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bible study Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary

One Spirit, many gifts: Pentecost’s preferential option for the poor

Pentecost Sunday, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 and Acts 2:1-21 through a queer, liberationist lens

Key points:

  • Throughout scripture and culminating in Pentecost, God’s breath pervades all creation and lavishes gifts upon all persons — yet also demonstrates what liberation theologians call a “preferential option for the poor,” often selecting society’s shamed and shunned to speak God’s good news to the world.
  • Too often, we dismiss God-given wisdom and leadership as it manifests in the oppressed; we must resist the hierarchy of gifts humans construct and learn to recognize Spirit wherever She moves.
    • For instance, many dismiss the powerful Spirit-movement of Pentecost; they aren’t prepared to see God among Galilean hicks, so they don’t. But there is Spirit-movement there, which lesbian theologian Kittredge Cherry envisions as an erotic, ecstatic, polyamorous marriage between Holy Spirit and human spirits (passage below).
  • At Pentecost, it’s people who know society’s in-between spaces, the not-quite-belonging-anywhere that many bi- or multicultural people experience — Jews who were immigrants or visitors from outside Judea. Spirit speaks to them in their own heart languages! We too are called to practice linguistic hospitality and the radical belonging and centering of marginalized voices, vocations, movements.
The disciples,men and women depicted with deep brown skin, sit or stand in a roomy hut, many smiling as tongues of flame hover over each head. One of them beams as she reaches up towards a ball of light.
“Pentecost” by the JESUS MAFA project

God’s Spirit: both prodigal and particular

Happy Pentecost! This Sunday’s readings show us a Spirit who blows across all creation, blazes into the bustling heart of community life, and bestows Xir manifold gifts prodigally yet particularly — prodigal as in almost “wastefully” generous, an overflowing abundance of blessing lavished over all created things; and particular in that Xe is intentional about which gifts each individual receives, often with what liberation theologians call a “preferential option” for strangers and outcasts.

There’s Psalm 104, wherein God’s Spirit, or breath, is what animates all things — then Numbers 11:24-30, in which Spirit rests upon a select group in a particular way:

“I’ll take some of the spirit that is on you and place it on them. Then they will carry the burden of the people with you so that you won’t bear it alone.” So Moses…assembled seventy men from the people’s elders and placed them around the tent. …When the spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but only this once.

Two men had remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they hadn’t gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp. – vv. 24-26

Along with the recognition that we all need support and that decision-making power must be shared, what I love about this passage is how God’s Spirit does what She always does — surprises us.

We expect Divinity to remain within the safe confines of the boundaries we devise — in this case, the meeting tent Moses established where he and God carry out important conversations. But God’s breath blows where it will; the Spirit isn’t solely in the tent! Off in the center of things, out among the people, She gifts Eldad and Medad with prophecy too.

It is as 1 Corinthians 12 tells us:

Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
– 1 Corinthians 12:4-7

Resisting a hierarchy of gifts

All of us carry gifts from the Spirit intended for communal good; it is in using and joining our God-given gifts that we participate in the delivery of God’s Kin-dom here on earth.

Unfortunately, we tend to create a hierarchies out of these spiritual gifts, vocations, and activities: some are put on pedestals, while others are belittled, overlooked, or even cursed as sin.

For instance, we too often fail to recognize disabled persons’ unique gifts — and I don’t mean “they have so much to teach us” in the paternalistic, infantilizing way that is mainstream. I mean that their/our experiences of moving through a society structured to exclude them/us often compels them/us to cultivate wisdom and resourcefulness that could help liberate everyone.1 This is true of every oppressed group that “makes a way out of no way.”2

Some of our God-given gifts are even denounced as curses. Take queer ways of loving and being — ways that defy and demolish normative constrictions, that challenge society to think beyond “the way things are.”

This is why I can’t tolerate the “love the sinner, hate the sin” rhetoric or see it as anything but hate wrapped up in pretend piety — you are calling Divine activity in my life, the bounty of love and holy transformation flowing out from my queer experiences, sin.

