This article was originally published in the 2023 Early Pentecost Bellringer
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Collect for the Day of Pentecost, BCP page 227
During my first year as a chemistry teacher back in Massachusetts, I was watching my students perform an experiment one day when one of the boys in the class leaned too close to his Bunsen burner and his bangs ignited. I was about to call out to him when his lab partner tapped him on the shoulder and informed his friend in a total deadpan: “Your hair’s on fire.” The student swatted at his forehead and other than a few charred remnants of hair on the counter and the somewhat ragged appearance of his bangs, no harm was done. It did however provide me with a great story for the next three decades anytime I was speaking about lab safety. The memory also has provided me for more than five decades now, a great mental image of the first Pentecost: a room full of people with their hair on fire. Of course, I don’t really believe that it was their hair, but rather their hearts, that the Holy Spirit set ablaze that day. After seven weeks of living in the shadows, afraid to be seen or heard by much of anyone, the apostles were suddenly on fire with the desire to share the Good News about the friend and fellow Galilean whom they’d come to know as the Face of God. And they weren’t just prepared to talk to the people they knew well, they were ready and able to tell people they’d never met, in ways these total strangers could understand, about the new way of being open to them by becoming followers of Jesus Christ. They were filled with the Holy Spirit as never before, ready at last to do the work Jesus had called them to do. That work is not, and never will be, done.
So hopefully when we put on our flame colored clothes, and worship under the flame colored streamers on Pentecost, our hearts will also be set on fire by the Holy Spirit. Hopefully we will discover in ourselves the strength and the courage to go out into the world, committed to doing the work God has given us to do. That may mean finding ways to communicate with people we’ve felt never really understood us, or with people who over time seem to have drifted terribly far away. The sad reality of today’s world is that people who appear to speak the same language often find it utterly impossible to understand each other. We need to find ways to bridge that gap, to make the miracle of Pentecost as real today as it was in the streets of Jerusalem all those years ago.
