ACTS 2:1-3 
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.
And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.

Well according to our Pentecost story from Acts they’ve waited and watched and gathered together in one place for long enough. Now the Spirit is interceding. And not with the a gentle or deep sigh but with a rushing violent wind and tongues of fire. I bet that got their attention!

Can you remember a time the Spirit swept into your life and grabbed your attention? Were you waiting for it? Hoping to be blown in a new and exciting direction? Or were you scared and huddled up hoping it would blow on by? In this well known story from Acts the disciples are called out and made visible once again in their communities. God’s fire danced on their heads.

How has God called you out of your comfortable or hidden places and what has God marked you for?

May the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit find you,
And may you be delighted in the dancing movement of the Spirit,
May God’s call catch like fire,
Lighting your way forward and warming you from within.
AMEN

Musical Meditation

Can you think of the moments in your life that go unspoken, and yet God attended to them? Either celebrating or grieving with you? And have you sat with a friend or even a stranger who knew the particularity of your joy or pain without needing to exchange words? Who are the ones who know your heart?

May we give thanks for the Spirit that intercedes on our behalf,
coming to our aid and hearing our prayers,
even in the deepest recess of our hearts,
May we give thanks for the listening Spirit that
comes in the form of a friend or stranger,
one willing to be our companion in wordless prayer.
AMEN

Musical Meditation

I was adopted and so I think that word always jumps out at me, making me read this scripture through that particular lens. Today when  I read it occurs to me, the author of this letter longs to be claimed by God. At it’s heart this is what it means to be adopted. To be chosen and claimed. To be taken as one’s own and be truly made a part of this new family. When I was kid adoption wasn’t as common (or at least  not as well-known) as it is now and often times kids would say to me, but where is your real mom?  And I’d think, wow, they just don’t get it. This is the lady who’s claimed me and loved me and made me hers. She is my mom.

We wait with anticipation to be loved and claimed in such a way that it sets us free. True love doesn’t bind or break, it challenges us to love well in return, no longer clinging to selfishness, fearfulness, insecurity, anger or hurt feelings. It’s hard work this waiting and loving. We struggle as individuals and as whole nations, as a species and in concert with all of creation contracting with violence and war and then receding and waiting for peace.

What are we waiting for? Not a passive peace but for redemption, for reconciliation, for the world to be made whole. God’s been working on teachings creation about love like this for a long time. It’s a long labor of love. How do we participate rather than wait passively? How do we learn to trust our adoption, believing that we are each chosen, claimed and loved by God?

O God,
We long to be claimed by You
and set free from the things in this world
that bind us to brokenness.
We long to bring our groaning and clamoring voices
together for peace,
working in concert for reconciliation
rather than retaliation.
Be with us in our labor pains
Oh God and teach us to breath in our fears
and breath out love,
teach us to breath in hate
and breath out peace.
AMEN

Musical Meditation

Earlier in the Psalm the writer encourages the listeners to ignore advice that is mean-spirited and selfish, to move towards God and not away from God and not to build one another up rather than using words to shame, bully or mock one another. The Psalmist often creates the dichotomies in which the good, the bad and the ugly are so easily discerned from one another. If I read it too quickly I might think the Psalmist is saying that some folks are good and some are not. But it’s more complex than that isn’t it? And it’s too easy to draw big thick lines between who we imagine as good and who we imagine is wicked. When in truth many of us have discovered that all of these parts — the good, the bad and the ugly — exist in our own hearts and minds.

There are times the voice of truth and love, of compassion and humility speaks loudly in my head and heart. But there are other times that voice is clouded or competing with voices responding to hurt feelings, disappointment and judgment. I imagine God’s stream of compassion running through my heart, pumping love and life and light into it so that it will grow strong and lean in towards that light, towards God. The beauty of a stream is in it’s invitational nature. It doesn’t overwhelm like the ocean, it flows at an even pace, calm and cool. It reflects the softness and beauty of it’s surroundings and functions as a life source for those who would root themselves nearby, for those who would swim, bath or drink from it.

May you abide in the cool waters of God’s compassion,
May you find yourself rooted in the words of God,
May you lean in towards the light growing stronger,
May your experience of God let you face your fears and brokenness with honesty
so that you move towards a wholeness grounded in Christ.
AMEN

Musical Meditation

This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent. (John 17:3)

That is to say that eternal life is a life grounded in and bounded to God, a life in which we (the believers) know God through Jesus — the one who walked, taught, ate, loved, died and was resurrected among us.

