Day of Pentecost 2026

Bless it becomes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Bless it becomes there is one body and one spirit.

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, you all just spirit.

And free seekers, glance by the Jesus Christ.

And word by your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you, let us pray.

Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit.

Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and raids with you, of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.

As you have been seated, our kids, you create the art by enjoying Godly.

And went rescue on each other.

And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.

And they began to speak in other tongues in Jesus.

Okay, how do we are the same as any lines?

And then there's a row of cross lines.

But Peter standingly allowed to raise his voice and address them.

These persons are not just about us.

And it is only the third hour in the morning.

This is what was spoken to the prophet Job.

In the last days of the day, God declares that I will pour all my spirit upon all flesh, and your daughters and your sons shall prophesy.

And your young men shall see visions, and your elders shall dream of dreams.

And upon my slaves, both women and men, in those days I will pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy.

Heirs of God and heirs with Christ.

If it is true that we suffer with Christ, so that we may also be glorified with Christ.

But by the will of the world was subjected to the creation itself will be set free for bondage or to decay or will obtain the freedom to the glory of the daughters of the sounds of God.

Likewise the spirit helps us in our we do not know how to pray as a necessary.

But that the very spirit intercedes in the eye.

And God, who searches the heart, knows what is in the mindset of the Spirit.

Because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the Word of God.

The word of the Lord registry to God.

Philip said to Jesus, Rabbi, show us the Father, and we will be content.

And Jesus said to him, Have I been with you all of this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?

The one who has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say, Show us the Father?

Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me?

The words that I speak to you I do not speak on mine.

But the Father who dwells in me does the works of God.

Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.

But if not, then believe because of the works themselves.

Very truly I tell you all, the one who believes in me will also do the works I do, and even will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

And whatever you will ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

If you will ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and God will give you another advocate to be with you forever.

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows the Spirit.

But you know the Spirit, because the Spirit abides with you, and the Spirit will be in you.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Amen.

Need to be seated.

Well, happy Sunday, everybody.

It's so good to see you.

I missed y'all.

I missed y'all very much.

It's nice to be back.

I'll talk a little bit about the Camino experience in a bit, but I wanted to tell y'all that, you know, I start the week and I think, what am I going to talk about on Sunday?

And I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do that theological imagination stuff I put you through a couple months ago.

Anybody remember that?

I made you painfully close your eyes and do all of that and imagine that you were in the scriptures.

And then I thought, well, I need to do that myself.

And so started doing that.

And I didn't get very far, y'all, because every single time, I mean, this is a weird reading.

Every single time I found myself the character in the back who was like, yeah, I'm out of here.

And I just I just leave my theological imagination.

And so I was either that or the people that were like, oh, they're drunk.

They have got to be drunk, that is the only thing.

So I thought, well, I'm not going to do that this time.

But see, we are standing here today celebrating Pentecost.

And the church for thousands of years has handed to us wisdom about festal celebrations, like the parts of the story that we should revisit significantly every year.

And so we have Christmas, we have Easter, and then we have a couple of other big ones.

We have All Saints, and we have this one, Pentecost.

That's why we're sort of wearing red.

It's a big deal.

It's a festival celebration.

But why?

Like, what's the thing that the ancestors have said we as modern Christians should take time and pause and think specifically about a few things together?

Because if we do, it's going to help us better understand our life of faith and what it means to be the church.

Now, we didn't invent this celebration.

Pentecost actually is Jewish.

The word Pentecost is in the Torah, right?

It's in the Septuagint.

It's the Hebrew, the Greek translation of the Torah, the Hebrew scriptures.

It just means 50th.

And in fact, the most ancient usage is it was a festival agricultural celebration where the Jewish people were celebrating, moving from a barley agricultural feast or barley agriculturally, to wheat.

And they would harvest the wheat, and then they would give their first fruits of that to God.

They would offer their best, right?

So it was this celebration of abundance.

There was a lot of gratitude in it.

And then in the Second Temple period, they started associating it with Moses being gifted the commandments, the tablets, the law.

It was so came from the festival of weeks, was the agricultural festival, to Shabut, which is the festival of celebrating God, forming the Jewish people around these covenants, right?

These commandments.

You know, not a bad way to organize a society, if you ask me, right?

And so they were remembering that God forms and gathers people.

