Worship

Scripture

Just up the highway and across the pasture from the country church where I grew up, a country Pentecostal church met, also.  On warm Sunday nights, our service would dismiss around 8:00.  As we walked out the front door after the closing amen, from open windows across the pasture drifted energetic strains of music in the most boisterous tones: twanging electric guitars, a rhythmic thumping bass, jangling tambourines, clapping hands, and at times voices raised in holy shouts.  We were finished with church and going home, but these folks were just getting started!

Without understanding the account of Pentecost as a ten year old, I imagined the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 in terms of the sensory details I remembered from those summer Sunday nights.  To my innocent mind, Pentecost meant a Pentecostal church with loud music, shouting, speaking in tongues, and animated worship expression.  Looking back, I assumed that the day of Pentecost in Acts was the beginning of the Pentecostal church, even though the sound imagery was more akin to a Happy Goodman concert than to a mighty rushing wind!

As a grown-up, I naturally understand Pentecost for its significance: the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.  We should never grow bored or weary of reading the account and its effect on the early church.  In fact, we should read the account in Acts 1-3 to celebrate the birth of the Christian church, the church that Christ paid for on Calvary and then took for his bride.  That church born of Pentecost transcends any denominational leaning, label, dogmatism, or persuasion that evolved in the centuries since.  

So the cheerful message for today’s reading is “Happy birthday, Christian Church!”  Not just our Ark Church, but the universal, global gathering of believers who exalt the name of Jesus. 

Instead of singing “Happy Birthday” on Pentecost, though, let us rather repeat Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17:21:  “I pray for those who will believe in me… that all may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I in you. May they also be one in us, that the world may believe.”  

By the power of the Holy Spirit that fell upon mankind on Pentecost, may we so strive!

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