Acts 2:1-11
1 Corinthians 12:4-13
John 20:19-23
Psalm 104:25-37
This time of year I like to go to the Regal Meadow a preserve kept by Nature Conservancy to look at the small white ladyslippers an endangered prairie bog plant. It's worth the woodticks and occasional early mosquito bite to step into a clearing and see dozens of white orchids.
Two Fridays ago, I went there only to find it was too early in a cold spring for the flowers to have bloomed but since I was there I figured I might as well look around and see what was up: a badger, white tail deer, pheasants mourning doves yellow marsh marigolds.
One of the most interesting things for my scrutiny was the ashes of a controlled burn on the western portion of the nature preserve. In order to keep the prairie bog from being overgrown with willows and dogwoods, the conservancy carefully burns off select portions of the bog every few years.
Now, most of us would like to thing about the Holy Spirit as coming to us to the form of a white dove or at least the great speckled bird of those gently weeping mourning doves. There's Gospel precedent for that the spirit in the form of a dove that appears at Jesus's baptism.
Today we heard about a different form for the Spirit: wind and fire, those same purifying elements used by the stewards of the Regal Meadows. Now these are discomforting elements. As a child I heard my grandmother's stories told by her grandmother of great prairie fires the pioneer version of the great forest fire in Disney's "Bambi." Scary stuff. Scary too I would imagine for the disciples gathered in that room on Pentecost when suddenly the fire of the Spirit danced above their heads.
Out of the destruction of the cross we received new life. Out of the fire, Regal Meadow is reborn. Even a few days after the controlled burn, I saw new life emerging out of the ashes. Out of Pentecost's flame, we Christians received the church, thought by some theologians and historians to be the birth of community in western civilization.
And what shape will this community take? Listening to St. Paul's celebration of gifts, I can't help but think of a walk I took yesterday in a friend's lakeside woods near Willmar. I saw 49 species of birds each filling a different niche in the local ecology. Herons speared fish, pelicans seined the surface of Lake Wagonga with their great pouchy beaks and cormorants dove in the murky waters. At least four different species of flycatchers caught insects on different levels of the trees Hummingbirds, thick as bumblebees, patrolled the white blossoms of elderberries.
I couldn't help but think of a healthy church filled with souls and their diverse gifts. Pentecost.
We are called by the Spirit to be part of a great community. As Christians, we are baptized by the Spirit in the name of Christ. In our local communities, our churches, we live out the ecology of the spirit.
Now, viewed from this frame, it would seem as if much of the letters of Paul are calls to stewardship of that community, and the call to cherish each individual's gift is a call on both the individual and group level to value our selves and the diversity we find everywhere in the church after the controlled burn of the Spirit.
That we are called to live a dynamic stewardship with the Spirit. That it's not as if we can get baptized and then it's settled. Within the diocese of Minnesota we recently completed a visioning process that reminds me of the prairie stewards' controlled burn. Our vision process has produced four one-word imperative sentences: