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| Rev. Victoria Rebeck (left) and her friend Jerioth Gichigi, a United Methodist Deacon from Kenya. |
Rev. Victoria Rebeck, Director of Connecting Ministries
Now that Easter has revived our gratitude for new life, what do we do with this great gift?
Pentecost tells us. We take the power of the Holy Spirit and follow God’s lead—even if we do not know where she leads us.
Looking back on it, from the perspective of 2,000 years later, the church’s first Pentecost seems exciting. Tongues of flame landing on everyone! They can preach in languages they never learned! What a glorious sending of Christ’s followers into the world.
When I think about this story, however, I imagine that the incident could have been scary. We’re sitting indoors and a violent wind blows through the room? Close the windows! Flames on the top of our heads? Get a bucket of water! I just hope the doors open outward so we can make a run for it.
As frightening as this may have been, we’ve learned from the Bible that God does some of God’s best work when our world is shaken up.
We’ve been in a year of disruption together. We’ve had to quickly change to a more constricted life. The end is not actually in sight. Yet God still gives us the power of the Holy Spirit and expects us to reach the world.
It’s a holy disruption, however. It’s opened up new spaces for the wind of the Holy Spirit pass through.
As difficult as this time has been for us, it’s been more challenging for others.
Last month I received a text from my friend the Rev. Jerioth Gichigi, who is a United Methodist deacon from Kenya. (Texting is one of their affordable forms of communication.) Though Kenya’s economy is one of the most developed in eastern and central Africa, about a third of Kenyans live below the poverty line. The internet is not universally accessible. COVID-19 seemed to be easing at the beginning of this year, but now infections are rising again, and people are limited to their homes. Church buildings are closed, and no one knows when they might reopen.
While we begrudgingly rough it with online worship, that luxury is not available to them.
“But we are trusting,” Jerioth says. And they are.
Before this, however, a great windstorm had come through their town and demolished the building of her congregation, the First United Methodist Church of Moheto.
A wind that destroys church buildings is but a puff compared to the Holy Spirit. Drawing on donations from United Methodists from other parts of the world, she and the church members are buying stones to reconstruct their church building. They have faith that God continues to work with and through them. Neither pandemics nor storms can separate them from the love of God in Jesus Christ.
Their lives are severely upended, though they were already precarious. But they have the Holy Spirit, and that gives them the power to spread Christ’s love, in any situation.
Pentecost reminds us that God often uses disruption to clear the way for something new. That is what it takes sometimes: the familiar to which we cling is swept away, making us available for something else. God was starting something new.
Our Kenyan United Methodist brothers and sisters know that God is empowering them to do something new. Let’s welcome the Spirit to blow away the old so that we can share God’s love in ways we never imagined.
