Tongues of Fire

Yesterday at St. Matthews we celebrated Pentecost. There were balloons, holy cat toys (jubilation streamers), incense and a picnic that included not only cotton candy and a bungee race but beer and the best cake I've had since I don't know when. I'm told it came from Cher-Dan's bakery here in town but I digress.

I was struck by the fact that this is the only Christian holy day where Christians, well, people at St. Matthew's anyway, get flat out slap happy about church. Christmas ends with wine and cookies but you've got all that very serious pageantry prior to that. The church starts out dark at Easter. Pentecost? You get scores of people coming to church in red t-shirts and shorts. There's almost always some sort of bouncing apparatus in the yard. Then there's the cotton candy...

It's we know this is the day where God said "Okay, I'm going to trust these people with this so I'm going to give them the means to accomplish it". This was the day when the church became the Church. This was the day when the Church stopped being a random Jewish sect and was given power by the Spirit of God. This was the day God had not only walked among us and shared our nature but had come to live in our hearts so we would know what to do when the big moments came up...

So why do we have such a hard time doing anything about it? Every time we do something we worry about offending people. We worry about whether it's going to be controversial. Whether we'll be perceived as being too liberal or too conservative (mostly too liberal). We worry about rubbing people the wrong way.

I don't know why, Jesus of Nazareth made a career of it! Oh wait, it did cost him his life, didn't it? If that's what we're afraid of, we need to find another religion.

For the first three hundred years of Christian history it was dangerous to follow The Way. Then Constantine screwed the church by making Christianity legal. (He was baptized shortly before his death---the Way was pacifist then and being a Roman emperor he had a lot more people to kill.) After that, someone made it the state religion. Making something the state religion brings in a whole tribe of fakers. Yup, fakers.

I guess the only way to weed them out is to start crushing some tin foil on our antennae and listening to the Holy Spirit again. If we offend enough sensibilities with this radical love that God has for the world, we won't have folks joining the church to help their social calender anymore. I actually think we've been doing that lately. Which may be why so many people are screaming about the direction the church is taking. It's starting not to be safe again.

How wonderful.