I’m not one to throw around words like blasphemy, but Jesus does warn us that insults against the Holy Spirit — which I interpret as divine activity in the world — are unforgivable. Now, Jesus often employed hyperbole to get vital points across, and I don’t think that by “unforgivable” he means “damnable”; even so, we must all take great care not to rush to denounce God’s movement as sin just because it grates against the status quo.

In Acts 2’s Pentecost story, some of those who witness God’s movement in the disciples’ multilingual exclamations of Christ’s liberation don’t declaim it as sin, but do dismiss it as drunken ranting (v. 13).

A queer vision: Pentecost as erotic, ecstatic union

What some dismiss as debauchery was in reality an ecstatic encounter with the divine. Lesbian theologian and QSpirit host Kittredge Cherry envisions Pentecost’s arrival of the Spirit as an orgy-like ecstasy of mystical love-making; Holy Spirit weds human spirit as divinity is distributed through a fiery kiss:

Medieval illustration of Jesus and a woman figure seated in a letter O, holding each other and kissing
Kittredge Cherry is by no means the first Christian to envision Pentecost as betrothal, Divinity erotically wed to humanity, or the Holy Spirit as a kiss, as evinced in this illumination of Christ the Lover kissing the Church his beloved in a medieval manuscript of the Song of Songs. St. Bernard of Clairveax was particularly smitten with the concept of a kissing Trinity: “If … the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity.”

When the Holy Spirit loved me, our contact produced a ripple of energy similar to a heartbeat. She was ringing me like a bell, and the “sound” would roll on forever.

“It is without end, because it is without beginning,” She said. She rang me again, and this time when the edge of her heart crossed mine, the rapture made me lose control and we melted into One. …

We kissed everyone in the room…We licked them with Our flaming tongues. They welcomed Our electric kisses. Each of them inhaled sharply and deeply in preparation for a sigh. We swept into them as breath, passed through each soul’s new doorway and fertilized the sacred chamber within. At the same time, their sparkling souls penetrated my divine heart and swam into a new womblike space that had just unfurled for them. The glorious friction made me feel flushed.

Holy Spirit and human spirit were wedded, catalyzing a chain reaction of power bursts. Every soul in the room ignited in such a way that flames appeared to blaze from each person’s body. They looked around at each other’s auras in astonished admiration.

All that happened on one inhalation. When they exhaled, they could taste how much God loved them as We flowed over their tongues. They let their tongues flutter and writhe in ecstatic abandon. Each one released the tension of the wedding consummation in his or her own unique speaking style. Some of it sounded like gibberish to them as they praised God. Others spoke in exalted words. …

The Holy Spirit and I rode the sound waves of their voices, still actively making love. We granted everyone within listening range the same gift that I had received that morning: the ability to hear pure thought.3

Pentecost’s preferential option for the poor

As the disciples’ spirits merge with the Divine Spirit, their joyful response flows out into Jerusalem. As aforementioned, some dismiss their ecstasy as inebriation.

To them, these students of the executed rabbi Jesus are nothing more than homeless hicks who’ve wandered too far from their backwater region of Galilee. Perhaps they should “go back to where they came from” instead of continuing to disrupt the peace — peace as in “quiet,” in this case; but also as in the Pax Romana, empire’s false peace of enforced order.

Of course many dismiss them, just as we today dismiss the ways God is speaking through those we consider backwards, badly behaved, or unworthy of our time.

But others are drawn to the disciples’ boisterous babble.

Peter stands with his back to the viewer, arms outstretched as he speaks to a small crowd. Among this crowd are women and men wearing different kinds of clothing, a disabled person, and a child
Peter explains that they are full of Spirit, not spirits!

“Devout Jews from every nation under heaven”

The Jews who stop to listen to what these Spirit-filled vagabonds are actually saying are foreign Jews, coming from nations outside Judea.

Some of them are ethnically Jewish, born in diaspora; others are previously-gentile converts to the Jewish religion.