And so the Christian Jews are gathering for that purpose.

They're gathering to celebrate, you know, Moses being gifted the commandments.

And so these Christian Jews, well, these Jews really from all over, remember, Judaism was an ethnicity and a faith.

So you had Jewish people from all over the Mediterranean world.

They would come together, but they looked different, they spoke different, right?

They had different languages.

So people were coming together for this celebration.

And this mystical thing happens among these Jewish Christians, where they say that like this great wind came in, and there was sort of mystical visions of being flames on people's heads.

And people were speaking and hearing and listening.

This mystical thing happened, and it was so significant that they said, we want to remember this.

We want to remember this moment, this moment where God said that God's love and the movement of the spirit is inviting everybody in.

You see, like Jewish people had a robust notion of the spirit.

Like, like this wasn't like God saying, well, thank you, Jewish people, we're now going to upgrade to Christians.

Like, we don't do that here, people.

Like we are, that's called supersessionism, and it's not a good way, in my opinion, to live.

Like, Christians are better than Jews.

Okay?

So these Christian Jewish people, right, with a robust understanding of the Spirit, then experienced the movement in a new way.

And it seemed to be different because it was now upon everybody.

You see, as far as I could tell, like the one thing about in the Jewish Second Temple period was the Spirit would come down upon a person for a specific reason to preach, to prophesy, to do something, to empower somebody.

But this seemed to be different.

Because the spirit was upon everybody.

And it was inviting everybody in.

Everybody was now allowed to experience this movement of God's love.

So the spirit, I started thinking, like, yeah, I mean, this is critical, like, but this Pentecost, this spirit reality, how many of you does this make uncomfortable?

Oh my gosh.

Thank you.

I feel like my wife's the only honest one in this room.

Like, come on, people.

Like, let's be honest.

Here, give me the Father, give me the Son.

I can talk about that all day long.

I can talk about Jesus, I can talk about the God, the Father, and the love, but this whole idea of spirit possession, I've been to one of those churches.

They flail around on the ground and they start speaking in tongues.

That's not us, that's not me.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Some of you come from that tradition, and part of you is here because you said that wasn't for me.

But I don't think it has to be like I'm possessed and speaking in tongues and flailing on the ground and I'm Pentecostal, or I'm just gonna stick with the father and his kid.

I don't really know about that, right?

Like, we're gonna leave that over there.

I mean, I'll be honest, I mean, I this this makes me a little nervous.

But it's like everywhere in our faith.

Like, we talk about the Spirit all the time.

I mean, the Spirit descending upon the bread and the wine to be transformed into the way God feeds us.

We talk about a baptism being empowered by the Holy Spirit, giving power.

To have agency to do things or being encouraged by the Spirit, to be given heart, encouraged, right?

To be inspired.

We talk about the inspiration.

Like literally, that means to be given breath, so that I have breath to breathe.

We talk about the Spirit all the time, like in our liturgies, in our prayers.

May the Holy Spirit descend upon it.

But what does that mean?

I think it means that we believe that God is active in the world.

And it doesn't always feel like that, does it?

In fact, that like I read a theologian who said that most Christianity is like stripped of the spirit.

He says that it is now what's called moral therapeutic deism.

So deism, remember, is the belief that maybe God exists underneath all things, like the clockmaker.

Like there was a reality where God created the universe and spun it in and then was like, good luck.

And then we have Jesus, who gives us morality.

He tells us how we should behave, like what's a good way to behave.

And he's our therapist.

Whenever we have some mental health needs, he shows up and says, here, here's some good ways to deal with your mental health issues.

So moral therapeutic deism.

And this theologist basically says that is what happens when you strip the reality of the spirit out of it.

And you know what?

I understand why.

Because, like, this whole idea that we believe in spirit possession as Christians is odd for me.

It's odd.

Now, let me be clear, because, you know, I here's what I'm not saying, right?

I'm not saying that God takes away our agency and possesses us.

In fact, I actually think this is what makes the Christian reality of the spirit different.

For most of human civilization, people have had experiences where they felt like they were possessed by something bigger than themselves, and it took away their humanity.

I was just so angry.

I mean, y'all, you hear me say I have PTSD, and I do.

And there are times where I feel like there are, like, my brain gets hijacked, and it's no longer me, and something has possessed me.

It feels like there's something from outside of myself.

