Fire and Wind

Day of Pentecost

Come Holy Spirit and strengthen me

We can imagine the scene in the upper room: a diverse group of followers of Jesus are gathered together. Some are of the twelve who followed Jesus from the beginning. Others are more recent believers. We can also imagine a wide range of feelings: from steadfast confidence in the promises of Jesus to uncertainty over happenings of the last fifty days. But when the Spirit blew into the room on the Pentecost like tongues of flame, the gathering was transformed, galvanized into a new community with an urgent message - and with new language to share that message.

The portrayal of the coming of the Holy Spirit in fire and wind makes us a fearful image. A fire fanned by wind in uncontrollable, sometimes uncontainable. When Jesus likens the Spirit to the wind he does so to remind us of his freelance power from God: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes" (John 3:8). And while flames borne by wind create destruction, this fire-like presence of God brings radical transformation - from the first believers gathered in the upper room to present-day believers.

Come Holy Spirit and renew my spirit and dwell in me

At Pentecost there is no going back. There is a saying that once you show people a picture of the earth taken from the moon, there are then certain land-bounded myths (for example, "the world is flat") that simply cannot be sustained. So it is with Pentecost. We are no longer captive to the old myths that tell of divided humanity of insiders and outsiders, or that speak of God's distance or indifference. We cannot go back, because God has changed us from within, and has changed our world from the inside out.

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