In the schema of the Christian Year that most of us follow Pentecost Sunday is revealed as a single event, a “birthdate” of the universal Church, so to speak. Unless it is treated, as only a few of us do, as the commencement of a Season of the Church Year, it closes off the Easter Season of some weeks, which itself follows the Lenten Season “of forty days,” and opens “ordinary time.” Yet Pentecost betokens a movement of God that is far from ordinary— “the falling of the Holy Spirit on the community of Jesus followers blessed by a number of appearances of the Risen Lord only to witness to His ascension “to His eternal place at the right hand of God” and lately to become preoccupied by reordering the life of the left behind through the election of a twelfth apostle. The coming of the Holy Spirit upon this dis-spirited Church is, rather, quite extraordinary. Certainly not an annual calendar event, the subsequent Pentecost events make up a short list of occurrences during the over 2,000 following seasons.

I venture to guess that few Christian “historians” would be able to quickly come up with more than the Azusa Street Revival as a subsequent Pentecost (or new birth) distinguished by an undeniable work of the Holy Spirit. Particularly as distinguished by the Biblical story markers: the grasping at order, the dis-spirited nature of circumstance and the unexpectedness of the occurrence. Azusa Street had these markers in spades, characterized as it was by disorder, a lack of spirit and a blank slate of expectation. The national economy and contemporary culture were reeling from the excesses of the Gilded Age, the order of the day was the call for anti-trust legislation to curb the predatory endeavors of the rich and powerful (it would not be until 2026 that we would again be exposed to the wealth gap between the powerful and the disenfranchised), and poor William Seymor was locked out of the holiness congregation that had just called him into the pastorate over the issue of “a second sanctification of the redeemed” and thus without prospect.

Yet I posit that that first, Biblical Pentecost and the birth of the Pentecostal movement in the early years of the Twentieth Century are not the “whole Pentecostal work of the Holy Spirit.” Clearly, the mystical body of Christ, cursed by the factionalism of our own making (denominations and non-), beset by the faithless -isms of feudal, totalitarian, national security state, Marxist, imperial and other orthodoxies, and deemed irrelevant by successive generations who find our fear-mongering judgmental rather than liberating is faced with the Biblical markers noted above. Disoriented, preoccupied by re-ordering and dis-spirited, our Christianity of the West is primed for another Pentecost, a falling of the Holy Spirit that will free (liberation being the core work of the Spirit) us from our enslavement to bigotry and ignorance for the imitation (work) of Christ’s compassion and mercy as redemptive encounter. That would be the redemption of the lost (the younger son) and the found (the church as elder brother and deed holder).