Pentecost

           Sunday in the liturgical calendar of the church year is Pentecost Sunday. The feast of Pentecost is a holy day in the church that commemorates and celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the apostles of the church after Jesus’ ascension. The church is to be decorated in festive reds, oranges and yellows to symbolize the tongues of fire that were over the apostles’ heads during the Pentecost experience. During this experience, which can be found in Acts, the apostles started speaking in different tongues.

            Some of the tongues that were spoken were from regions such as the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs. I bring this to your attention to point out the diversity of faith, which goes beyond just the Jewish community of the day. The grace of God was extended to everyone in attendance and beyond.

            All the way in Boone I have heard stories of the Klu Klux Klan meeting that will occur in Northern Iredell County tomorrow (Saturday). I would encourage each of you to be in prayer for members of this organization, that God might be at work in their lives, changing, restoring and transforming the broken nature of racism that we see.

            I have been an advocate throughout my column’s articles on an inclusion of love and an exclusion of hate, but it seems that some residents of the great county of Iredell feel that hate is more important than love. How do we respond? How do we fight the evil powers of this world?

            We stand, together. Beyond the lines of denominationalism, nationality, race, gender, and clan, we give a resounding yes to the world’s no. Where the world says we can’t, we say we can with the power of the Holy Spirit that was present those many millennia ago.

            Tomorrow (Saturday) I will be praying for the people who will participate in the cross-burning, I will pray that the same grace that transformed us to transform them, so that one day the transformation in all our lives will be complete. I look to a wonderful man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr.  who said so eloquently, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” People of faith that is what Pentecost is about.

            Pentecost is about the life-changing act of the individual becoming the communal; it is about grapes and wheat becoming the bread and wine that grace our table. Pentecost is the resounding grace that conquers the bonds and chains of racism. Pentecost is the speaking in tongues that changed the course of those apostles’ lives, and ever more presently changes our lives as well. In that we can say, “Thanks be to God”