“It sure is awful darn cold!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer.
"Yep, ya got that right." The lady who came around to the remote mountain campsite to care for the campers and toilets was dressed in polar fleece and a frozen smile. "I live at the north end of the lake and the wind from the lake drives right through my cabin. I was down to Puntzi Lake this morning to check the campsite there and the weather station recorded a low of minus one celsius. Apparently it was the coldest reporting weather station in Canada for today. It's hard to believe it's the first day of summer."
Linda and Campsite Kate continued to banter back and forth at the door to the travel trailer but typically, my mind had already taken a hard left, this time down memory lane. Puntzi Lake was etched on my memory since I was a snotty nosed kid. I lived with my paternal grandparents for eight years after my own parents had separated and divorced. It was the best thing that could have happened to me at five years of age; living with Grandpa and Grandma that is. They introduced me to all things cultural including listening to CBC radio. Every morning on CBC radio Grandpa's ritual was the cross-country weather report. It seemed to me that just about every morning there was this place called Puntzi Lake that reported in as the coldest spot in the province. I imagined it must be a place just a little bit north of the polar ice cap but Grandpa told me it was a U.S. Air Force Base up in the Chilcotin region of central British Columbia. The word Chilcotin and the name Puntzi Lake sounded Indian to my five-year-old ear. And the reputation for cold and the native sounding name attracted me in a strange kind of way, appealing to my passion for all things pioneer.
Thirty-five years later Linda and I and our family moved to the Cariboo-Chilcotin plateau and Puntzi Lake was just around the corner from us, a mere three hour drive across the plateau to the west. Puntzi Lake had ceased being a U.S. Air Force base when the Pine Line had ceded to Canadian control and then it had ceded to the pine squirrels about the time that President Ronald Regan had won the cold war with the Evil Empire. Besides, who needed an early warning radar system with Ronny's Star Wars missile defense program in the wings?
And so, Puntzi Lake is now just a Chilcotin lake again, with a handful of wonderful people who live around it enjoying the squirrels and the bitter cold. For some reason, official weather records are still kept for it. Whenever we have minus 40 degrees Celsius at Lac La Hache, Puntzi Lake records minus 50. Some things never change.
Puntzi Lake is noted for cold. It's always been that way. It's just like the Church of Jesus Christ is noted for the Holy Spirit. It's just always been that way. You just get used to it. So I was a little unsettled the other day when I was preparing for Pentecost by reading Acts 2, that something very old and very new broke into the state of the familiar and turned my thinking right on its head.
The church, or at least the people who make it up, has always been noted for being filled with the Holy Spirit. I have always thought in terms of the church this way, and I have always thought of the church exhibiting certain Holy Spirit traits. In his epistles, some of these traits the Apostle Paul calls the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" … things like wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues and interpretation of tongues (1Cor. 12:8-11). Some of these traits Paul calls "the fruits of the Holy Spirit," things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal.5:22). And so when I think of the church or its people as being noted for being filled with the Holy Spirit, I am usually thinking of us exhibiting these particular gifts and fruits.
Lately I have been trying to recover from the Christian addiction of proof-texting. You might say at present I am a recovering proof-textaholic. This means I am trying to listen to the Bible totally within the particular book that I am reading. What I mean by this is, that when I am reading something written by the evangelist Luke, I don't drag the Apostle Paul into it, and vice versa. I try to listen to each biblical book all by itself, at least at first. This freedom from the text-proofing addiction has caused me to discover all kinds of old stuff that is completely new to me. Like in the book of Acts, chapter two, the birth narrative of the church of Jesus Christ and the filling of its people with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. From Luke's perspective, he writes about this very Jewish festival that they called the Feast of Weeks. The particular trait that the Spirit filled church of Jesus Christ was noted for was the shared common life. It was a shared common life that was gathered by the apostolic Word, initiated in baptism, nurtured around the Lord's table and most importantly, lived out through the sharing of wealth (Acts 2:40-47). From Luke's perspective this is what the on-fire Holy Spirit filled church was noted for.
Now what really challenges me here is this sharing of wealth thing. I am not very good at it and I seem to share the Spirit filled common life of the church with folks that are almost as bad at it as I am. Together we seem to want to focus on Paul's list of Holy Spirit traits, perhaps because his gifts of the Spirit are much more spectacular and his fruits of the Spirit are much more subjective, and both can be nicely privatized to fit the strict individualism of our western culture. And so when I read Luke saying that the Spirit filled church is noted for community and a radical and costly redistribution of wealth with those who have need, I nicely sidestep Luke's bit of biblical truth and substitute Paul's, which suits me better personally, fits me like a glove really. But there is something missing, at least it seems to me there is. How on earth can you have a shared common life if you don't share your wealth?
Someone once told me that the Christian writings of the Bible, what is usually termed New Testament, are authenticated by the way they fulfill the Hebrew scriptures of the Bible, what is usually termed Old Testament. With this in mind, the interesting thing with regards to Pentecost is that when I look at the ancient instructions for celebrating it in the Hebrew scriptures, those detailed instructions in Leviticus 19 and 23 conclude with: "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God." (Lev. 23:22). And when you read around these instructions for Pentecost, or the Feast of Weeks or the Day of First Fruits as it is also called, you run headlong into the spot where Jesus lifted his famous response to the question concerning the greatest commandment, which He insisted was the hook on which the whole of the Law and the Prophets hung: "… you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord." (Leviticus 19:18)
I take this as more than mere coincidence. According to the Acts of the Apostles written by Luke, on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit filled the church of Christ, what the newborn church became noted for was Holy Spirit. What the sign of the Holy Spirit's presence was, and what attracted people to the church was, a common life lived out in the redistribution of wealth in caring for the needy. It is as if the God of both Testaments said, "See, here is my Pentecost Holy Spirit stamp on them as they fulfill the Torah and my Son's command." Luke tells us: "And all the believers lived in wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person's need was met. They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added those who were saved." (Acts 2:44-47)
I think now I begin to understand the seeming preoccupation throughout the rest of the book of Acts and indeed all of the New Testament, with what is termed Jesus' royal command to love neighbour as self (see James 2:8; Rom.13:9; Gal.5:14) and the requirement to care for the poor (see Gal.2:10). It is the outward sign, the evidence of what we are noted for, the ongoing Pentecost miracle of being filled with God's Spirit.