And whether it's that, whether it's anger, whether it's addiction, it's not me.

I feel like I don't want to do it, but this thing comes in and it feels like it takes away my ability to choose whether it's lust, whether it's greed.

This is why people would say things like, it was the spirit of Ares that came and overwhelmed me.

That was Mars, it wasn't me.

That was Bacchus, the god of wine and festivity.

It wasn't me.

Bacchus took over me and made me drink that fifth of whiskey.

Right?

It wasn't me, that was Aphrodite.

Aphrodite came and overtook me, and so I behaved in this way that wasn't life-giving.

So you see Jesus casting out spirits, right?

Saying, this person is possessed by a spirit.

And we think that that, like, we don't want spirit possession.

We want to cast out all the spirits, we want to avoid them.

And then you have this language at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit that says there is a way that God moves in us that makes us more alive, more human, more shawl, more who God designed me to be.

Now that doesn't mean that it's not gonna be uncomfortable.

I mean, sometimes it's great.

The spirit descends and I feel connected to all of reality and universe, and I think everything is good, and I look at that baby and I'm like, oh my gosh, they're beautiful, God is real, everything's great.

That could be the spirit.

Or it could be me waking up and putting my hands on my head saying, oh my god, I'm an idiot.

I don't want to apologize.

Or it could be me sitting there thinking, wow, maybe I'm benefiting from things and other people are suffering from the things I'm benefiting from.

It may be when the spirit confronts us with our own, you know, jealousy or greed, right?

Our own violence.

But either way, it's doing it for the sake of making us more alive.

Then says that it's going to be the advocate and the comforter.

There's all these names that the ancestors have said.

The way the Spirit of God moves in us is always and everywhere towards healing.

And it's always available.

So, how many of us take seriously that we can stop and quiet ourselves and connect to the wildly active Spirit of God that is moving in and through all things, driving all things to healing and reconciliation?

I think that's what Pentecost is challenging us.

Do we take time?

Do we believe that?

Do we take seriously that we're not alone in this work of healing ourselves and healing the world?

The other thing that I think we talk about in relation to that spirit is that it's just not about us.

I mean, I do think that the spirit is available.

I mean, the spirit of God is in us.

Like, you know, Paul would talk about, like, it is Christ within me, it is the Spirit within me.

But the truth is, is the Spirit is also the thing that gathers the church.

I mean, that's the other thing we're celebrating today.

We're celebrating, like, what does it mean to be church?

Church is not a building.

Like, we call this church, but like we are church.

The people gathered by the Spirit.

One of the ways I was thinking about it was there was this theologian who said, we often ask ourselves, what is the mission of our church?

Like, what is the mission of St.

Thomas?

I don't think that's the best way to think about it.

He said, the truth is that he believes that God has a mission in the world to heal and reconcile and bring to justice all things.

God is wildly active in the Spirit, in the world, and that mission has a church.

Churches don't have missions.

See, we together gather around this story, empowered, inspired, encouraged by the Holy Spirit to unite us in this work of justice and healing and love.

I mean, the scriptures, it is the commandments rooted in love, welcoming all people, helping heal the traumas and the wounds that people carry, telling the good news of abundance that there is enough, praying for it, forgiving our enemies, forgiving ourselves.

This is the work that we do together.

And we need each other.

We need each other to do it.

And the Spirit is gathering us to do that.

I mean, we're we're gonna do this baptism, right?

And so Eleanor is gonna be baptized next.

Shout out to the name Eleanor.

You guys know I like that.

And so, like, when we baptize Eleanor, we're not, this isn't magic.

We're not like doing an incantation magically over Eleanor, so it's like, now she can go to heaven.

That's not what's happening.

There is a change, don't get me wrong, something is different from before and after, but the change is in the body of Christ, the church.

That's what changes.

Because she's now a part of this story.

The story that we're going to say, when you come here, we're gonna do our best to talk about an active God who is about the work of healing, who is about the work of forgiveness, who's about the work of welcoming, right?

Who's about the work of abundance, who's about the work of eradicating shame in our life, telling us that we are enough, telling us that we are loved.

And when you come here, we're going to try to remind you of that.

And then as you get older, you're gonna try to remind us of that and be a part of the work the Spirit is doing.

So it's sort of like when we talk about making room at the table.

