Getting Things Backwards at Pentecost

The Day of Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Church.  The Church was given birth out of the theological grounding of knowing who God is and who we are: God is our parent who has sought us out, redeemed, us, and adopted us.  We are thereby God's children, and using Paul's terminology from Romans, we are heirs of God's infinite creativity and redemptive power.

God's Spirit did not show up for the first time on the Day of Pentecost.  The Day of Pentecost was the day when the community realized who they were and who God was, recognizing that God's Spirit had always been present, was present, and always would be present, and that God's presence was deep inside the souls of every human being.

Paul says in Romans that the Church, as usual, gets things backwards.  God's Spirit does not enter us when we become God's children.  Instead, when we become conscious that we have already been adopted by God and are thereby children of God and heirs of everything that God is, we understand who we are for the first time and discern the Spirit of God that has always been in the world and inside us.

The Church universal is the invisible community of those faithful who know who God is and know who they are.  Any institutional manifestation of the Church universal is incidental and ultimately ineffectual in fully giving articulation to the wonder of what the Church truly is.

The true Church universal will be manifest by endless creativity, joy, and wonder.  As Paul reminds us in Romans, it will not be characterized by a Spirit of fear, but under-girded by the knowledge of who we are.