hermionesviolin | Entries tagged with pentecost

On Friday I posted a link to "We Are Young" by Fun, featuring ft. Janelle Monáe to facebook, saying, "I don't really love this video, but the chorus has been recurrently playing in my brain for some time. (Happy almost Pentecost?)"

We are young / so let's set the world on fire...

It felt too warm today for a long-sleeved shirt, and I don't love the one short-sleeved red shirt I have (plus, I'd rather be wearing a red shirt with black pants, but my weekend usual is blue jeans) so I decided to wear my red dress* and maroon tights ... and I wasn't wearing my rainbow Pride heels** to bicycle, so I wore my black ~Vans with the ~glow-in-the-dark stars on them (they're not actually Vans, they're just laceup flats in that style -- they were on like closeout sale at Berks for $10/pair or something).
*When not worn with black knee-high boots with ~3-inch heels, this dress totally doesn't feel like a hooker dress. [No one has ever called it a hooker dress to me, I just frequently think of it as such, b/c of aforementioned footwear pairing.]
**I got an Urban Outfitters email this afternoon which included these shoes [Jeffrey Campbell Rainbow Starlight Eva Sandal marked down to $99 from $139].

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(from the FCS bulletin this morning)

Unison Prayer of Confession

God,

We confess that we find Christmas and Easter more exciting than the urgency of Pentecost.
We confess that our worst nightmare is sounding drunk or folish.
We confess that this birthday-church isn't always a party.
We confess that we rarely listen to the speakers of other languages, and almost never try to learn their words ourselves.
Holy One, we are heart-cut and frightened by strong winds.
Make us new, and ready for Your Holy Spirit. Amen.

-Maren Tirabassi, adapted

+

Meditation [a longer piece was printed in the bulletin]

I believe the church can have an integral role in the development of the self, but also of the self in covenantal relation to others. I believe the church should always adapt and change and grow with each person; in other words, to a certain degree, when a person becomes a part of a church community, that church should never be quite the same as it was. And as change happens to the church, I should change, too. I want church to help me to be me, to help me figure out what that means as a child pf God, and to help me figure out what that means as a citizen of God's green earth with neighbors all about. I want church to help me to understand what it is to be loved, to feel loved, and to love. I want church to help me to recognize God around me and others, to see God at work in and through me, to assure me of my place in God's grace.

-from Rev. Kaji Spellman, Yale Divinity School Reflections Fall 2009

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"Joy Sadhana is a daily practice in the observation of joy."
-

mylittleredgirl [more info]

And those chapters, again, must be read in the context of the entire book of Acts, which begins with Pentecost — bringing together people “from every nation under heaven … Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to the Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” — and continues inexorably outward to include and embrace European tradeswomen and African eunuchs and anyone else the author can imagine the reader otherwise being tempted to exclude or reject. The book reads like an after-school special on celebrating diversity.
-slacktivist

( Read more... )

I've been thinking about Pentecost a lot recently.

Later last week, I came across an entry on the "When love comes to town" blog -- "Pentecost, peace and grace..."

I don't like the color-and-image-heavy formatting, so I am definitely not replicating it all here for you, but here's an excerpt:

How does John’s gospel for today put it?

“I still have many things to tell you,” Jesus said, “but you can't handle them now. But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won't draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is going on… indeed, out of all that I have done and said. He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. Everything the Father has is mine. That is why I've said, 'He takes from me and delivers to you.

And then he concludes with these words: Fix this firmly in your minds: You're going to be in deep mourning while the godless world throws a party. You'll be sad – very sad – but your pain will turn into joy.

Did you hear that? God will be sending Christ’s friend to us – the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth – and the Spirit will come to us and comfort us so that our pain might be turned into joy. And that is what an adult Pentecost is all about, it seems to me: learning how to live and nourish the Spirit within and among us so that we might experience Christ’s joy.

Pentecost, writes Jim Callahan, is not the birthday of the church; that probably happened on Good Friday when Jesus was hanging on the Cross and pleading with God that we might be forgiven for sins we couldn’t even name or imagine. No Pentecost is God’s reply to Good Friday – a day of great joy, power, fire and spirit – that isn’t reserved just for Jesus alone but is poured out upon all of the faithful disciples. How does the book of Acts put it?

When the Feast of Pentecost came, the faithful were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them. There were many others staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. And when they heard the sound, they came on the run… because one after another heard their own mother tongues being spoken. They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, "Aren't these all Galileans? How come we're hearing them talk in our various mother tongues? Are they drunk?”

Strangers became kin folk on Pentecost. Frightened disciples became fearless evangelists on Pentecost. Women and men became equals on Pentecost. And everyone who experienced this revival could only talk about it like a banquet – or a beer fest – because the sadness was gone and joy filled the air. “In the midst of a numbingly sober and sour world, these women and men looked like a bunch of happy drunks,” Callahan writes, “because at last they knew that they were God’s beloved.”

Every last one of them experienced from the inside out that they were beloved by God just as Jesus had promised. What’s more they knew deep within that the heart of God was love – “not just in poetic theory, but in palpable fact.” They experienced, too, that in belonging to God they were not alone – they belonged to one another – in community. And the joy this gave them not only filled their hearts, “but gave them the inspiration to go out into the streets to heal and redeem.”

