Pentecost! Holy Spirit, Let The Fire Fall

This Sunday, May 23 is Pentecost Sunday. It is the feast that celebrates the coming of the Spirit on the followers of Jesus’ Way in Jerusalem. This community was in hiding. It was living in an environment of fear. Yet it gathered and prayed together. It found hope in the shared experiences of seeing the Risen Christ. These men and women trusted in the promise that they would not be left orphans. They awaited anxiously to see what would happen next.

Chapter Two of the Book of Acts tells us what did happen:

When  Pentecost day came round, they had all met in one room, when suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech.

Now there were devout men living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven, and at this sound they all assembled, each one bewildered  to hear these men speaking his own language. They were amazed and astonished. (Acts 2:1 - 7 New Jerusalem Bible)

What a marvelous scene follows. The devout men hear the same men speaking and yet hear the message in their own language. They search for an explanation and even suggest that the speakers are drunk!

Peter, strengthened and emboldened by his experience of the Holy Spirit, reminds them all of the Jesus who walked among them and did the miracles and portents and signs that God used to commend Jesus to them. Peter concludes in his response to the questioners that Jesus “… has received  from the Father the Holy Spirit, who was promised, and what you see and hear is the outpouring of that Spirit”(Acts 2:33-34).

At St. Maurice this is the time that we celebrate the working of the Spirit in us through our liturgy. We are commissioned to serve. We celebrate the Spirit’s movement as wind and fire in us and in the world around us today through our ministries. We celebrate the flames of love that lead us to respond to those whom we serve as they and we are.  In our ministries  we  meet Jesus walking among us because what we ”see and hear is the outpouring of that Spirit” (Acts 2:33-34).

The word for wind in Acts has the meaning of wind and breath. God sends the Spirit, his wind to awaken us and shake us and open us. He calls us to service of the other. And in the service of that other we feel His Spirit, his breath, on our face. He creates us anew!

Come Holy Spirit, Let the Fire Fall!