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The texts for the Day of Pentecost are rich with imagery, metaphor, and narrative. There is a persistent theme of “now and not yet” - the work is complete but has yet to be fully revealed. The Spirit is available but we have yet to harness it’s full power. The earth dwells in perfection but yearns for the day when all creatures are truly free in body.

The story of Pentecost in Acts is powerful and curious, a story of equality and inclusion, of accessibility, simplicity, and choice. In Acts 2 the Apostle Peter quotes the Prophet Joel’s inclusive and egalitarian vision of God’s Kin-dom, saying “'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

Everyone who wants in is in, status notwithstanding.

From Resurrection to Pentecost we leap from awakening to consciousness, from believing to seeing. I’ve tried to do the practically-impossible here: to capture our collective wordless longing in words.This litany accompanies the text, drawing from the Ezekiel, Acts, and Romans passages.

God, we are waiting, waiting,
For the redemption of these physical bodies (1);
Even as we know they are already redeemed,
Still we wait for the fullness of time.

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I'll mostly let Frederick Buechner do the commenting this week. Except to say, the Lectionary is never the wrong thing for the moment. And to say: Rest in peace George Floyd, who was murdered in a racist act of police brutality earlier this week.

“Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.”

― Frederick Buechner

God, our world is rife with violence and evil
With cruelty, injustice, and materialism.
We need Holy Spirit’s fire
To burn away our unjust systems…