Pentecost Day – May 27

Pentecost Day – May 27

Acts 2:1-4
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 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.

She comes sailing on the wind,
her wings flashing in the sun,
 on a journey just begun, she flies on.
And in the passage of her flight,
her song rings out through the night,
full of laughter, full of light, she flies on.

This hymn by Gordon Light, though a lovely hymn, is typical of how we often approach Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is described as a dove, a breeze, a gentle presence. The Gospel of John reinforces this image when Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as a Comforter and an Advocate. I think we relegate the Spirit to the sidelines of our lives as a kind of ethereal presence more often than not glimpsed only in our peripheral vision.

But there is another aspect to the presence of the Holy Spirit. The first chapter of Mark says that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to face temptation. SCUCC has a sense of that kind of the Spirit’s presence when we say “May the Spirit of the Living God… push us into places that we wouldn’t necessarily go ourselves.”

The Celts have given us this persistent, strident Spirit in the image of the wild goose. Some wild animals are cute and cuddly. Geese are not. Geese are noisy, cantankerous, and sometimes downright mean. I can imagine a wild goose driving Jesus into the wilderness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYwVrgdNJc   A gentle breeze might not knock me off course. A cooing dove probably would not make me change direction. A wild goose? Flapping and hissing and charging? Yes, I would move!

Pentecost is often called the birthday of the church, when the Spirit came upon the apostles and they spoke in a variety of languages. They were likely quite happy among themselves, locked in that upper room. But the Spirit changed the conversation and drove them into the streets of Jerusalem. You can almost see the goose at work.

Where are we when the Wild Goose confronts us? Where does the Wild Goose need to drive us, either as individuals or as a community? When does the presence of God interrupt our routines, our expectations, our comfortable positions? Maybe the sound of Pentecost voices is more like the cacophony of geese than the United Nations.