Celebrating Diversity: Pentecost Sunday
Acts 2: 1 – 21
What is Pentecost?
They sat in the back row, just trying to slip in unnoticed. It had been years—decades even—since they’d set foot in a church. Wounds from judgment, silence, exclusion. But on that Sunday morning, when the first words spoken from the pulpit were: “Whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here,” they said it felt like something inside them cracked open. Tears welled up. Warmth spread across their hearts. It was the first time church felt like home.
That’s Pentecost.
What does a 100-year-old church do when the Spirit shows up and says, “I’m not finished with you yet”?
Pentecost isn’t just the church’s birthday. It’s the story of a Spirit that moves beyond walls, speaks in every tongue, and includes every soul.
And today, as we look up at our Pentecost mobile—red ribbons swirling, doves dancing in the air—we remember that the Spirit still stirs, still speaks, still surprises.
The biblical account: moving past comfort and fear.
Pentecost, a big word that remembers the day not long after Jesus was crucified that his followers got over being afraid they’d get crucified, too, and ventured boldly into the streets proclaiming God’s amazing deeds of power in Jesus. It was a stunning transformation.
The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit came to them as fire and wind. We’ll never know for sure exactly what it looked like. But we can see that fire and wind are great metaphors to tell us that God’s spirit is beyond human control, and powerful enough to turn fraidy cats into courageous leaders. The point is to say, When the Spirit of God gets ahold of you, watch out anything is possible. You’ve just got to open yourself to it. Like the disciples, we are all called to step beyond what is comfortable, into what we’ve been so afraid of to discover the blessings that await. What would it look like if you got over being afraid? Come, Holy Spirit, come!
The traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit is a dove. We have them on our beautiful Pentecost mobile. It’s because when Jesus was baptized the Holy Spirit is said to have lighted on him as a dove. Doves are great. Peaceful, gentle, beautiful. It’s not hard to catch a dove and train it to go where you want it to go.
Wild Geese spirituality.
The Celtic Christians in Ireland centuries ago said, doves are nice and all, but our experience of God is that God is beyond domestication. God is wild and free, sometimes noisy and messy. So they adopted the wild goose as a symbol of the Holy Spirit.
When geese soar in the air they fly in a V formation and they take turns about who is in the lead. When the leader at the point of the V wearies, he falls back where it is easier to fly and another rises to the front. That way the gaggle can fly for incredibly long stretches at a time. It’s a good symbol for the Spirit who teaches us to work together, take turns. When we follow that simple pattern, we fly as individuals, and as a congregation.
I sat for a few hours at El Dorado Park the other day and watched the geese. Sometimes peacefully gliding across the pond. Other times noisy and rambunctious. Sometimes the Spirit comes to us and disrupts our nice peaceful lives and challenges us to go beyond the comfortable to embrace new challenges and new people. We weren’t looking to do it. We didn’t want to do it. But there was that calling in our hearts that disrupted our status quo.
The park geese honked at a couple and raised their wings when they got too close, warning them to back off. I wonder if the Spirit warns us through some inner intuition to back away from habits and tendencies that lead to something not so good for us. The thing about geese is if too many of them are around you get problems with the sheer volume and smell of their waste.
Trying to chase the geese away.
We used to take our morning walks around a pond at a cemetery in Iowa where the geese became problematic. They hired a woman who had a small business called Goose-B-Gone. She had trained her Border Collie to track down and chase away the Geese. It was quite a sight to behold. The dog bounded from the back of the truck and ran to the pond, the geese scattered, hiding behind gravestones, and the dog would hunt for them, find them until the very last goose had flown the coop.
I got thinking about how some folks try to chase away the spirit from their lives. They hide in a veneer of busyness, or numbing behaviors. Some folks try to chase away the spirit by normalizing lying, corruption, cruelty. But you can’t Goose-B-Gone the Spirit forever. What I noticed at the cemetery is that after the border collie got back into her truck, and went off to the golf course, the geese soon returned. The Spirit is as persistent as a gaggle of geese.
One of my favorite Mary Oliver poems is called Wild Geese.
Wild Geese | Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The Spirit announces you have a place in the family of things–of the people of God.
Bay Shore’s DNA.
That’s what happened on Pentecost–all these people from all these cultures and countries found their place with each other. The Spirit honked that day and announced that the church is a new kind of creation that proclaims that everyone has a place in the family of things. In our DNA we are inclusive, we embrace diversity. That’s how it’s always been and how it will always be no matter how political winds may shift.
Bay Shore has always been committed to this. From the bond of union that celebrates diversity of thought to the bold non-discrimination statement in 1964, to our becoming an ONA congregation two months ago. All means all.
And the spirit is pushing this 100 year old congregation to go out into the streets and tell anyone who has ears to hear that they belong in the family of all things. They have a place, they have dignity. It’s the message that brings tears to their eyes, and the warmth of feeling at home in their souls because that’s what Pentecost is and always will be. Amen.