Greetings… as we come together to celebrate Pentecost this Sunday, the day when the Spirit came as fire and wind to the first disciples… and look what happened….
Great hymns; Gospel Choir; children leading us in telling the Pentecost story; new members joining — it will be a fine day.
And then, when we finish worship, we have a birthday to celebrate…. twelve tables, twelve cakes…. month by month… at the end of the service you’ll be invited to go to the table named for the month in which you were born… who knows who you’ll meet!!
And then… a grand lunch for the members of our choirs, for all the volunteers, and for our new members… in the Salons.
GLEANINGS:…from F. Buechner’s definition of “Spirit” from Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC…
Like its counterparts in Hebrew and Greek, the Latin word spiritus originally meant breath (as in expire, respiratory, and so on), and breath is what you have when you’re alive and don’t have when you’re dead. Thus spirit = breath = life, the aliveness and power of your life, and to speak of your spirit (or soul) is to speak of the power of life that is in you. When your spirit is unusually strong, the life in you unusually alive, you can breathe it out into other lives, become literally in-spiring.
Spirit is highly contagious. When people are very excited, very happy, very sad, you can catch it from them as easily as measles or a yawn. You can catch it from what they say or from what they do or just from what happens to the air of a room when they enter it without saying or doing anything. Groups also have a spirit, as anybody can testify who has ever been caught up in the spirit of a football game, a political rally, or a lynch mob. Spirit can be good or bad, healing or destructive. Spirit can be transmitted across great distances of time and space. For better or worse, you can catch the spirit of people long dead (Saint Therese of Lisieux or the Marquis de Sade), of people whose faces you have never seen and whose languages you cannot speak.
God also has a spirit — is Spirit, says the Apostle John (4:24). Thus God is the power of the power of life itself, has breathed and continues to breathe himself into his creation. In-spires it. The spirit of God, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, is highly contagious. When Peter and his friends were caught up in it at Jerusalem on Pentecost, everybody thought they were drunk even though the sun wasn’t yet over the yardarm (Acts 2). They were.
Please click on the link below in order to access the Announcements and the Bulletin for this coming Sunday, May 31st.
http://www.standrewswesleychurch.bc.ca/announcements.pdf
http://www.standrewswesleychurch.bc.ca/bulletin.pdf