Some are only visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage to celebrate Pentecost, the Greek word for the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which celebrates Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. They’ve only left their gentile-majority communities for a short while.

Others have taken up more permanent residence in Jerusalem, where they get to live among fellow Jews — but, with their foreign languages and customs, they still don’t quite fit in.

Overall, these are people of the in-between:

Too Jewish for the gentiles of their homelands; too foreign for the Jews of Jerusalem, they know what it is to not quite belong anywhere.

Here in Jerusalem, these pilgrims and immigrants probably get by with the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, Greek (or, for more official occasions, Latin). They are heartsick for the ease and comfort of their mother tongues, their regional dialects. Strange idioms trip them up; miscommunications abound; jokes and banter are belabored.

As these people of the in-between journey through Jerusalem to the temple for Shavuot, I bet the last thing they expected to hear was their own heart language, breaking through a wall of Greek and Aramaic.

What wonder! What relief! What…on earth are these Galileans; where did they pick up so many languages??

Of course these are the kinds of people who stopped to listen. Judeans accustomed to communicating easily, to hearing their first language everywhere they go, are more likely to react with scorn at the boisterousness of these country bumpkins.

But for those who yearn for a quality conversation in their heart language, it’s good news. They’re disturbed all right — but in a wondrous way. They are ready to have their lives shaken up by proclamations of a Messiah of the in-between — a fringe Jew like themselves, who made time for outcasts like themselves.

…Isn’t it always the people on the outskirts, in the gaps and on the borders of things, who are most ready for revolution?

Mosaic with rectangular tiles. A group of disciples, men and women of various races, stand looking upward at the flames above their heads
Photo of a Pentecost Mosaic by Holger Schué

Many languages, shared liberation

Pentecost is sometimes referred to as a reversal of what happened at Babel — but I don’t think that’s quite right. At Babel, God creates a diversity of language; a reversal of that act would be to reduce human speech to just one language.

But that is not what God does — that’s what Empire does: It bulldozes difference and calls enforced conformity peace.

God speaks to us and hears us in our own language, whatever that language may be, and delights in our diversity! We, in turn, are called to exercise what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “linguistic hospitality,” rejoicing in our cultural diversity and enjoying the richness of our variety of language, united in the One who prays for us “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8: 26).

At Pentecost, the apostles invite others into their community as they are — sharing much in common, devoted to one passion, but maintaining core differences, like language. Oppressive differences like class are broken down, but the things that make us unique are welcomed.

Speaking as a USAmerican, this posture of humility and hospitality goes against everything we are taught here in the imperial core. I can’t dominate you if I know I have a lot to learn from you. You can’t dehumanize me when you acknowledge the value that I alone can bring to the table.

Rejoicing in this expectation-exploding, harmonizing Spirit, let us pray:

Holy Spirit of breath and flame,
howling gale and still small voice,

We praise you in your elusiveness,
how you whirl through the world wherever you — not we — will.

You dodge every attempt to pin you down,
slipping through our fingers like thin air
when we try to claim control of you —

yet at the same time, you pulse through our cells with every heartbeat,
settle deeper into our lungs with every breath.

As you, Irresistible Wind, pour over us now,
set our hearts on fire with passion for your justice,
for hospitality and mutuality,
for abundance beyond reckoning.

Amen.4

Drawing of the disciples with light brown skin and dark hair, holding on to each other as they gaze upward and the flames over their heads. The two Marys stand in the center of the group
Pentecost” by Gisele Bauche.

Footnotes

  1. For more on the unique gifts that disabled persons often bring to the table, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha’s book The Future Is Disabled — or their article on the topic here, where they declare, “At the core of my work and life is the belief that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion. Crip genius is what will keep us all alive and bring us home to the just and survivable future we all need. If we have a chance in hell of getting there.” ↩︎
  2. “Making a way out of no way” is an expression of Black wisdom frequently referenced by Womanists, as in Monica A. Coleman’s book that uses the phrase as its title. ↩︎
  3. Kittredge Cherry, Jesus in Love: At the Cross, 2018. ↩︎
  4. Prayer first shared on my website, binarybreakingworship.com. See also this Pentecost call to worship and benediction. ↩︎
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John 10 & Acts 2: abundant life is anarchic life

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John 10:10

If I had to pick a favorite single Bible verse that isn’t part of one of my favorite passages, John 10:10 would probably be it. In many ways it encapsulates Jesus’s ministry and purpose — what he is for, and what he is against. In other words, it names what Christ’s salvation actually is — what we’re saved from, and what we’re freed for.

