Worship will never end; whether there be buildings, they will crumble; whether there be committees, they will fall asleep;whether there be budgets, they will add up to nothing. For we build for the present age, we discuss for the present age, and we pay for the present age; but when the age to come is here, the present age will be done away. For now we see the beauty of God through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now we appreciate only in part, but then we shall affirm and appreciate God as God has affirmed and appreciated us. So now our tasks are worship, mission, and management, these three; but the greatest of these is worship.

I am not talking about the Christmas season, or even Easter.  I am referring to the Season of Pentecost.  Once recognized alongside the aforementioned holidays as one of the most important seasons on the Calendar, its significance has been lost to most of us.  In truth, I myself discovered in writing this piece for the newsletter how woefully uneducated I am on this important time.  So, what is the Season of Pentecost, and what does it mean to us?

You may ask what could possibly be so special about the season, which occurs at a time referred to by much of the Church as “Ordinary Time.”  After all, secular culture has not even bothered to hijack the season and commercialize it.   There are no Holy Spirit Marshmallow Peeps.  Santa does not make a spring time run.  I promise you in my time at Wal-Mart, I have not once had to order a massive feature of crackers to ensure there could be communion for Corpus Christi.  And I have never found myself sorting through the religious candles trying to locate the one with a representation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus while a customer waited with fingers crossed.    But that is all the more reason for us to recognize and remember; to take joy and to receive the Gift of God anew.  It is still uniquely ours, if we will only claim it.

This brings me back to that explosion of color: radiating reds, glistening whites, and life giving greens.  Just as the Church was birthed through the Spirit’s flames, the Season of Pentecost is ushered in by Pentecost Sunday, and the liturgical color of red, which represents that same fire.   This is the fire without which, the story we have joined ourselves to would have been trapped in anti-climax.  Jesus dies, and the disciples despair.  Jesus is raised and the elation of Easter is overpowering.  And then, as Chris has so eloquently put it on a number of occasions, “Poof.  He’s gone.”

You can hear the disciples wondering, “Where do we go from here?  We will go to Jerusalem, Jesus.  But what awaits us there?  What are we supposed to do with all that has happened?”  I can imagine that as they readied for the feasts, it all must have felt a little too familiar.  For three years they had lived on the edge.  They had been revolutionaries.  But now they were going back to the same routine.  And then, in a flaming burst of red, it all changed.  The Spirit of God showed up and the Church was born.

And breaking through the sea of red, setting it off brilliantly, are the flashes of glowing white; the robes of newcomers to the faith, cleansed by the Spirit’s fire, as John the Baptist had foretold.    Three thousand joined on that day, and millions have followed them in the two thousand years since, earning it the name “Whitsunday,” in many traditions.

Also joining those new converts in white are the catechumens acknowledging the faith they have been given as a gift of God; a beautiful picture of God’s faithfulness for the parents, friends, and family who have entrusted their beloved to God.  Altogether, it is hard to imagine a more joyous, unordinary event.

From this beginning, the season of Pentecost, which stretches from Pentecost Sunday all the way to Advent, flows into a lively green which is symbolic of growth in the Spirit.  For after all, what does new life do, but grow?  And so as the flowers bloom, the trees blossom, and the birds return to sing their songs, we should not find it difficult to be reminded that this is for us to be a time of grow taller, stronger, and closer together.

Again, what is Pentecost Sunday, and what does it mean to us?  It is no “ordinary time.”  It is anything but drab and dull.  Pentecost is not merely time that must be endured or a space holder between major holidays punctuated by a few barbecues.  Pentecost is a Season to be Lived.  It is a time to embrace the Spirit’s work and the Life of Christ and of his Body.  If Christmas is a time to look back to what God has done, and Easter is a time to remember what God will do, then Pentecost is the time for the Church to be focused on the Present work of God’s Spirit in the world; a time to as one of my co-workers used to implore us, “put your hands on something.”  Get dirty.  Do some gardening.  Join the adventure.  Go on a quest.  Pick a battle.  Bleed a little.  Write another chapter into the story.  Add to the beauty.  Grow.    Live.  All the courage, boldness, comfort, and power you need is alive in you right now.

by Michael Wilson

Some Sites that helped:

http://www.stpaulskingsville.org/pentecost.htm; http://www.thisischurch.com/christian_teaching/lectionary_bible_notes/lectionarybiblenotesyearb/pentecost_08Jun03.htm; http://www.christianitysite.com/calendar.htm; http://www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/liturgy/commonworship/texts/calendar/seasons.html; www.wikipedia.com;

1. The Trinity is not an optional doctrine, it is essential. God’s unity is not behind God’s threeness, God’s unity is in God’s threeness. This is not speculative mathematics, it is a descriptive theology of revelation.

