Today, in many traditions, is Pentecost Sunday. It’s also a planning nightmare when it happens to occur on Memorial Day weekend! Just between us, I’m kind of okay with having a different role these days! Kind of more free to set aside the Lectionary’s notion of what story goes with which day and open myself to inspiration which, in many ways, was kind of the original point!
Clearly, my song leader friend agrees! This is what I heard…
Deep and wide… Deep and wide… There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide…
Deep and wide… Deep and wide… There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide…
Now seems to me like a really good time for that!
According to my late seminary professor, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, Pentecost can be seen as a revolutionary rupture of the status quo in which the outpouring of the Holy Spirit dismantles hegemonic power structures, shatters psychic numbness, and actively subverts the homogenizing, empire-building impulses of the world.
Walter goes on to contrast Pentecost with the Tower of Babel which represents a human society driven by fear and a desire for hegemonic power, seeking to impose a single homogeneous culture. By miraculously allowing the gospel to be heard in native languages, the Spirit affirms God’s will for radical diversity, ethnic pluralism, and localized variation… not a soothing comfort, but a disruptive “wind” that upends society’s comfortable routines and privileged arrangements… and makes way for new, just, and inclusive communal realities… in which every single person has both a voice and a purpose.
My painting friend and I offer these whisperings in full knowing that your tradition may be different. Your teachers may have shared different wisdom. And, if you hang around here, you’d probably stand beside me in claiming equality and radical hospitality, in this world, now. Deep and wide!
For now, I join the the prayer from Ephesians that we, whatever our traditions, might grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of the Son of Creators. That’s what all those dots are for… healing wounded hearts!
And one last thought from an episode of The West Wing… It’s season 7, episode 8. Presidential candidate, Matt Santos, is speaking in a predominantly black church, just after one of their teenagers was killed by an hispanic police officer. He begins with a quote from Dr. King:
If we could find compassion… if we could express compassion – if we could pretend compassion… it would heal us.
As the congregation begins to hear… to respond… Santos goes on:
We are tired. Tired of understanding. Of waiting. Of trying to figure out why our children are not safe and why our efforts to make them safe seem to fail. We’re tired. But we must know that we have made some progress… and slowly… too slowly, things will change.
This is the message of my heart for this day…
