When Difference is a Gift
When Difference is a Gift in the Spirit
Dear Salt House Community,
My imagination is stirring, and my heart is burning with hopeful anticipation as I look to this Sunday’s Acts 2:1-13 text. I’m working to make what is so seemingly familiar to us, a little less familiar, and perhaps even a big strange. For it’s in the unfamiliar and the strange where the gifts of the Spirit arise. It’s in the differences that are not reduced to sameness, but rather, differences that create conditions for a new kind of community. This is what one thing the Spirit is up to.
Pentecost, originally, was a Jewish annual festival where Jews from various nations gathered to remember Moses being given God’s word up on Mount Sinai. In this moment, in Acts 2, the Spirit rushes in bringing a a fresh twist on the power of God’s word being given. Jesus is not just another updated Moses, with a better moral to-do list. The Word in this Jesus, the one the Spirit is creating with Christ, involves bringing together the most disparate voices, the scattered, diaspora communities, people from every corner of the known world. Suddenly, there are languages, complexity, and difference intermingling among them like a wind-chime—and yet, somehow, they receive each other, in their own language. Crazy! How is this even possible, right? They're united not by uniformity, but by their shared witness, in different languages, to God's deeds of power.
This is the heart of our summer series on the Holy Spirit through Acts: the Spirit is always about drawing together, joining persons from different backgrounds, and to bear witness to God in our differences, not erasing them, but through them forming a community. Difference is gift, not deficit.
As we read this passage, I keep thinking about an inspirational figure I have come to love and appreciate. Perhaps you too know of Gregory Boyle and his Homeboys Industries in Los Angeles. Fr. Boyle's vision of kinship and compassion across seemingly impossible divides reflects something fundamentally Pentecostal: that transformation across difference is not just possible, it's where God is most alive and at work.
For some inspiration this week, and if you can make time and have energy, I invite you check out this brief TED talk. See if you can catch the goodness of a vision for the qualitatively different community the Spirit is creating. Notice, too, that Fr. Boyle doesn’t really talk about sustaining any kind of institution. Rather, it's the fostering a kind of community from the deepest of polarization. He talks about raising up new life between and among people who the world considers disposable. https://youtu.be/ipR0kWt1Fkc?si=_cyBsHRoTxDCzTk8
What are you hearing? Please share. I love to imagine the Spirit’s movement with others.
See you Sunday.
Pastor David
My imagination is stirring, and my heart is burning with hopeful anticipation as I look to this Sunday’s Acts 2:1-13 text. I’m working to make what is so seemingly familiar to us, a little less familiar, and perhaps even a big strange. For it’s in the unfamiliar and the strange where the gifts of the Spirit arise. It’s in the differences that are not reduced to sameness, but rather, differences that create conditions for a new kind of community. This is what one thing the Spirit is up to.
Pentecost, originally, was a Jewish annual festival where Jews from various nations gathered to remember Moses being given God’s word up on Mount Sinai. In this moment, in Acts 2, the Spirit rushes in bringing a a fresh twist on the power of God’s word being given. Jesus is not just another updated Moses, with a better moral to-do list. The Word in this Jesus, the one the Spirit is creating with Christ, involves bringing together the most disparate voices, the scattered, diaspora communities, people from every corner of the known world. Suddenly, there are languages, complexity, and difference intermingling among them like a wind-chime—and yet, somehow, they receive each other, in their own language. Crazy! How is this even possible, right? They're united not by uniformity, but by their shared witness, in different languages, to God's deeds of power.
This is the heart of our summer series on the Holy Spirit through Acts: the Spirit is always about drawing together, joining persons from different backgrounds, and to bear witness to God in our differences, not erasing them, but through them forming a community. Difference is gift, not deficit.
As we read this passage, I keep thinking about an inspirational figure I have come to love and appreciate. Perhaps you too know of Gregory Boyle and his Homeboys Industries in Los Angeles. Fr. Boyle's vision of kinship and compassion across seemingly impossible divides reflects something fundamentally Pentecostal: that transformation across difference is not just possible, it's where God is most alive and at work.
For some inspiration this week, and if you can make time and have energy, I invite you check out this brief TED talk. See if you can catch the goodness of a vision for the qualitatively different community the Spirit is creating. Notice, too, that Fr. Boyle doesn’t really talk about sustaining any kind of institution. Rather, it's the fostering a kind of community from the deepest of polarization. He talks about raising up new life between and among people who the world considers disposable. https://youtu.be/ipR0kWt1Fkc?si=_cyBsHRoTxDCzTk8
What are you hearing? Please share. I love to imagine the Spirit’s movement with others.
See you Sunday.
Pastor David
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