As the spiritual invites us:
“I’m gonna sing when the Spirit says sing…”
This Sunday the church celebrates Pentecost, that
Spirit-filled day when worship spaces are decked out in red, when we find the
red clothes in our closets, when we display red flowers. It is a day of celebration,
a day when we proclaim that we can be church only by the gift of Holy Spirit.
This is certainly worth singing about. But what do we sing?
This decision required some extra attention and altering of our worship
plans. Many of the hymns associated with Pentecost are grand testimonies to
the purging, cleansing fire of the Holy Spirit. Take, for example, this stanza
from “God of Tempest, God of Whirlwind” by Herman Stuempfle:
God of blazing, God of
burning,
All that blocks your
purpose, purge!
Through your church,
Christ’s living Body,
Let your flaming
spirit surge!
Here’s the thing: Our community has had three funerals in
just the last two weeks, seven over the past months. We are praising the breath
of the Spirit all the while mourning those whose breath has left them. Moreover,
a faithful family’s home was devastated by fire last week. Fire cleanses, yes,
but fire destroys. Singing hymn after
hymn with fiery words and melodies may have hit too close to home.
When we gathered this Pentecost morning, we sang hymns laden
with diverse images for the Spirit, a little wind and fire, yes, but more, the
images we needed on this day, images of the Spirit anointing wounds, wearing
our pain like a garment, reviving our souls. We sang “There is a Balm in Gilead” and
wrapped the fire-stricken family in a prayer shawl. We sang “Lead me, Guide me”
trusting that the Spirit is indeed what gives us strength when our own fails
us, as it certainly will. We sang of the promised peace of Jesus, the peace
breathed on those disciples locked up in their fear and the peace for us in our
fear.
Psalm 104 declares:
How manifold are your
works; in wisdom you have made them all
When you hide your
face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die and return
to their dust.
When you send forth
your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.
Pentecost is that day to say yes, God is renewing and
recreating, taking the ashes of our lives and the dust of our bones, taking
them and renewing them in ways we cannot fathom. And so we sing. In our
singing, we are one in the Spirit, one breath joined to another. This
Spirit wears our pain with us, enveloping us like one of those prayer shawls,
reminding us that in Christ’s Spirit, we are restored, we are whole.