( Read more... )

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In looking at the Archives, I saw a post titled "What if God was one of us..." and wondered if it was like this post (responding to an Onion piece), but actually...

Excerpt:

Well, my friends, in case you haven’t guessed, today we’re going to be talking about Jesus: specifically I want to consider what the Cross of Jesus Christ has to tell us about God’s love and our humanity in these early hours of the 21st century. Theologian Douglas John Hall writes that: The cross of Jesus Christ represents simultaneously a high estimate of the human creature, a grave realism concerning human alienation, and the compassionate determination of God to bring humankind to the realization of our potential for authenticity.

Did you get all that? In the tongue of popular culture, we’re going to think about three essential insights in the Cross:

+ God’s deep love for us as beings created in the Lord’s image

+ The profound pain we cause through our alienation

+ And the relentless compassion of God’s grace

Are you with me? Love, pain and grace – or as Hall writes – our experience of being created, fallen and lifted: a new/old encounter with the Cross of Jesus Christ for our generation. So let’s see where this conversation might take us, ok?

( Read more... )

I don't really see that the Cross per se tells us these things, but I do affirm these things.

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I wasn't that taken with most of the Pentecost stuff from actual Pentecost Sunday this year, but one of the things I liked best was from LizL's Children's Time. She said she had been trying to program her husband's radio alarm clock but it wasn't working, and she asked the kids what they might try if they were having that problem. One kid said, "I would check if it's turned on or plugged in." And indeed that was exactly the problem. She said, "It's very important to plug in electrical appliances before you try to program them."
It actually reminds me somewhat of the Pentecost blogpost I quoted above.

During Coffee Hour, LizL. and I joked that she should have a red sparkly stole. When I was telling Carolyn this before CWM, I said it made me want to obtain/create a red sparkly shirt with flames on it to wear for Pentecost next year, and she said, "If you wear that, I'll wear my red sparkly bra...under something see-through." I said, "It's a deal!"

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At the 3pm organ recital at FCS UCC, I sat in a pew by myself like I do. Laura Ruth summoned me to sit with them. So while she was off doing stuff I read the pieces of paper she had left, which was her reading copy of her day's sermon, "See My People Through." From the end of the sermon:

When we are done, when we can’t go on any longer, when we are all dried up, when we’re toast, when we have put down the bags, spent our last dime, when we have woken up in someone’s bed and we don’t remember whose, when we have alienated our last friend and relative, when we have drunk everything in the house including the mouthwash, when we have stolen from those we love and been caught, when we are too ashamed to live anymore, when we have sold our birth rite, when we can’t remember our essential sweet goodness, when we have sold out our friends and family, when we have been conquered, when someone not interested in our welfare is occupying our heart, our homeland and our minds, God will blow life back into us.

Even though we are a heap of desiccated bones, if we watch and notice, God will bring us back to life. God will help us to reassemble ourselves, to grow into the people God made us to be, humans whose essence is the same essence of God.

And more than that, and it is the story of that day of Pentecost, if we remember to ask for the presence of God, she will come and not only save us, but give us the gifts we need to heal and to become like Jesus, bring justice, she will set us free to be fully human, fully free.

[Heh, I hadn't realized that my Subject Line got cut off -- Semagic allows me to type for longer in the Subject Line bar than LJ will actually display -- but I kind of enjoy that "house of Is" . . . echoing God's self-identification as "I AM."]

[FirstChurch Mailing List] Rest and Bread, Ezekial, his wheel and his bones

Dear Beloved,

Rest and Bread tonight is a preview for Pentecost, as each service is, a preparation for a visit from Spirit.

In our series of biographical reflections, tonight, we learn about Ezekiel, how he was visited by God's Spirit, what he saw, and what it has to do with us.

Come and be prayed with and for tonight at 6. There will be a full glorious 15 minutes of silence (except for music for meditation). Our service begins at 6:15.

Growth committee meets at 7:15.

Love,
Laura Ruth

Psalm 6 [I remembered reading this during Lent -- 'cause I read one Psalm a day, in order -- and I appreciated hearing it today, even though I am definitely not that distraught.]
Sacred Text: Ezekiel 2:1-3:3 (with changes ... "mortal" instead of "son of man;" I think the Israelites were just referred to as "rebels," etc.)