You know, we're always like, well, we like to make room at the table.

You ever said that?

We want to make room at our table.

Friends, I don't think God makes room at the table.

I think every time somebody comes, God makes a new table.

Because now they're there.

We don't make room and say you could come and be a part of who we are.

We say we are gonna make a new table because now you're here in your gifts and your talents, and we have the courage and willingness to do that.

Maybe that's why Jesus was a carpenter, Jim.

I don't know.

He wasn't, but anyway, that's funny.

Okay.

So what I'm saying is like what we're doing is we are saying we invite you in to be a part of this story, this beauty, this work, this belief that the spirit is moving.

And so I'm gonna leave you with a final story from the Camino.

So you all know that, you know, a handful of us went and walked 125 miles on this pilgrimage at the Camino.

And people have been doing this for 1300 years.

And I was thinking about Pentecost in light of this, right?

And we use metaphor to talk about what I just said, about what it means to be church.

And we say things like, we're all one body, it's the body of Christ.

We talk about the vine and the branches, right?

We're trying to bear good fruit in our life through the Spirit, right?

More love, joy, peace, patience, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

We're trying to bear good fruit as a community.

And as I was walking the Camino and I was thinking about Pentecost, I thought, man, this is actually another really good metaphor of what I'm trying to say.

Here you have, you know, literally thousands of people every single day who have decided that there is a place that they're all going to go together, and that that place might be holy.

It may be a place where we experience the love of God because other people have for a long time.

And so we set out on our journey, and that journey is actually hard.

It's a lot of ups, it's a lot of downs, it's like walking on the road, it's like walking in the wilderness, it's walking through cornfields, not cornfields, whatever the agricultural fields we walk through, and you're just walking.

And sometimes you're walking with other people, they come along right next to you, and it's lovely, and you get to talk to them and about who they are and their life, and other times we're walking by ourselves.

But what's interesting is all these thousands of people, it seemed to me that every single time one of them passed me, which was often, just gonna be honest, not a fast walker.

Even if they didn't stop to say hi, they said, Buen camino.

Matter of fact, it was so powerful, I got another tattoo.

Surprise.

Buen camino.

And at first I was like, well, buen camino.

I didn't know what that meant, right?

Like I was like, what are we doing here?

Because my first mindset was, of course, like, we're all like achieving something.

Go fast.

But what they were saying is, is like we're all moving at different paces.

And we might not even share the same language.

But what we can do is wish each other a beautiful, good journey.

See, the word buen, it means a lot of things.

It's really a fantastic word.

It's used in the Spanish language for like buen día, a good day.

It's used for like buen amigo, like a really good friend.

It's useful, or it's beautiful, or buen provecho, it's delicious.

That's my favorite one.

Like, like, may this be delicious for you.

May you delight in the reality of this.

I wish you a good journey.

And I thought, man, that's a beautiful way to think about church, isn't it?

We're all gathering here and we've all decided that there's a way that we want to be.

We're moving towards something, all at our own different paces, mind you.

Right?

Sometimes we stop.

I love the people that just stopped and like splayed out on the ground and the flowers.

I'm like, how long have they been laying there?

I don't even know.

Some people are just focused on the rocks in front of them.

Some people, you know, everybody walks their own camino.

But whenever you encounter somebody else, you say, I wish you well.

I wish you a good journey towards the place that you are going to, one that is useful and delightful and perhaps delicious.

I wish you a good journey.

Buen Camino.

I thought, man, that would be great.

If every time we gathered together as a church, in fact, every time we found somebody in any journey of life, at the grocery store, work, sports field, if we had an interaction and we made sure that when we left, we said, I'm wherever you're going, I wish you a good journey.

I wish you a good journey.

So, my friends, on this day of Pentecost, where we celebrate the power of the Spirit that is active, wildly active in our life and in the world that is accessible, invitational, saying, I'm here.

And the Spirit is saying, I'm about the work of healing and connecting and loving.

And as we celebrate the reality of the Spirit, doing it together as the church, I wish you went Camino.

And I'm now grateful to invite uh Eleanor's family and closest friends up as we celebrate the start to her Camino journey in faith.

Uh make sure you bring your red prayer book with you if you can.

And folks, uh, and folks and everybody else, we're gonna be uh between the bulletin and page 304 in your red prayer book, page 304.