Jesus is for life abundant — or, as the CEB translates it, “life to the fullest.” The Greek adverb he uses is περισσός (perissos), which has an intensity to it, a vehemence, a sense of excess. One might also translate it “excessively” or “overflowingly.” Because it has that prefix peri, one source1 suggests you could even translate it “all-around.”

However you translate it, it’s clear that Jesus’s liberation is all-encompassing, is holistic, floods every area of our lives, individual and communal. We aren’t freed just to survive, but truly and fully live.

An icon in traditional style of Jesus with brown skin and dark hair and beard, holding a lamb.
“The Good Shepherd” by Kelly Latimore

Queer abundance — liberated for

As a queer person, this truth set me free to pursue the things I needed to live fully.

It’s possible I could have eeked out a shell of a life constrained to my assigned gender, in a body I felt utterly severed from rather than experiencing my body as me. (It’s also very possible I couldn’t have survived that way; one of the violent fruits of nonacceptance and restricting trans people’s access to affirming healthcare is suicide.) However, I could not have lived life to the full that way. I would not have experienced Christ’s salvation holistically. I wouldn’t be open to the divine presence in my body, mind, psyche, and relationships with other people and all living things.

Embracing my trans self, daring to fall in love with someone of my assigned sex, discovering the power of queer community — these are some of the things Jesus liberated me for; these are the things that have brought me into life that overflows outward, joyously spilling out into my connections with everyone and everything.

Liberated from

In this example from my own life, we also see what kinds of things Jesus liberates us from — the thieves that break in to steal our joy and destroy our peace, who attempt to rob us even of our inherent dignity as creatures made in the divine image.

Any person or group that preaches Jesus’s salvation only as something we’ll experience in some abstract heaven, that denies the divinity in flesh and dirt and the everyday mess and miracle that is embodied life, is one of these thieves who threaten to destroy us.

Those who seem to hold nothing but contempt for this life, to hate this world — who seek to control other bodies and minds as well as the created earth, to constrain sexuality, to bring shame and fear and starvation of body and spirit — work against the abundant life Jesus came to bring. Even and especially when they do so in Christ’s name.

Comic by the Naked Pastor. An angry sheep is preaching while holding up a bible and pointing accusingly at a rainbow sheep sitting in the pews. Jesus is sitting next to that sheep, covering its ears so it doesn't have to hear the hate
caption…

“Us” and “them”

I’ve been saying “we” and “they” in too vague a way — who are “we,” the sheep whom Jesus the gate protects and guides into flourishing?

Whether the Gospel writer meant Jews, or early Christians, or something else when writing about Jesus’s “flock,” the verses leading up to verse 10 make it clear that the evangelist doesn’t mean all humanity; it’s a limited group. So did Jesus come to bring abundant life, life to the full, to his followers alone?

If we continue reading beyond the lectionary passage, the question of who gets included in this overflowing abundance expands exceedingly:

“I have other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen. I must lead them too. They will listen to my voice and there will be one flock, with one shepherd.” – John 10:16

In her book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, Barbara Brown Taylor refers to this passage to explore salvation beyond Christianity. God’s liberation, the abundant life that we as Christians believe Jesus came to bring into the world, is for all people.