In ancient middle eastern communities there was primary emphasis placed on the quality of life, especially of life in and with God. Jesus who was grounded in the Jewish ancient middle eastern community invited his followers into the fullness of knowing and being known by God through his own life and teaching. He invited them to an experience of abundance. Over the centuries as the early Christ followers became the Early Church and the Greek influence of rationalism and logic became the prevailing notion our understanding of eternal life took on new meanings that reflected a culture that favored longevity or quantity over quality.

How do our current values shape our ideas about God? About what living a life of fullness and abundance looks like? Does our current culture favor an emphasis on the here and now or on what happens when we die? Do we value quality? quantity? or both? And does our faith community reflect the same values or different ones?

May you live into the fullness of the knowledge that God is with you,
that despite our fears and all that we do not know,
we trust that in life and in death we belong to God.
AMEN

Musical Meditation

The Elder writes to them, imploring them, hoping to remind them of the story of who Jesus is. In the verses before this one he refers to the waters of Jesus’ baptism, to the pronouncement of the Holy Spirit, to the suffering he endured on the cross and finally here he names God the creator as the greatest one testifying to who Jesus is. The author of 1 John also reminds his readers to listen to their own hearts, that they have the testimony of who Jesus is inside them, written on their hearts.

Testimony is a word made complicated by the centuries. When I hear it I think of courtrooms and witness stands (which may be a sign that I’m watching too much TV drama) or I think of sidewalk proselytizers who might as well be yelling into an empty abyss for all the attention they get from the crowds that pass them by without a backwards glance. But what does testimony look like in our communities of believers in this time and place? What are the words and stories about Jesus that are written on your hearts? Last week we were invited in the Gospel of John to abide in God. If our lives our grounded in God, if they are nourished and supported and bound up like branches to the vine of God then where and how do the stories of God turn up in our lives? In our stories?

When you find yourself telling someone a story about your life today, ask yourself, and where is God in this story?

Our everyday stories are our testimonies about the living, breathing, challenging and comforting Christ in our lives. They do not have to be cut and dried and obvious, in fact most of the time they aren’t. They don’t have to end with a moral or be tied up with a perfect and then we all lived happily ever after ending because we don’t often know how our stories are going to end. They just need to be true. God is with us in the trenches of the ins and outs of all of our days and the stories that we tell about the silly and mundane, the heartbreak and humiliations, the tenderness and forgetfulness of our days are our honest-to-goodness God stories.

So go on, go ahead and tell your stories,
May God’s presence be revealed in each one of them,
May you see God revealed in the stories of another,
May these stories hold and sustain you and
May they testify to the truth that God is with you.

Musical Meditation

Jesus’ words must have been reassuring to the disciples. That they are given, belong and are protected by God. But what does it mean for the disciples to be in the world? That must have been unsettling to hear, “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” Was Jesus leaving them behind? What should they do? What will happen to them next?

What does it mean for us? To be in the world? Our answer might depend on how we see and experience the world? Do we see and experience the pain and suffering in the world? Do we notice the beauty of the world we live in? Do we think of the world as our own small piece of the city, the United States of America? When we hear world do we think bigger? The whole planet? Our galaxy? The whole universe?

Before we answer that question it might be good to consider Jesus’ next words, “protect them… so that they may be one, as we are one.” Jesus invites the disciples, and us into deep and abiding wholeness. To see ourselves as one. When we consider the world in all it’s beauty and brokenness do we understand ourselves as intricate part of the whole? That we belong to God and to one another?

We are in the world.
We are given by God.
We belong to God.
We are protected by God.
We are in the world to love one another.

Musical Meditation

Praying aloud is a particularly vunlerable way to pray isn’t it? It’s self-revealing and imperfect. I remember my first few months as a hospital chaplain. I learned so much about prayer. I learned that folks didn’t care so much if I could wax poetic words of prayer but they needed me to listen and to reflect their deepest needs and their stories; to weave those stories into words of prayer — requests that God rememember and attend to them in their darkest moments. My words were often clumsy and awkward, but when we pray aloud for one another we stand in solidarity with them. It’s comforting when we hear our own fears, our deepest desires and our joys reflected in prayer, spoken aloud to God and our personal prayers become corporate prayers. Out-loud prayers to God acknowledge our common humanity.

May God be in your head and heart as you listen for the stories of others that need lifted in prayer,
May you know the peace and healing of hearing your own needs and hopes spoken aloud.
And may God hear your prayers.

Peace,
Shawna

Musical Meditation