Today is Pentecost Day. Thousands of churches will mark today as the occasion when the Spirit of God is poured out on the faithful who turn their hearts and faces to God. Those who have read this blog for some years will remember that I like to associate Pentecost with an explosion of colour. I was fully intending to do so today. Inspired by a fellow Baptist Minister, I decided to go with the colour theme again, and conduct a little polychromatic experiment.
It seems to me that when the Spirit came, all the promise which was there in the prophets, all the anticipation which was there in John the Baptist, all the grace which was there in Christ came cascading down on the hopeful crowd. For the first time ever, all the rainbow colours of God's grace could be seen in a way which was only monochrome in anticipation. The colours were there all along in the waiting - but nobody could see them.
Today I shall issue lenses from these glasses to the children and ask them to look at the light coming in through the church's plain windows:
I shall then ask each child to find an adult and then 'bring them in' on the wonderful surprise:
On Pentecost day, a hope so often seen in bland monochrome is washed in glorious colour.
The big question, of course, is whether I should 'change the script' on the morning after another terrorist attack. I believe that I should not. After all, Pentecost is the day when the Christian church expresses the belief that ordinary people given extraordinary blessing have both mandate and capability to change the world. Pentecost is not the day when the church looks at the world not with blinkers to shield it from the nastiness. Rather, it is the day when it dons the spectacles of faith and sees the most glorious possibilities even in the darkest corner.
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