2. The Trinity is not an academic doctrine thought up by clever scholars, rather it grew out of the Christian experience of worship, i.e. it expressed the early church’s pattern of prayerto the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

3. The driving force of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was Christological and soteriological, i.e. it served to articulate the Christian experience of salvation in Christ. The first Christians already knew God; through Jesus they came to know God as Jesus’ Father and Jesus as God’s Son; while in the Spirit Jesus continued to be present to them, forming a family of prayer to the Father and building a community of witness to Christ.

4. The church’s thinking was this: As God discloses himself in worship and salvation, so God must be in Godself. In the technical language of (Karl) Rahner’s Rule: the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity, and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity. What you see is what you get, and what you get is what there is.

5. At the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity is God’s being-as-communion. God’s unity is not monadic, it is relational. The doctrine of the Trinity is the church’s exegesis of [Scripture's claim that] “God is love.” Father, Son and Spirit indwell each other in love, giving, receiving and returning love in an eternal dynamic of gift-exchange.

6. If God is Trinity, do Jews—and Muslims—know nothing of God? Not at all. God can be known without being fully identified. In fact, “the church’s identification of the one true God as the Trinity does not preclude, but rather requires, that Abraham and his children know how to refer to this God, and so are able to worship him” (Bruce Marshall). Indeed the activity of the Spirit in the world encourages the church to be open and attentive to the presence of God in all the major religions.

7. Is the language of the Trinity sexist? Not at all. No responsible theologian has ever thought of the Father and the Son as male, nor of the Spirit (as is currently fashionable) as female. The issue is not gender but personhood. In fact, it is a strictly monotheistic God, not the Trinity, that is patriarchal—and oppressive.

8. Father, Son and Spirit are constituted by their mutuality, i.e. they are who they areonly in their inter-relationships. So too human beings, made in the image of God: we are who we are only in relationship with others. Margaret Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society; on the contrary, there is no such thing as an individual: there are only persons-in-relationship.

9. Clearly the Trinity is not an irrelevant doctrine, it has very practical—indeedpolitical—implications. That God is essentially and eternally God-in-relationship of equality and mutual fellowship—could there be a more cogent critique of hierarchies of domination and exclusion, or of an economics of greed and exploitation?

10. Finally, that God is Trinity means that God is mystery—but a mystery not to beexplained but entered. God calls us to participate in his very being, joining in the divine dance that issues in creation and concludes in redemption. In Rublev’s great icon of the Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit are seated around three sides of a (eucharistic) table. The fourth side awaits a guest.

By Kim Fabricius

You can find his original post here.

We are sometimes convinced that true freedom is being able to live life on our own, but in fact there is no room for this type of life in the kingdom of God. Unfortunately, our desire to be self-sufficient is deeply rooted and makes itself known at a very early stage in our lives. When a small child is attempting to learn a task that will give them more freedom, the monster of self-sufficiency often raises its ugly head and the child will let any one who attempts to help know that their assistance is unnecessary because they can do it by themselves. As we acquire more things and develop greater skills we are in even graver danger of thinking we are independent and self-made people. After all it was our labor, our ideas, our creativity that allowed us to acquire what we possess. However, the Gospel teaches us that freedom is not self-sufficiency, but a shared life. Taking care of one’s self first is a denial of our need for community with others. It is a refusal of our obligation for others in the community. Our survival is not secured by what we possess, but by what we generously share with God and others.

This shared life that Jesus calls us to, frees us to generously love God and love neighbor. It creates room in us so that we are free to be loved by God and to accept the love of others. In this shard life we learn and experience what it means to give and to receive, to help and to be helped. As we help others and allow others to help us we acquire a sense of mutuality and are free to be truly human and nurture this new humanity in others. Our life together with Christ frees us to be generous - and what else is generosity but grace? The Christian is free to be an expression of the love of God finding its only motive in the bounty and benevolence of God. We help one another through small acts of mercy and generosity because God’s mercy and generosity are without limits. The Christian is free to share both weakness and strength. Jesus, the most complete picture of humanity that the world has ever known, was not self-sufficient: Mary washed his feet, Simon carried his cross, and Mary, his mother, nurtured him to maturity. Therefore, let us look for opportunities to help others and generously give from our need and our abundance. Let us be the kind of people willing to share in the troubles of others and allow others to share in our troubles, as well. Let us be a people content with little or much because we are members of the beloved community.

Quoted in Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: the Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2006), 11.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, p. 18.

‘…what Scripture can say is determined by the character of the churchly life within which it is read’. Robert Jenson, ‘Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church’, Reclaiming the Bible for the Church, p. 93.

OF THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST

THE second coming of Christ our Bridegroom takes place every day within good men; often and many times, with new graces and gifts, in all those who make themselves ready for it, each according to his power. We would not speak here of a man’s first conversion, nor of the first grace which was given to him when he turned from sin to the virtues. But we would speak of an increase of new gifts and new virtues from day to day, and of the present coming of Christ our Bridegroom which takes place daily within our souls…

Its wherefore is fourfold: God’s mercy and our destitution, God’s generosity and our desire. These four things cause the growth of virtue and of nobleness.