Pentecost Sunday, Year B

“In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your daughters and your sons shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your elders shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both women and men,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.”…
~Acts 2:17-18
 
In the human family tree, the genus Homo goes back about 3 million years, and includes more than a dozen named hominin species, including modern humans, according to our best scientific understanding. Seventy thousand years ago, there were at least six different human species on earth. They were insignificant animals whose ecological impact, according to Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “was less than that of fireflies or jellyfish.” Today, only one human species remains, us, Sapiens, who rule the planet.
 
Something revolutionary happened in the Sapiens brain that enabled language, and imagination, and the development of myths, stories about non-physical things, about things that, technically, don’t exist. We can believe in things that exist purely in our own imagination, like states, and money, and human rights. We can believe in God. We can imagine possibilities and futures; we can prophesy and dream dreams, and we can organize ourselves around them. As long as communal beliefs persist, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
 
The story of Pentecost is a story of imagining the possibility that we belong to one another, that we are siblings in a story of salvation that leads toward connection, that leads toward mutuality rather than division, that leads to love rather than hatred, that leads to peace.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Acts 2:1-21 † Psalm 104:24-35b † Romans 8:22-27 † John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
 
About the Art: He Qi. Holy Spirit Coming, Oil on Canvas, 1998. Retrieved on May 6, 2024 from https://artandtheology.org/tag/he-qi/. Original source: https://www.heqiart.com/store/p96/50_Holy-Spirit-Coming_Artist_Proof_.html. 

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