Pentecost 2026; 24 May; Whitsunday
Acts 2:1-21; Ps. 104: 25-35, 37b; 1 Cor. 12:3b-13
John 7: 37-39; Jack Hardaway
MANY WATERS
I went to go visit a friend recently who has been living and working at the same place for most of his life and he is about to retire. As he is preparing to leave, decades of memories and stories are overwhelming him. Everywhere he goes he sees all the memories layering on top of what he sees. I could see him staggering around and reeling from all the layers of life overlapping. He was seeing so much more than me, many worlds, many lives all happening in the same place all at once. The thickness of time filled every step.
It was a powerful thing to observe, overlapping worlds, in the life of my friend, staggering and reeling.
Life in the Spirit is like that, seeing the river of life, and the Spirit of God running through and around everything all the time, seeing more than one world overlapping. Wind and water, breath and the endless deep.
The gift of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, life in the Spirit, that is today.
We call it Whitsunday because of the white clothing worn by those being baptized.
Define and control the wind.
Contain and restrain a flood.
Grasp and cling to a breath.
We can’t.
So it is with the Spirit, so it is with the life-breath, the giver of life.
It is beyond our capacity.
Yet it carries us.
Yet we can see its way flowing in the world and holding all things in life.
Overlapping worlds, seeing more than one way of being, layering over each other.
The world is flooded and filled with God’s presence, will we welcome it in? Do we even have much of a choice? Say yes to the wind. Say yes to the tide. It carries us with or without our permission.
Scripture and the lives of the saints bear witness to these overlapping worlds, this layered way of being in the world.
A pattern of communion that is love.
We see it there.
The many ways that love builds up and creates and sustains and grows in a world determined to tear down and devour.
The Spirit.
It joins together all our divisions and it turns them in to the vast diversity of creation, peoples, languages, genders, all building up each other rather than feeding off each other.
Life in the Spirit.
The divine pattern flowing through and around us all, bringing the passion of love where there was hate and indifference.
The arrival of the Holy Spirit continues the life of Jesus, the way of Jesus, through the community of faith, bringing and being Jesus to the world, the water and the blood and the breath of Jesus bursting into the world through us.
It is a vision of the world flooded with life and full of breath, with many languages, full of meaning, and purpose and direction and spontaneous joy, like in the line from psalm about Gose creating the leviathan for the sport of it, out of joyful playfulness.
The scriptures and the saints speak of this divine force in our midst.
It is spoken of as gifts of the Spirit, as fruits of the spirit, as speaking and understanding words of God’s activity in the world, as the Lord the giver of Life, as intimacy between the Father and the Son and with each one of us, as deep intimate communion and sharing, as silence, as song, as ecstasy, as calm, as dreams, as waking up, as dying, as being born anew.
Life in the Spirit is so many things, and to see the presence of the Spirit at work among us is to to see many worlds all at once, seeing the power that is love building up everything, walking by faith not by sight, the seeing that is faith.
Today is about that.
Rivers of living water.
Flowing from Jesus pierced side, and flowing through us into the world.
Today is a feast to celebrate and give thanks for that river, that breath, that storm, that fire, making all things holy.
Life in the Spirit is like that, seeing the river of life, and the Spirit of God running through and around everything all the time, seeing more than one world overlapping. Wind and water, breath and the endless deep.
It is a life dizzy with awe, and staggering with wonder.
Jump in, the water is fine.