When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Acts 2:1-21
This is the moment for the church newborn. A rush of wind, a loud sound, the feeling of fire, the joy of voices raised. Such a great image – but a strange one and absolutely lacking in our usual mainstream Sunday morning decorum. I love stories like this that shake us up.
Last week, we were in a similar place. Ascension is another strange story. There’s a difficult balance required when telling Bible stories to kids. You want to get at the real experience of the people -kids hear stories all the time and Bible stories are perhaps significant in that somehow they really happened. But you don’t want to spent too long trying to explain how or even why they happened. There are layers of understanding that need to grow organically in each of us. In the meantime, you want get the groundwork established so that faith can grow. So with our Sunday School kids, we tackled the Ascension story in terms of a relay race. (Thanks to Carolyn Brown at Worshipping with Children for the genesis of this idea. If you don’t yet read her blog, do. It is FULL of fantastic ideas and approaches at real intergenerational worship.) We wondered together about how Jesus ‘passed on’ the task of sharing to his disciples when he knew that he wasn’t going to be physically with them any longer. We used Carolyn’s idea of making wooden batons – and added a little tissue paper pizazz. I hope that the kids will hold onto the idea of stories being something we pass on one to another and that Jesus trusted us enough to pass them to us in the first place. Next week for Pentecost, we’re still running (oh dear) with this idea. We will take our batons and add eye screws to the end of each to be threaded with red Pentecostal ribbons. In the meantime, this is how they look: 
So the visuals are in place for next Sunday. But I’ve been wondering how to talk about the gift of the Spirit. It isn’t always easy to do with adults so how do you express it to children? They tend to have questions. And while, sure, it’s always viable and often appropriate to just confess that I don’t quite understand the story, I’ve been wondering what I do understand about this one.
Several years ago, I went to an Alpha weekend conference. I should say that I hadn’t been attending the Alpha course – a friend had been helping with the leadership and I was staying with her so I ended up gatecrashing the conference. The theme was the Holy Spirit, and I was warned that during one of the worship sessions there would be speaking in tongues.
This Presbyterian girl says gulp.
My home congregation was far to well-behaved for that sort of shenanigans. I had no idea what to imagine nor what I would do while it was going on. So I worried.
But when the time came, it turned out that there was nothing to worry about. And that I wasn’t alone in my worrying. Most of the conference participants were from likewise well-behaved congregations and, though the Alpha course had opened all sorts of questions for them about the experience of the faith, speaking in tongues was fairly outside the familiar frame of reference. The conference planners knew that. But they also wondered about the biblical description of the phenomenon. So, in the context of worship, they invited us to consider how music might open us to the personal words of God. We sang a sort of repetitive chorus that led – for some – into spontaneous song. Something not quite scripted, not quite understood, not quite well-behaved, something free.
And that was it. It felt like this experience of God’s Spirit was a liberation. The feeling of freedom that must be experienced.
I felt that freedom again a few years later during a workshop by Jeremy Begbie about theological imagination and the arts. He spoke about freedom and improvisation, and suggested that true freedom – artistic and spiritual – requires some suggestion of pattern and structure in order to grow. We need forms. The biblical pattern of promise, presence, and redemption enable us to see God’s continuing activity in history and in the world around us. And that awareness is freedom. He enacted this with music – explaining tension, waves of melody and harmony, and resolution. Then, with that idea in our minds, he invited us to sing. He taught us simple chorus, something that rose and fell in waves, always returning again to resolution. As a congregation, we stood together and let our voices trace the pattern of the song. Then slowly, one voice broke from the set pattern, elaborating it, taking it in new directions, but returning again with the rest of us to resolution. And then another voice. And another. Voices twisting out and twisting back in, some tentative at first, some quiet, trying the space, trying themselves. I remember Darlene’s voice in particular soaring rich and wide, filling the space of the church with her own song but never occupying all of it. There was always space for more. Some voices (like mine) kept more-or-less to the set chorus, providing the underlying continuing structure. Others like Darlene’s rose above and helped us to hear new possibilities and potentials in that which had seemed simple and straightforward. It was a beautiful experience. It felt like freedom.
I imagine the first Pentecost for the newborn church felt something like that. Invited, enabled, suddenly singing with many voices – one song in many ways. Not quite chaos because it is anchored and beautiful. Not quite ordered because it is freed. A splash of fluttering red. Something beyond decorum but something firmly grounded in praise. This is the gift the Spirit gives us in community. We can anchor each other and inspire high soaring flight. We are rooted in love and we are freed.
Happy Pentecost this coming Sunday. May it bring freedom in your community. May it bring joy.
