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ProudDog
Posts:559
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| 05/05/2008 1:25 PM |
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| It's an exciting week -- Kate's written about the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the connection with the Tower of Babel story, the connection with the Stillspeaking ministry and the whole astonishment factor. I've invited any and all to explore spirited emotions through thought and art. Take a look at Life-Giving Spirit and Spirited
emotions and please share your thoughts! |
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-Kirk Moore |
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kate huey
Posts:62
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| 05/06/2008 9:31 AM |
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Pentecost is the birthday of the church, when the cowering and shaken disciples were filled by the Holy Spirit, and then stepped out in faith as bold proclaimers of the gospel - the Good News of God's love in Jesus Christ.
The Spirit enabled everyone there that day to understand every word they said. This experience astounded the crowd, and they seemed to pay more attention at first to that wonder than to the content of the preaching! But then many were baptized, so they must have gotten the message, too.
The news this week is full of reports about the candidates visiting NASCAR races, WWWF (is that the right number of W's?) wrestling matches, bowling alleys, night-time TV, and many other culturally interesting events. The pundits are discussing their apparent intent: to reach across the divides in our society and talk with people in their own language. What do you think really unites us as a people? What then unites us as a church? What language do we speak in the community of Christian faith that all of us can understand?
In a day or two, let's talk about wind and fire! |
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kroz
Posts:1
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| 05/06/2008 7:34 PM |
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I don't see the disciples as cowering and shaken folks, really. I see them as people with an awful choice that took them some time to make: to give up on Jesus (whom they had followed and loved) or to carry his ideas forward in the face of nearly universal opposition. Even if they tried to continue, which ideas would that be - and how did they understand them? As they retold the stories and talked and struggled, who among them agreed?
Pentecost is our celebration, a great, lovely, spirit-out-of-the-box Sunday, celebrating their eventual sense that God was with them, that (as Jesus had been saying in all the post-Easter stories of the gospels) they were not alone. Pictured like ecstatic prophets in whom spirit burned, like the judges (in Judges) driven to save the people, suddenly unformed and remade like Genesis' story of Creation - at this point the disciples come together (the flames are on them ALL) and just go for it. What's the phrase? They get game!
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subear
Posts:789
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| 05/09/2008 4:12 PM |
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Kate:
I love what you noticed about the foreign languages that the people were all speaking. Rather than being the mystical babble that some call "speaking in tongues," you noticed that it says people were speaking in the different languages of others who were present in the room. So there was more inclusivity rather than exclusivity; there was more understanding rather than less. At that moment, there was a taste of "we are One."
In Peace, Love and Understanding,
Susannah |
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"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin |
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