06.04.06
Pentecost Sunday—Year B
- Acts 2:1-21
- Psalm 104:1-34
- 1 Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13
- John 20:19-23
Is it perhaps akin to the heresy of Deism to presume that the burning of the sun, the courses of the planets, the falling of rain, the life cycle of man and beast and plant, having been set in motion at creation, endure throughout the millennia, held together and fuelled by tireless subatomic forces? As amazing and incredible as it would be to create a universe that just kept going and going all by itself while its Creator stood by changing lives and answering prayers and loving people, maybe that’s not the way things are. Maybe every atom, every nucleus, every proton and neutron, the very ‘fabric’ of time and space is held together and urged forward in perpetual motion solely by God’s power. Or what if the continual existence of each fundamental particle is somehow bound up in the continual existence of God?
The same power that not only created, but also, in some way that defies explication, continually lends being to all that is; the same power that resurrected Christ; the power of the Christian Pentecost, poured out through tongues of fire and manifest in diverse giftings, is accessible to Christians today.