Pentecost: Like Christmas but Bigger

Everybody understands Christmas and Easter. These are the big feasts of the church that have become a part of our American culture and their meanings are clear. But the feast of Pentecost, which is very important to the church, is not as well understood. For me Pentecost is just like Christmas, only bigger.

In Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus who, in his being, connected the human and the Divine. In Jesus, we see God with us. Jesus was so closely connected with God’s Spirit which dwelt within him that his human nature and the Divine nature within comprised one being. God’s love for us and God’s loving sacrifice was made physical and manifest in Jesus.
After modeling this deep, inner, abiding communion with God, and after offering his life in love for the world, Jesus commissioned his followers to carry on his work. He promised that God’s spirit would dwell within them in the same way God’s spirit dwelt in himself. The feast of Pentecost (50 days after Easter) marks the birth of God’s spirit within us. It is just like Christmas in that God’s spirit is made manifest in a physical way. It is bigger that Christmas because it happens on a grand scale. Instead of God’s spirit enfleshed in one human, God’s spirit is enfleshed in many, many humans. On Pentecost we celebrate the fact that we are all bearers of God’s spirit in the world and we honor our call to embody this spirit for the love of the world. In a sense, the world becomes filled with many Jesus-es.

While we may never perfectly embody God’s spirit in the world because we keep getting in our own way, that doesn’t take away from the fact that God is dwelling in us and we have the lovely obligation to be in communion with God and with the world around us.

Pentecost, which we just celebrated, shifts the focus from God in Jesus to God in us. And it challenges us with the question, what will you do with the gift of your life filled with God’s spirit.

Blessings,

Brian
http://blogs.deanbaker.org/