Laura Ruth gave the Reflection.
She said that Ezekiel was around 570 BCE, when Israel's power was waning and the Babylonians were coming in and carving up pieces of it and taking Israelites into captivity. I definitely did not take notes on all of this, but I think she said that Ezekiel was on the fringe somewhere. She said he was a priest & prophet -- which was unusual at that time, although it's how Christians are ordained now.
She talked about the prophecy Ezekiel is given about the dry bones and I thought, "Didn't we do that Scripture reading?" But actually that was Holy Saturday at CWM (thank you, Ari -- since a site-specific Google search was uncharacteristically fail).
She said that from a Christian perspective, Ezekiel's story prefigures Pentecost (which she did say we celebrate as the birth of the Church) -- God breathing into people and giving them voice, though she then said that of course God doing that long predates Ezekiel (I later thought, "Yeah, like Adam"), he's just a very good example of it (and apparently it's one of the readings you have the option of doing for Pentecost). I thought, "But Pentecost is the birth of the church because it happens in community." As I was articulating to Ari tonight what about the Acts story of Pentecost makes it the story of the birth of the church (like the fact that everyone gathered heard it in their native language, symbolic of reaching out and being so much more than just a Jewish revival/reform movement), I realized that I was so stuck on community being the important part of our Pentecost story in reaction to Laura Ruth's analogy, if you had asked me previously to tell you what Pentecost is about, I probably would have said: fire, speaking in tongues, birth of the church (in that order).
She also talked about (and this was one of the pieces I was most struck by listening to the reading) God telling Ezekiel to eat the scroll and his finding it to taste as sweet as honey. She talked about embodying the Word by physically ingesting it and pointed out that we ingest the Word every time we take Communion, which I hadn't thought of (hi, I have a low theology of Communion) but which immediately made me think of the time we had milk and honey with Communion at CWM one Sunday.

Prayers of the People:
At Prayers of Thanksgiving, I said the first one -- thanksgiving for having a functioning washing machine again, thanksgiving for being able to afford the technician's visit and being able to afford to take the time off work, and thanksgiving for being able to afford to purchase a new washing machine because this is very much a stopgap fix.
Next, Gary said in that theme he gives thanks for the guy in Brookline who gave Althea a free washer.
Keith gave thanks for family visits at a graduation ... and his parents doing his laundry.
Laura Ruth gave thanks for the next-door neighbor who hauled away lots of trash from the basement, including a washing machine.

***

After service, I hugged Laura Ruth and asked if she was okay, said she had seemed rushed before service. She said she was rushed, is still catching up from being away, but that she's fine (and she sounded genuinely really cheerful and energetic). She asked how I was, and I said I'd been better. She got concerned-face (which was of course the reaction I had been looking for).
I said low-level anxiety flare-ups which I wasn't entirely sure the why of, plus I still haven't heard from my friend Terry and I really really really don't like that.
She said, "You knew you wouldn't hear from him for a while, right?" (in a way like she wanted to make sure she was remembering correctly, not like she was criticizing me for being upset about something I should have expected) and I said yeah, said my self-imposed deadline for when I'm allowed to contact him again is next week.
She said someone once asked her if she "carries" parishioners and she said yes she does and the person said, "Then you're not letting God do her part," and she was properly abashed. I laughed and said I try to do that but yeah the reminder is helpful, that you sit with people but you are not called to carry it all. She then said something like, "But I know how much you care about them," which I appreciated -- because yeah, of course I worry about those I love, and I think I actually do a good job of not trying to take on an undue portion of the stuff I should leave to God. I knew she had a meeting to go to, so I wasn't even going to request pastoral care in that moment ('cause it's not like I was in crisis, and getting to tell her -- and hold her hands while I did it -- and have her be sympathetic, was about what I was looking for ... yes, I want someone to sit with me and hold me for a long long time, but really I want to know something; I'm trying not to dwell SHUDDUP because talking about it doesn't really do me any good and I don't have anything to talk about anyway, since entertaining worst-case scenarios is not at all a good use of my thought processes) nevermind think about getting into a discussion about loving healthy caregiving and support -- though on reflection, it wouldn't be a bad conversation to have at some point (though she'll be busier than usual this summer with Molly on sabbatical).
After I was done, she changed topics and asked if I wanted to be a part of their summer small group series and I said yeah I'd been a part of the tail-end of that last summer and so long as it could be right after service on Wednesdays I could do it. She had apparently already put my name down -- though as she pointed out, she could easily have taken it off if I'd said no :)

Today is Mother's Day [Note to self:

the_red_shoes' post.] and Pentecost.

The former got basically ignored at my churches -- which I'm okay with, as I'm not into the fetishization of motherhood.

CHPC had lots of hymns using Spirit, and the sermon was a bit about "What Is The Holy Spirit?" I wore red and did the Scripture readings (Acts 2:1-21, and John 20:19-23).

CWM had A Service in Remembrance and Celebration of General Conference (though, as last year, it also had a blessing of the mothers, with a typically inclusive interpretation of "mothers" :) ).

One of the readings was Jeremiah 29:1-11 (the source of GC's theme this year: "A Future With Hope"). Tiffany changed some of the language (e.g. using "partners" and "children") but I'm just c&p-ing from oremus.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the LORD.

For thus says the LORD: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

-Jeremiah 29:4-14 (NRSV)

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When I was looking at Christianity Today online the other day, one of the links on the front page was: "Blessed Be the NAME of the Lord: Why 'Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier' is somewhere between heresy and idolatry" (A Christianity Today editorial - May 8, 2008). ( I, unsurprisingly, had problems with it. )

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burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

when faced with my demons I clothe them and feed them

Entries tagged with pentecost

[Pentecost Sunday] joy sadhana

"I'm not gonna light your tongue on fire -- TODAY." -LizL.

"You are not being sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Is

"Jesus said to them again, 'Peace be with you.' " (John 20:21)

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