Trinity Sunday – June 16, 2019

Romans 5:1-8

Eighteen years ago this month, I was attending Annual Conference in Virginia Beach and excited about reaching my final level of ordination as an elder in the United Methodist Church. Yet at dinner on the first night, I began to have severe abdominal pain that, as I lay alone in my hotel room, became unbearable. I would later describe it as “like being sawed in half.” I called the hotel’s front desk to ask the location of the nearest emergency room, only to be told by the person on the other end of the line that he “was not from here and had no idea.”

I was somehow able to drive myself to Virginia Beach General Hospital where I was admitted to the emergency room, where doctors would mistakenly diagnose me with a kidney stone. I remember writhing on the gurney, waiting for the Demerol to kick in, waiting for Tracy to arrive from Newport News, trying to make sense of what was happening to me.

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Pentecost Sunday – June 9, 2019

Acts 2:1-21

Anyone who is a chemist (or anyone who has paid close attention to the television program Breaking Bad) is certainly familiar with the term chiral or chirality. In chemistry, chirality refers to a geometric property of some molecules and ions are asymmetric in a way such that the structure and its mirror image are not superimposable. Human hands are perhaps the most universally recognized example of chirality. In fact, the word chiral is derived from the Greek word for “hands.” It was a term first used my Lord Kelvin, who used it in a lecture at Oxford in 1893.[i]

Today is Pentecost, the Sunday fifty days after Easter when Christians celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire given to the eleven disciples who were gathered in Jerusalem. This Sunday that falls each year after Ascension Sunday is considered to be the birth of the Christian church. As such, Pentecost services often feature red paraments and stoles, yellow and orange flowers, images of wind (wind and spirit derive from the same word), and the chaotic sounds of people speaking many different languages at once, as the disciples did on that Pentecost day two thousand years ago.

Today I would like to discuss the chirality of Pentecost – how it is the mirror image of important events in the Hebrew Bible, and how these Jewish roots of Pentecost are so very important for how we understand what Pentecost means for how we understand what it means to be the church and its visible witnesses today.

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