If only Pentecost hadn’t been so fleeting, and so quickly misunderstood and misused….can you imagine? Is it too late to re-understand it, and get it right, re-understand all of what happened in that part of the world back then, and experience it as a positive rather than negative force in the world? (A comment on yesterday’s post)

Never too late…we have recent examples and living examples of Pentecost–people. Every generation is responsible to remember, relearn and rehearse the spirit of Pentecost.

Even Peter had to relearn the meaning of his own blazing experience. He was given a dream.The contents of heaven were lowered to earth in a sheet and inside he saw all the different species of animals mingled together-in his world the unclean with the clean. It was a reoccurring dream that finally ended with Peter’s face to face receiving of someone culturally, historically, and religiously outside of his circle.

Of this Peter explains, "You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean."

This was Peter’s time to stand beside his new friend, elated, barely comprehending the revolutionary beauty and possibility of his inclusive act.

Pentecost envisions universal restoration. Pentecost is the dream of togetherness, the dream of the sacredness of all things.

But your right, it is still largely a dream in-waiting. We’ve read the stories but we really haven’t been possessed by them. We still prefer the neat divisions of us and them because it’s easier to be over and above than to love. Easier to manufacture division than to merge with differences and work creatively within them.

It is achingly hard to find our meaning beyond divisions because from childhood we have been candle-dipped in ways of pegging others and identifying with any inside group. Some of us even call this a gift of discernment. Thinking it a skill valuable for staying on the righteous side of some line.

The manufacturing of division pretends to give us meaning. But the story of Pentecost gives us our meaning in love, in inclusion, in beauty, in seeing the earth, our world, as sacred, as one.

Technorati Tags: Pentecost, Apostle Peter, Christianity, Peace

I like to keep track of the liturgical calendar and so I’m thinking Pentecostal this week. This Sunday is Pentecost. It marks the end of the Easter season and the beginning of what’s curiously called "ordinary time." The time, I suppose, when nothing extraordinary happens.

But in thinking about Pentecost the first thing that came was a particular stripe of Christianity and a particular way of being a Christian. And I’m reminded of larger and deeper divisions. The many divisions within protestant Christianity, the greater division of Catholic and Protestant, the division of world faith traditions, and finally the divisions of holy and profane.

Brueghel’s Babel

And all this reminded me of a knack I had for sorting out the “true Christians” from the non-Christians, or the "carnal-Christians," or the straight up pagans, or for that matter, anyone other than Baptist.

It’s a knack I learned early through a kind of osmosis while growing up in a small town with a big church. But I was willing enough. The knack we sometimes had the gall to call, the gift of discernement.

My discernment, through opening up to other osmotic sources, has undergone some adjustment. (I’m hoping perhaps even a reverse osmosis from my early one.)

I know now for instance, that Pentecost is not a denomination. Pentecost is the story of the undoing of all the hard divisions along these lines.

While the ancient story of the Tower of Babel describes a world fractured through misunderstanding, and scattered by subsequent tribal wars and blood-feuds, Pentecost, rightly read, is the radical coming together of the broken and the undoing of confusion and misunderstanding.

And in this mutual understanding lies the Pentecostal dream and vision of universal restoration. And this is the direction life in "ordinary time" should take us.

Technorati Tags: Pentecost, Tower of Babel, Christianity, Peace