Pentecost Sunday, June 8, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Pentecost
Suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house where they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them.
Fire purifies, or it burns us up.
Because it might burn us up, we try to put it out. Douse it, smother it, finish it off so we’ll be safe.
God showed Noah by the rainbow sign, “No more water, but fire next time.”
In the new film Ballerina flame throwers are used with powerful effect.
And then there is this story from the Bible.
We were sitting around talking
about how he loved us,
when it flared up in us—not a memory,
but inward fire, the love itself,
like a mother’s love that drives her
into a burning house to save her children—
his love, this unbidden passion
for the world, flamed up in us
and drove us into the streets
to seek the stranger, to embrace
the foreigner, and to speak—
how to convey it?—this love
for all who’d been told
they were outsiders,
in languages not our own:
locked doors opened,
fruit placed in their mouths,
hands laid on their shoulders,
belonging nested in the crib
of their hearts. Homecoming.
That day there were no strangers.
We were all kin, all learning
how to listen together for the first time
to this mystery rising up to greet us
in each other, all of us losing
our tongues for the language of God.
Then we knew that fire which Jesus had
had not been put out:
it was in us, now, spreading, yes, actually,
like wildfire. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes
John of the Cross compares the purgative effect of what he calls the “dark night of the senses and then spirit” to how fire affects a log.
First it makes it give off any water it contains; then it gradually turns the wood black, making it dark and ugly, often causing a bad odor … The fire brings to light and expels all those ugly and dark accidents which are contrary to fire.
Thomas Green describes what happens to us:
The initial effect is painful and alarming. All our flaws are revealed as we crack apart in the flames. If a log could think, it would say to itself: “This is a disaster! Far from becoming beautiful I am much uglier than before. I have made a terrible mistake in submitting to the fire.” But of course the log would be wrong. All the flaws were there all along. The fire has merely brought into the open the moisture, the cracks, the maggots.
Fr. Green listens as John of the Cross continues:
At last, by heating and enkindling it from without, the fire transforms the wood into itself and makes it as beautiful as the fire is itself. Once transformed, the wood no longer has any activity or passivity of its own, for it possesses the properties and performs the actions of fire.
Green concludes:
This is the freedom of the transformed children of God.
All the world over people gotta be free. Larry and I sang that song while driving toward Grant Park in 1968, anxious to join demonstrators desperate for some semblance of freedom, with little understanding of the fire required for that transformation. Always it would be someone else’s fire, not our own. I wrote a story for our Lincoln newspaper about the virtue of burning flags. Reading it now I see how unconcerned I seemed about my own “moisture, cracks and maggots,” when really, my own transformation had to precede any judgment I might make on others.
Now and then I taste the freedom of becoming a transformed child of God. Like anyone else, however, I avoid getting burned by natural fire, and that fear extends too often to the fire of God, of Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit burning just outside, waiting for my invitation to come in.
(Acts 2, Psalm 104, 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 8, John 20, John 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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