The Church is God’s gift to us

This Sunday, June 8th, is the Day of Pentecost. Pentecost is the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit and the founding of the Christian Church. That description may sound rather dry and abstract to you. So, here is how I have always regarded Pentecost:

The salvation story in the Bible tells of God who, rather than destroying an imperfect creation and its creatures, has chosen to provide us a way to wholeness, peace, and eternal perfection in love — things we simply cannot achieve by our own wits or will. Rodney King’s question — “Why can’t we all just get along?” — is inadvertently a confession of our powerlessness to fix the world, each other, and ourselves.

As a movement of perfect compassion, God chose to live in the world, among human beings, as one of us, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was “made to be sin, though he knew no sin” (II Corinthians 5:21), meaning that Jesus was, as a biologically-human being born as we all are, trapped in the same helplessness we are. God, as it were, walked a mile in our shoes as an act of compassion.

And in Jesus Christ, God poured out God’s own Spirit — the very Spirit who brooded over the waters at creation (Genesis 1:3), and in whom is the power of God. In Jesus, both the power of the creating God (Father) and the power of the sustaining God (Holy Spirit) dwelled in perfect unity. In this perfect unity the three persons of God were (and are) one.

Thereby, Jesus was perfectly faithful to the mission to which he was destined: to remain completely and steadfastly aligned with the power of God’s love, even as worldly powers sought to destroy him by crucifying him. Once the power of death had done all it could do, God raised Jesus by the power of God’s steadfast love. Death was overcome; life eternal was sustained.

The man Jesus, the Christ of God, ascended into heaven (the Realm of God’s Steadfast Love). So, at this point in the story, God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — are in heaven. But people are left on earth. This is where Pentecost comes in. God sends the very Holy Spirit who was there at creation, and who indwelled Jesus after his baptism, to live in us. This is precisely what we affirm in our own baptisms.

So, to my thinking, Pentecost is a day for us to remember: “Hey, we are not alone! The Church is not our project like any other — business, school, politics, arts, sports, etc. The Church is God’s gift to us, called into being and sustained by the Holy Spirit. So, the Church does best when it is faithful to the truth:

This is not OUR Church; it’s God’s gift to us in Christ, supported, guided, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. This leaves our first move in every endeavor not to “think things up” for the Church to do, or “keep the Church going”, but prayerfully to seek God’s will for the Church. The second move is to trust that God has a good will for the Church, and that the Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom and strength to embody that will.

In Christ,

Lee