Wild Spirit

What is rising in you?

Today is the beginning of the longest season in our Christian calendar: Pentecost. Today marks the day where spirit is breathed into the matter of you and in me and brings life, prophecy and deep dreaming to our bones and our flesh. Today is the fulfilment of what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was leading to: God is not far away but breathing wild spirit into everything.

What is rising in you?

Acts 2:1-21 is actually pointing us to something far more interesting than a one-time event. Like all stories in the New Testament, if there is a story or word that sounds strikingly similar to something in the Old Testament, it usually means we are invited back into those older stories. And, in our case today, we are being guided back into the story of Moses and the Israelites in the desert.

In Numbers 11 we are given a similar event: where God’s spirit not only resides in Moses but fills the Israelites bodies and enlivens them. Some of the Israelites protest to the indwelling of the spirit of more than one man but Moses is quick to criticize them, saying all God’s people are prophets and are filled with God’s spirit.

What is rising in you?

But the funny thing about Moses and the Israelites is that this story, like our Acts reading, is actually pointing us to an even older story. We are being guided back to the beginning of creation itself: to Genesis 1.

And so after jumping from Acts 2 to Numbers 11 and now to Genesis 1, we find ourselves in the beginning when God created the earth. Here we are told that the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. We are invited into the very first Pentecost, if you will, when wild spirit is just about to break forth into creation, creating form, light and life onto the earth.

And it is from this place, the beginning of creation, that we are invited to meditate on. It is from here where we can come to understand Pentecost as not only a one-time event that happened after Jesus ascended into heaven, but an event that continues to spiral through scripture, spiral through story and spirals through us today.

What is rising in you?

We are told in John 3 that the wind blows where it will, that spirit is wild and emerges out of the most unlikely of characters and out of the most unlikely of places. We see this in Genesis 1 where earth is an empty void and is brought to glorious life. We see this in the Israelites who are grumbling and complaining in the desert when, all of a sudden, spirit fills them. And we see this is Acts 2 where Jews from all nations, and Gentiles of different languages all of a sudden are filled with the same wild spirit and hear it according to their own native language.

But Peter, who knows his Jewish stories well, is not surprised. Instead he quotes the prophet Joel in the Old Testament by saying: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show signs in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

No one is excluded in experiencing this wild spirit. Everyone is filled. Everyone is given the ability to prophecy, that is, to speak truth into what is happening right here and now. And everyone is awoken into the truth of their dreaming.

What is rising in you?

These scriptures are not only calling us to pay attention to what is rising in us, but is also calling us to pay attention to what is rising around us, to the people who are prophesying, dreaming and listening in our world today.

This week not only marks Pentecost, but it is also National Reconciliation week. Where we not only live into and meditate on what it means to say sorry to our First Peoples in this country. First Peoples who were stripped not only from their families and Land, but also from their stories, from their prophecies and from their dreaming. This week marks what it looks like when we deny the wildness of spirit that shows up not only in ourselves, but in those who have been listening to spirit for over 100,000 years. But in recognizing and apologising to the ways we consciously or subconsciously have participated in colonization, that is, stripping our sisters and brothers from wild spirit, we also recognize that this story is not over. Just like in our scripture readings today from Genesis, to Numbers, to Acts, the story is never over. Wild Spirit cannot be smothered that easily. Wild Spirit is alive in us still, it is alive in Aboriginal Australians too and we have an opportunity, like in our Acts reading, to gather together under one roof, as sisters and brothers, to experience Wild Spirit alive in us today, as one people, as God’s children who, in our difference of culture and language, have an opportunity to make way for Wild Spirit to take form, light and life in our world today.

What is rising in you?

What is spirit speaking through you?

How might spirit be calling you to participate in the reconciliation of people who have lived on this land since time immemorial?