At the same time, Taylor warns us against disrespecting our non-Christian neighbors when naming this not-Christian-exclusive, universal liberation:

“Once my holy envy led me to ask more of my tradition than the narrative of exclusive salvation and everlasting triumph, I began to search for counternnarratives that sounded more like Jesus to me. In particular, I looked for stories that supported Christian engagement with religious strangers — not as potential converts but as agents of the God who transcends religion and never met a stranger. …

In Judaism they are called ‘righteous gentiles.’ I do not know what they are called in Christianity, but Jesus receives them more than once, whether they come from Samaria, Syrophoenicia, Canaan, or Rome. …

If it is easy for Christians to overlook the ‘otherness’ of these religious strangers, then I think that is because we assume that once they enter our story they never leave it. In gratitude for their blessing, we baptize them as anonymous Christians. We make them one of us. A few do join us, but this is not the norm…”

Rather than declaring John 10 is evidence of “anonymous Christians” — Karl Rahner’s idea that non-Christians who sincerely seek to live ethical lives are essentially living as Christians and thus included in Christ’s salvation2 — perhaps we can focus less on the hypothetical details of Jesus’s gate and shepherd analogies and more on its overarching sense of radical inclusion and belonging.

As Taylor explains, Jesus does not elaborate on these many sheep of other flocks, but we can imagine a “God of many sheeps, many folds, many favorites, many mansions.” With this good news, we are challenged to engage respectfully with people of all religions and values, and work towards their abundant life as fervently as our own.

Illustration of a single building constructed almost townhouse style, with each individual unit representing a different world religion
“In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” by Irving Amen

And that leads us to the anarchy and mutual aid of Acts 2:42-47!

I know that for many, the term anarchy evokes visions of Heath Ledger’s Joker who “just wants to watch the world burn.” But the anarchists I hang out with are deeply committed to the world’s flourishing, believing that true equity and justice can only be achieved by removing all hierarchy.

An anarchic community has no central leaders. Decisions are made communally. Resources are shared equally. A core component to anarchy is a complete leveling of class, the systems by which the few wield power over the many. There’s no bigger threat to Empire. To white supremacy. To capitalism.

Images of Paul and Karl Marx wearing sunglasses. Under Paul is text from Acts 2: All the believers were united and shared everything. 45 They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them." Under Marx is his famous slogan, "From each according to their ability; to each according to their need"

In Acts and various Pauline epistles, we see an effort to dismantle hierarchies, reflecting Mary’s Luke 1 proclamation that God lifts up the lowly and casts down the powerful, fills up the hungry and sends the rich away empty.

Here in Acts 2, the rich Jesus-followers liquidate their wealth and distribute it among the poor Jesus-followers, effectively making themselves one of the poor. What a radical act of faith and commitment to true equity!

The mutual living, or koinonia, of this community reminds me of one disabled activist’s care webs.

In texts like Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha describes webs of care that they have participated in among other disabled queer and trans BIPOC — i.e., people who are failed by the government and institutions, by school and church and even family, and who therefore know deep in their bones that only “We keep us safe.” Because disabled persons often need to figure out mutual aid in order to literally survive, Piepzna Samarasinha explains, the disability community has much to teach everybody about how to live into mutual care.

The first such care web Piepzna Samarasinha helped form came together when “three disabled queer Asian femmes” were prepping to travel to a conference and going through the “very common disability experience” of “having your freak-out about how badly the whole thing will fuck up your body.” They decided that instead of choosing “between handling our access needs on our own or crossing our fingers that the conference and the airlines would come through to take care of us,” they would “experiment in coming together and caring for each other,” with powerful results:

We didn’t just survive the conference—we made powerful community. Committed to leaving no one behind, we rolled through the conference in a big, slow group of wheelchair users, cane users, and slow-moving people…People got out of the way. Instead of going out to inaccessible party sites, we chose to stay in, and ate and shared about our disabled lives. For some of us, it was our first time doing that. People cried, flirted, and fell in love.

…It was just four days, but people went home to their communities transformed.

We were no longer willing to accept isolation, or a tiny bit of access, or being surrounded by white disabled folks as the only kind of disability community we could access, or being forgotten. …We came back less willing to accept ableism from conferences and community spaces, because we knew it could be different—and if CCA could happen in someplace with scarce physical resources like Detroit, it could happen anywhere. Being part of that wild pack of slowness, talking tentatively about our disabled lives in ways we’d never said out loud before, changed everybody’s lives.

