and all the weeks after Pentecost, so that you can be a part of that story in new, exciting, mysterious, holy ways.
Let us pray:
Holy Spirit, come. Guide us in truth and power. Send us to those who need your care. Grant us the wisdom to speak of God’s works to all. Inspire us to serve in the name of Jesus Christ, who we worship and adore in our words and our actions, now and always. Amen.