Pentecost
Illustration Courtesy of Ben Gosden.
May 31, 2020 Pentecost Sunday—Commonly Called Whitsunday
Acts 2:1-11
Have you noticed? God is always showing up in the most unexpected places. We simply do not know which direction God will take. It is a bit like the wind. We hear the sound but no one can know what the wind will do.
Take a look at that motley crew gathered in Jerusalem. What a babble, but they seemed to have understanding of each other. There was an Ethiopian eunuch—a half man excluded by the law from religious assembly. Cornelius was there –a good man but a Gentile considered to be unclean. Saul of Tarsus breathing threats was there. Even Cretans were there and so many more. Did God really plan to make a church out of a crew like that?
But the spirit falls where it will. We cannot know which direction God will take or who God will side with or what the new Church will resemble.
My old teacher Fred Gealy wondered too what kind of organization is the church. Surely we are more than birds of feather who have flocked together.
The church is a mystery. It cannot be explained. The sociologist cannot explain it, psychological explanations fail—Maybe it is not something to explain but to live. It is the creation before the foundation of the world to bring reconciliation. We are the reconciled appointed to reconcile.
God will again make a people out of no people. That is my one hope for General Conference: That God finally will do for us Methodists what we seem unable to do for ourselves. That God will do for each of us what confounds the wisdom of this world. Does any of this make sense?
Perhaps it is the raving of an old preacher who has spent too much time in hospitals this year, one of the lucky ones who didn’t have the dreaded curse.
But in that hospital, locked in with no visitors, he watched a kind of sanity take place. Doctors and nurses went about their business of pulling the victims of the pandemic back from death. The fight is a tough one ---but there were things to laugh about, celebrations as well as the silence of death. Even there the wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it; you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the spirit (John 3:8). And I found myself thanking Wesley and the early Methodists who formed houses of mercy and healing across this land. That kind of spirit changes, redeems, saves the world.
Come holy spirit
Heavenly dove
With all Thy quickening powers;
Come, shed abroad a Savior’s love,
And that shall kindle ours.
– Isaac Watts
The Rev. Bill Cotton of Des Moines is a retired clergy member of the Iowa Annual Conference. Together with friends and colleagues he produces MEMO for Those Who Preach.