Pentecost is a season for renewed commitment to mission

by the Right Reverend Thomas Clark Ely, Bishop of Vermont
Mountain Echo
June 2005

The season of Pentecost is the season of the Spirit, the season in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and respond to God’s Holy Spirit working in and through us—God’s people, the Church, the Body of Christ. It is the season for recognizing and delighting in the variety of gifts present in the lives of God’s people and for renewing our commitment to place those gifts in service to God’s reconciling mission.

The season of Pentecost is the season of anointing, the season of our being set on fire for God. It is the season for letting the fire of God’s love burn in and through us so that others may know its cleansing, healing, and transforming brightness in the midst of an often cold, fearful, dark and difficult world. Our response to the joy of Easter can take deep root and come to life in us in this season, a season when God’s Spirit urges us ever deeper into ministries of loving, caring, justice and peacemaking as we faithfully seek to do the deeds of Christ.

The season of Pentecost is the season for the Church to renew its commitment to mission, to the reconciling purposes of God for the sake of the world. During Pentecost, we celebrate the variety of ways in which God’s Word is heard in the varied contexts of the world in which we live—an especially important work of the Spirit for the Anglican Communion at this time. Pentecost is the season not for stifling voices of diversity, but for seeking them out so that we might more richly and more fully know the mind of Christ.

The season of Pentecost is the season for praising God and giving thanks for the Spirit’s Wisdom as it helps us grow in faith through prayer and worship rooted in God’s Word and planted in community.

Pentecost is a season of song about God at work in us and in the world, about God filling our lives with joy and conviction, and about the renewal of our hearts and minds as we prayer the prayer of Christ.

The Reverend Michael Hudson, in his book Songs for the Cycle, offers meditations, with suggested hymn tunes, for each Sunday of the three-year lectionary cycle. His offering for Pentecost Year A is a meditation on John 20:19-23. It can be sung to the tune Saint Denio, familiar to most of us in the hymn “Immortal, invisible, God only wise.” I invite you to add this meditation to your prayers throughout the long season of Pentecost. Perhaps it will be for you, as it is for me, a steady reminder of the joy and the challenge that is ours as we “Receive the Holy Spirit” over and over and over again in our lives.

Fresh fire falls from heaven,
a sign from above
that now is the moment
to burn with God’s love
and carry the brightness
out into the world,
like stars through the vast, spreading universe hurled.

Now Wisdom is calling
and gathers her friends
to share in the movement
of grace God intends.
We come in all colors,
from faraway lands.
yet each hears a language
the soul understands.

Praise God for this moment!
And leap at the chance
to join in the Sprit’s great,
spiraling dance—
One spark lights another
until all acquire
this bright, blessed, heart-waking
Pentecost fire.

Faithfully yours, in the power of the Holy Spirit,
+Thomas