From the Principal's Desk. . .
“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all in one place…”
Although it is a mixing of different gospels, when I hear the story of Pentecost, I can’t help imagining the disciples are gathered in the same upstairs room in Jerusalem where they last ate supper with Jesus, where they later locked the doors in fear, and the resurrected Christ appeared to them, where Thomas doubted. I imagine a familiar, comfortable gathering place; a home for them in Jerusalem.
And I have to say that I have a lot more empathy for the disciples after the last year and a half, for what it is like to wait indefinitely and in the midst of uncertainty in a set of upstairs rooms set above the city streets. Like many other people, I have spent a lot of time at home this year, my world constricted to the suite of rooms that make up a two bedroom apartment and connected to the wider world through the window of my computer screen and the windows looking out over the street.
The Holy Spirit arrived in the room full of disciples, but astonishingly it was the people outside that inner sanctum who felt the impact of the Spirit’s arrival. Speech poured out in a variety of tongues loud enough to be heard in the street and strange enough that it drew the attention of ‘the crowd’, who heard the sounds of home. People from all around the Mediterranean, from across the whole Roman Empire, stopped in the street and listened.
The Pentecost story makes me wonder what would happen if the Spirit did arrive one Sunday morning, setting us on fire (but not consuming us) and equipping us with speech: not for one another, but for the people outside our gathering. It makes me wonder if I’ve been imagining myself in the wrong place in this story all along. I’m so quick to assume I’m in the room with the rest of the disciples! But if I think about the movement of the Spirit, from the upper room of disciples to my upper floor apartment, I realize that really, I am an extension of the crowd. The Spirit and the Gospel and the Christian community has spread from the street filled with global travellers in Jerusalem to Rome and beyond. To Africa, Europe, and Asia. Across the oceans to Australia and the Americas. All the way across time and distance to me and you here on Turtle Island. Still in the midst of colonizing empires.
Maybe that is the deeper invitation in the Pentecost story: to step out of our own upper rooms, step out of our assumptions that we are the centre of the story, the speakers, the ones aflame with the Holy Spirit.
Maybe it’s time to listen to the voices coming from inside other rooms and other communities. Maybe it’s time to hear stories of home from unfamiliar voices, to listen to the roar of the Spirit, catch sight of the flames through a window and let ourselves be transformed by what we hear as others speak to us of home.
Michelle Owens, Principal
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