Pentecost Preparations

What Exactly Are We Waiting For?

Dear Friends,

It’s almost time! Pentecost is coming!

Okay, okay – I know we still have another Sunday of Easter – but Easter is a bit funny in terms of being both a time of celebration and a time of waiting, especially towards the end. We are rejoicing in Christ’s resurrection, yes, but as we hear in this week’s reading from the Book of Acts, which recounts the Ascension scene, we are also waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, this last week in Easter is most certainly strange. Jesus will be gone again; as he says to Mary in the first moments at the tomb, “I have risen but not yet ascended.”

Well, now He has ascended. That has been accomplished. I think that for many of us, as Easter people but also Trinitarian people, this is a “now what” moment.

Waiting on the Spirit

There’s so much we can’t know about the Holy Spirit, just as there is so much we cannot know about the Triune God as a whole. But it’s always interesting to think about the idea of the “coming of the spirit,” of this active waiting, because it’s also inconsistent with some of our early stories. In particular, the story of Jesus’s baptism by his cousin John is marked by this seemingly obvious “spirit moment,” so to speak.

The Holy Spirit is co-existent and co-continuous with the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is already present. But the Holy Spirit is also not clearly evident to the disciples yet. Or is it?

One of the most common ways that people talk about the presence of God in our daily lives, in the highs and the lows, in the seemingly miraculous and the experiences of terror, is by speaking about “the movement of the spirit.” God and Spirit are, colloquially, often considered synonymous. But how do the disciples experience this? I wonder! What about the past is separate about what is to come?

Here in the waiting we have a little time to think about what exactly it is that the disciples are waiting for, and what we are preparing to remember.

From Whitsuntide Til Today

In order to understand what we’re really doing when we talk about observing Pentecost, it may be helpful to look backwards at the language of Whitsunday, one of the most beloved holidays of the liturgical calendar. Dating back many hundreds of years, Whitsunday was accompanied by an almost Easter-level degree of recognition. There was an Easter Vigil-type service the night before, and just as we baptize people on Pentecost now (if you attend a church that only/primarily performs baptisms on a handful of appointed days of the liturgical calendar), that service was when catechumens were baptized. The name derives from White Sunday, marking the color of baptism, though we now typically mark this day with the color red.

Somewhere between the then and the now, Pentecost lost some of its emphasis. As much as it is a big church festival, once people walk out those doors, we don’t expect to hear that they are having dinner with family or otherwise engaging in special events the way they might at Easter. And there’s probably not much we an do about that. But we can bring some of that energy back to the Church itself.

One way that many churches are trying to remind parishioners of the importance of Pentecost is by making the day particularly festive. This post from BuildFaith describes some popular practices, from donning red clothes to giving the Church birthday presents. Personally, I’m very excited that we’re planning to get the liturgical kites out at my parish!

As a formation professional – even as one that doesn’t actually love a party – I adore the concrete ways that we can mark Pentecost together. It’s the little shift from traditional coffee hour snacks to birthday cake, the opportunity to make a little wish list of church school gifts, encouraging the community to invest in programs in small, concrete ways – with the gift of a book that looks interesting to them, or some new art supplies. And, given that Pentecost comes with a scriptural excuse for chaos (things were so unfathomable that people thought the disciples-turned-apostles were drunk early in the morning!), it’s also a great day for noisy games, balloons, and crafts.

From balloons to pinwheels, bubbles to streamers, and everything in between, Pentecost is primed for a party, just as many of our programs are winding own for the summer. Hang on to that energy just a little bit longer, friends – the Holy Spirit is coming, still!

Peace,
Bird