Pentecost Sunday-What Are We Missing?

We make a big deal about Christmas and the coming of Christ with lights and gifts. And we should!  We celebrate Easter with heart-swelling music and the hard but wonderful story of our salvation.  And we should.

However, when Pentecost comes fifty days after Easter, it is simply a quiet blip on our spiritual radar, if that.  And yet it is the birthday of the Christian Church.  It was God’s unmistakable pouring out of His Spirit into His called people so that they could take this revolutionary message into the world.

We should celebrate Pentecost with hopeful prayers and ready hearts. We need what God wants to give us. If Pentecost does nothing else for us, it should remind us whether we live powered up to do God’s work God’s way.

I don’t understand what rushed through the room where the disciples gathered in more of a prison than a launch pad.   We only know that each had such a powerful encounter with the God of Law and Creation that each was transformed from the inside.  They received power they had never experienced.  Not when they were with Jesus.  Not when they saw miracles.  Not even when they recognized he had come alive after death. This was new and different in every way.

The fear that had kept them behind locked doors was gone. In its place, there was power, an inner upheaval as mysterious as the rolled-away stone. They experienced a oneness with Jesus that they didn’t know when they walked with him before his crucifixion. It opened doors in their hearts and minds and pushed them into the world.

We need a little pushing today, don’t we?  We live cloistered in our Christian circles.  I live there, too.  I pat myself on the back with Bible study teaching and Christian writing.  But that is not all that God gives His power for.

And so I pray for me and all of us as we pass another Pentecost Sunday:

If you want to print a copy of this prayer, click here: Prayer for Pentecost