Dreams of the Spirit
Dreams of the Spirit
On this day at least, Pentecost isn’t just for Pentecostals. The Holy Spirit isn’t just for Pentecostals this day or any day. Every Sunday, we call the Holy Spirit our “Lord, the giver of life.” Whatever life this church has comes from her. And if this Church is to live, we must pray for the Gifts of the Spirit, which aren’t just for Pentecostals. Traditional Catholic theology gives us seven of them: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Holy Fear, or reverence.
And rightly understood, the kinds of gifts that those first disciples received on Pentecost are included in the Sevenfold gifts I just mentioned.. Take the gift of tongues. They weren’t speaking some unrecognizable language. Just as today, when some people having suffered a brain injury are able to speak a foreign accent or even a foreign language, those Galilean disciples were able to communicate the Good News of God’s love in Christ Jesus in whatever language the pilgrims to Jerusalem needed to understand. A few years ago, former Presiding Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori spoke of “evangelistic listening” as a kind of pentecostal language. You can say a lot by just listening to people, how they have been loved and hurt, how they have loved and hurt. That takes wisdom, understanding, counsel, all gifts of the Holy Spirit. And she has given these gifts to all Christians, not just the ordained.
About the only time we directly invoke the Holy Spirit on a person is at ordinations. But notice in today’s Gospel that Jesus says to the “disciples…receive the Holy Spirit,” not to a select group of “apostles” — John never uses that word — but to all the disciples, all to whom are given the power to forgive and the power to retain. As far as the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved was concerned, all of Jesus’s disciples had the ability to speak and listen to each other in love and truth, and to forgive each other. The reserving of that power to declare pardon in the name of God to the ordained is, by the Beloved Disciple’s measure, a concession to the Church’s failure to fully breathe in the Spirit of peace, truth, and mercy.
To be sure, much of that failure is on the ordained because all of us have seen those ordained ministers who seemed much more interested in retaining sins than releasing them. Many have seemed to think that judgement was the point when in truth the purpose of this power is reconciliation. And, unofficially, all of us have the power to confess to each other and reconcile to each other. To the extent that you need the assurance of forgiveness that the Priest declares, that is available almost every Sunday. And the Church trusts each of us to examine our selves, where we sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, where we did not love God with our whole heart, nor love our neighbors as our selves. And when your Priest makes the sign of the cross and declares your forgiveness, they are only reporting what God has done, without reservation. And this reconciliation we experience in the Church is one that we can all share outside the church, for the same Holy Spirit that Jesus blew on his first disciples at that first Christian Pentecost, is blowing on us today.
That was Peter’s starting point in the first Church sermon, quoting the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams.” The Holy Spirit empowers the younger generation to speak wisdom for the ages. She empowers the elder generation to build on their memories and dream new dreams of how things should and still can be. All of us doing our part — not all — can bring truth and release to the people around us, the people that God has given us to help. Not the whole world, just the parts that we can touch. In the Holy Spirit, God is giving you a present today. Don’t be afraid to open it.
May 24th, 2026
The Day of Pentecost-Whitsunday
The Rev. David Kendrick