Of course, these care webs are never perfect. Piepzna Samarasinha describes how many fall apart due to unresolved harm, disagreements, or other interpersonal conflict. But they’ve never seen that as a reason to give up on the concept altogether:

“[T]he struggles we hit weren’t failures or signs of how inadequate we were but incredibly valuable learnings. …[O]ur struggle to figure these questions out is at the heart of our movement work. CCA [a disbanded care web] is another worthy, imperfect model in my body’s archive, one I build on as I build care in my life now.”

Photo of Leah Lakshmi, who has brown skin and long blue hair, smiling at the viewer. Next to them is the cover of Care Work.

We can say the same for the earliest communities that sought to live by Jesus’s example, in and through and as Christ’s body.

The early Church did not live out Acts 2’s vision perfectly.

“First of all, when you meet together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I partly believe it. 19 It’s necessary that there are groups among you, to make it clear who is genuine. 20 So when you get together in one place, it isn’t to eat the Lord’s meal. 21 Each of you goes ahead and eats a private meal. One person goes hungry while another is drunk.” – 1 Corinthians 11:18-21

Eavesdropping on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we learn that the Corinthian community of Christ-followers is not living the way Acts 2 claims the Jerusalem community was living. Instead of unity, they form cliques. Instead of divvying up resources, some eat richly while others go hungry.

None of us manages to live into our own values all the time. Paul is as human as the rest of us in that matter:

At some points, Paul seems to possess a transcendent glimpse of a Kin-dom that demolishes the systems that pit one ethnicity above another, that enslave some and empower others to dominate, and that situate men over women and all other “non-men.3

At other points, Paul (if Paul is indeed the author of these passages) clearly retains the biases he’s spent a lifetime absorbing. Take Ephesians 5 and 6, where Paul instructs wives to obey their husbands (5:22) and enslaved people to obey their masters (6:5). He does so while acknowledging that God does not classify people by status (6:9), seeming not to notice the cognitive dissonance in therefore reinforcing these hierarchies of sex and class.

Paul, if you believe that God’s Kin-dom is one in which these human hierarchies are no more, live into that now! For God’s Kin-dom isn’t just a far-away dream; it’s here, and we are the midwives tasked with delivering it.Paul, as you tell us, don’t conform to worldly systems and structures — be transformed by the renewing of your mind, constantly reassessing your presumptions and beliefs through the lens of Christ’s words and actions.

Decolonizing one’s mind is a lifelong effort.

Just when we think we’ve unpacked all the biases we’ve been absorbing from birth, we mess up again, cause harm. Thus it is essential to keep paying attention, to keep listening to those whom unjust systems place under us — so that we might partake in both the daily work of lifting up the oppressed and casting down the powerful, and the big-picture struggle to completely dismantle the systems that created poor and rich, oppressed and oppressor, powerful and disempowered.

In essence, let us always strive to be Christ’s hands and feet on earth, living in ways that bring life — full, abundant life that spills over into all things! — to ourselves, to each other, and even to those we think of as “other.”

  1. https://biblehub.com/greek/622.htm. I’m not a fan of HELPS Word-studies in general, or the Discovery Bible that produces them, but I did find this “all-around” translation option intriguing. ↩︎
  2. Admittedly, this explanation of “anonymous Christians” is oversimplified and Rahner himself would probably have a bone to pick about how I’ve summed up his concept. Go read his own writing for more depth. ↩︎
  3. “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:28 ↩︎
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Affirmation of Faith Call to worship Confession and Pardon easter Holy Days Liturgy

Pentecost Liturgy: Spirit of breath & flame, howling gale & still small voice

Call to Worship 

Christ is risen! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Christ is risen indeed!

We are a resurrected people! Alleluia!
Alleluia! We are raised up into new life!

The Spirit of God is upon us! Alleluia!
Alleluia! God’s Spirit dwells
among us, within us, around us, always!

