May Pastor's Ponderings

The second Sunday in May, we will celebrate Pentecost, the birthday of the church. The early church received the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the form of tongues of flame and wind. Spirit in Greek is pneuma and this is the word of origin for pneumonia, pneumatic; this relates to breath, wind; a force that is unseen, yet felt and experienced. On Sunday, 11 May, we will celebrate this gift given to us through Baptism and when ever we experience or encounter God in our lives. We welcome this gift and we gather to help each other discern our experience of this encounter with the Holy Spirit in our lives. Because it can be a puzzling and troubling experience for us, we seek help from others who have encountered this experience to help us fathom what it means for us. Through Holy Scripture and prayer, we help each other discern if we have truly received an experience of the Holy Spirit. Satan can deceive us and can be equally adept at manipulating our experiences as God can (see Mt 4:1-14 and Lk 4:1-13, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness). So we need to be vigilant and seek each other out to discern if indeed God is working with us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lutherans have never been to keen on emphasizing the power of the Holy Spirit. Our experience of the Holy Spirit can be a very emotional one. Lutherans have never been prone or comfortable with ecstatic emotional experiences or manifestations of the Holy Spirit at work in, with and through us. We have been very heady, intellectual in our approach to the Holy Spirit; this limits our intimate, emotional connection with God. Yes our intellect is a gift from God and a part of our life, but we are also gifted with an emotional component as well. This intellectual gift can be abused and misconstrued just as the emotional gifts we receive. We as a gathered assembly of the faithful pray for discernment as to the truth of the revelations we receive from the Holy Spirit using both our intellect and our emotions. To deny our emotional side of our encounter with God is to limit our experience of the Holy in our lives. If we reflect upon how we live life, we experience life through our emotions, more so than of our intellectually analyzation of life’s experiences. In John 10:10 Jesus tells us: “I came that they (we) may have life and have it abundantly.” Part of that abundance of life is our experiencing all life’s encounters – both intellectual and emotional; this leads to an abundant, rich life. We have the Word of God to study, reflect and ponder over; we have this gift of the Holy Spirit to enrich and profoundly touch us. When we encounter the Holy Spirit, we are changed, we are enriched, we experience God loving us. Let us celebrate on Pentecost with joy and affection this gift of love, this gift of the Holy Spirit.