The fires of Pentecost are not the tame flames of birthday candles or a cozy winter’s hearth; the fires of Pentecost are a sign of the God who resists our every attempt to domesticate the divine and to control how the holy will work.

For the followers of Jesus, the day of Pentecost becomes an occasion of profound initiation. With the gift of spirit and flame, the community that Jesus has formed is now fired, prepared, propelled into a new stage of its journey. Like a vessel in the furnace of a kiln, the followers of Jesus receive the transformation they need. They are no longer a group of believers but rather a catalyzed community, a body that, enlivened by the spirit, will endure and continue the work of Christ.

As those followers knew, we can’t always plan on moments of initiation. If we cannot control God, it follows that we cannot control the ways that God beckons us or, sometimes, seemingly flings us across a new threshold. We can work to make ourselves available when it happens, but we don’t always get to choose our initiations.

At Pentecost, initiation occurred not only at the individual level (“and a tongue rested on each of them”) but also at the corporate level. The outpouring of the Spirit upon the whole community reminds us that we are not on an individual journey but a shared one. God calls us, compels us, to attend to the Spirit in one another.

The celebration of Pentecost beckons us to keep breathing. It challenges us to keep ourselves open to the Spirit who seeks us. The Spirit that, in the beginning, brooded over the chaos and brought forth creation, the Spirit that drenched the community with fire and breath on the day of Pentecost; this same Spirit desires to dwell within us and among us. Amidst the brokenness and chaos and pain that sometimes come with being in community, the Spirit searches for places to breath in us, to transform us, to knit us together more deeply and wholly as the body of Christ, and to send us forth into the world.

Blessings to you in these days of celebration. May we keep breathing. May we blaze.

The words of Jan L. Richardson.