Time with Sharon: Dancing with a Wild Thing!

May 2009

“When the Day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”

Soon we will be preparing for Pentecost in the church. We call it the church’s birthday, and so it is. It is the day when Jesus’ worried followers were transformed into a bold community of faith, forged by the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and commissioned to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out into the world. This year, Pentecost falls on May 31st.

The Pentecost experience described in the New Testament was quite a happening! The promised Holy Spirit came swooping down to rest upon the Christian community like dancing flames of fire. Wind and fire! My imagination conjures up a vibrant, even somewhat dangerous, picture. I see a whipping wind blowing hats off and chairs over, coupled with the strangely exuberant, even ecstatic, expressions on faces of Jesus’ followers as their souls were filled by God’s mighty Spirit. Everybody’s eyes must have been pop’n!

By this account, this Holy Spirit-thing sounds like a wild thing.

Untamable for sure, for scripture tells us that the Spirit goes where the Spirit will (my loose translation of John 3.8). To let loose God’s Spirit then, is to unleash an authority that is powerful beyond human capabilities and disarmingly unpredictable. I suspect we ought to be taking it more seriously than we do.

To let loose the Spirit might result in our doing something we never dreamt of before, like going to Mexico to build a house out of cement blocks. It may prod us to take our Vacation Bible School out to the park, or transport kids in, to offer a worship service at a shelter, or serve a meal at a soup kitchen. God’s Spirit tumbling around inside of us may make us say “yes” when we were all ready to say “no”, give more deeply and joyfully, and begin loving that person that usually makes our teeth grind.

Yep, God’s Spirit is a wild thing.

When unleashed, the Spirit will stretch us, fill us up to the brim to be poured out and then filled again, and use us to move big rocks…even mountains. Then after all that work, when is seems it ought to be time for a nap, we may strangely feel like… dancing!

Dancing with God’s Spirit. Whoah…won’t that be wild. I’m in…are you?

Come and catch the Spirit unleashed. And wear your dancing shoes.
Pastor Sharon