Opening Prayer

Holy Spirit of breath and flame,
howling gale and still small voice,

We praise you in your elusiveness,
how you whirl through the world wherever you — not we — will.

You dodge every attempt to pin you down,
slipping through our fingers like thin air
when we try to claim control of you —

even as you pulse through our cells with every heartbeat,
settle deeper into our lungs with every breath.

Another Prayer

Holy Spirit, Giver of life,
We praise you for your multifaceted movement:

Like gale force winds you stir up stagnant spirits,
upturn tables in high places,
whisk us up from apathy 
into your heady dance;

Like a cooling breeze you comfort battered bodies,
refresh parched hearts;

Like oxygen you resuscitate the hopeless,
bringing life to lifeless places, 
dreams and visions that revivify the future.

As you, Irresistible Wind, pour over us now,
set our hearts on fire with passion
for justice and for your abundant life.   

Amen.

Confession and Pardon

Call to Confession

We have come to worship the Holy Spirit who whirls around us
as wind, as breath, as the air in our lungs,

But so many of our siblings find the breath of life
squeezed from their lungs;
and God’s good creation is suffocating.

Only in acknowledging our complicity
can we join in God’s restorative work. 

So let us confess our failings, 
first in silent reflection,
and then as one.

Silence

Prayer of Confession

We confess that we are bystanders and collaborators 
in the stifling of God’s children —

not only on national and global scales
but here in our own congregation.

Our society teaches us that to admit to being wrong
is a moral failing
instead of an act of courage, 
so we stick to our side out of spite,
resisting repentance,
refusing reconciliation.

In our refusal to budge,
meanness and malice engulf us all.

Lord, we forget that we are one Body, your Body.
We forget that you call us not to complete 
all the colossal tasks that stack up across the world, 
but to do our small part, in our small place, 
and to strive even when all seems hopeless.

Assurance of Pardon 

Look! God is doing a new thing! 
In the hopeless void of suffering and sin, God’s Spirit comes: 

She revives parched hearts and desiccated bones,
opens us to visions and dreams, to possibilities for improvement. 

In the new life won for us by Jesus
and breathed into us by the Holy Spirit,
we are empowered to dream bigger, to act more boldly,
to join together in God’s liberating movement.

Alleluia!

Affirmation of Faith / Responding to God’s Word        

While making room for fresh insight,
and celebrating the diversity of thought
that sets the cloud of witnesses aglow,

there are some beliefs that we in the church
commit ourselves to holding in common.

As one, let us affirm
some of that shared faith
while lifting up the wisdom
of one of our fellow witnesses.

We believe in one Triune God,
Creator of all things.

When God formed human beings from the earth,
They brought us to life by breathing
Their own breath into us,
making us in Their own image. 

Though God made us for interdependence
we play-act self sufficiency,
severing ourselves with binaries and borders
and labels of “us” versus “them.” 

Still, God remains faithful, 
urging us ever towards justice and abundant life for all.

Professor Philip Vinod Peacock of the Church  of North India writes,

“No one human or even a set of humans can claim that they are made in the image of God or are God’s representatives here on earth. Rather, only the whole of humanity together can claim that they are in the image of God. …

[Thus] God is best represented by diversity: Only the whole diversity of the world in terms of different cultures, gender, sexual orientation, and religious experience can represent who God is. This means that no [one] culture, gender, sexual orientation, or religious experience can claim superiority over another. It is only together that all of them represent who God is.”

God’s breath that divinizes all flesh, 
God’s Spirit who whirls through communities
of all kinds of cultures and creeds, 
God’s flame that burns and builds anew
knits all of humanity into one Body.  

All glory belongs
to the God who made us varied
and the God who makes us one. 

Amen.

I wrote this liturgy for Pentecost, May 2021 that centered around Ezekiel 37’s valley of dry bones, but much of it would fit well in any service focused on the Holy Spirit.

An alternative prayer of confession that focuses on the Movement for Black Lives, environmental justice, and other global social justice issues can be found here.