The Holy Spirit can be the most underrated and misunderstood persona with the Divine Presence. Popular author Frances Chan suggests, “There is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and…
How to prepare for Pentecost
I’m lying on an ice pack early this morning, doing my back exercises and listening to Pray as You Go, a tool for meditation, with monastery bells, music and a Bible reading. It warms up my cranky body — and…
Pentecost and the (Un)Holy Land
On the evening of July 16, 2017, I boarded an 11-hour flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. It was my first trip to what has been known for years as the Holy Land, as part of a clergy contingent sponsored by…
Could the righteous, riotous fire of Pentecost be burning in the protests for racial justice?
The riotous fire of a burning police precinct might not be the Pentecostal flame many of us expected, and that itself is a failure of white Christians to listen to the suffering around us.
‘We can’t breathe’: an apt Pentecost prayer for white Christians
Now more than ever, we need that Breath in our bodies, that fire in our bones, that vision of an otherwise possibility that bespeaks sheer revolution and not a measured tinkering with a supposedly “broken system.”
The time is now: Born-again Christians need to make some babies
The Holy Spirit is conceiving new life and needs a partner. The Church, the body of Christ, is called to be born again and again and again. May we be a body in the infancy of innovative growth, a body vulnerable and yet powerful as the Church enters an unknown future full of new possibilities.
The scattering yet unifying Spirit and the place of LGBTQ persons in the Church
How do we discern how the Spirit works in our particularities for the sake of the larger mission? Today I imagine the Spirit’s fire would fall down on LGBTQ folk, enabling them to speak to God’s testifying work in their lives and in their communities.
The prevailing power of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit’s socialist tendencies
We need God’s very essence and being to persuade those in power to see the work that they do through God’s eyes, to adopt and embrace God’s view of things, and then to make it happen in the legislation they produce, the policies they enact and the initiatives they advance.
The ecstasy of God’s inner life is the model for human community
We seem to sing it better than we conceptualize it. We can muster a hearty rendering of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” probably pondering more about the “early in the morning” wording than the theological verities. I am speaking of the blessed…