Pentecost

Today is Pentecost. For those who don’t go to church or who attend a non-denominational church, Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit descending on the disciples some time after Christ’s ascension into heaven. The story is described in the Bible in the book of Acts, chapter 2 starting at the first verse. Not to go into the the complete story but basically the disciples were all in one place when they heard what sounded like a violent wind from heaven and then tongues of flames seemed to rest on their heads. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began speaking in tongues. Cutting to the end of the story for that day, so many people were moved by what had happened that three thousand were baptized and added to their number.

At my church this is a day that we truly celebrate because not only is it the day of Pentecost but we also have it as our Confirmation Sunday. Confirmation is when our young people, usually around 13 or 14 years old, re-affirm their baptism and become full fledged members of the congregation. But more on that in a moment.

One of the ways that we celebrate Pentecost is to do something special with the reading from Acts. We have four people who can speak a foreign language each read a segment of the reading then the last segment is read together (everyone speaking their respective language) with a fifth reader speaking English. It is supposed to simulate what it was like on the original Day of Pentecost. We had people speaking in languages such as Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Spanish, and German. Since we only needed four people per service, each service had different languages represented.

What I thought was fun, for me personally, was that I was able to read part of the reading at two of our services. As I have mentioned in previous postings, I spent a year of college in the Netherlands. Even though many people there speak English, I did manage to learn Dutch, to a certain extent. I certainly can’t carry on a conversation in Dutch and I don’t understand all the words but I remember enough of it that I can read the verses. Of course it is lucky for me that no one in my church speaks Dutch. It was fun to do and I was able to practice it enough that I was able to put inflection in so it sounded like I was somewhat fluent in the language. I also spoke with authority and confidently so it seemed like I was pronouncing everything correctly. That is one thing I learned as a Worship Assistant. Pastor always says that if you pronounce things with authority and with confidence, it doesn’t matter if you are pronouncing it correctly. People will think you are saying it right. This is very important in reading the Bible since there are so many unusual and unfamiliar names in it. And it comes in handy in speaking a language that you haven’t spoken in years, and weren’t that fluent with while living in that country.

Back to the confirmation, we had three kids confirmed today. One of the things we do to celebrate this is to show a power point with pictures of the kids from when they were really young to now. This is really fun for all of us to see and really embarrassing for the kids. After the service they had people coming up to them telling them how cute they were when they were babies. Yeah…just what they wanted to hear on the day they are become adult members of the congregation.

After all the fun of the service, we had a nice luncheon in our fellowship hall. That is one thing we do well at my church…feed people. We had quite the spread today – a lot of sandwiches, salads, and a beautiful cake made by a member of the congregation. I contributed potato salad. Made five pounds of it. There was exactly one spoonful left at the end so I guess everyone liked it. I thought that the committee at my church who puts on these functions did a wonderful job and everyone looked like they had a great time and were well fed. All in all, it has been a wonderful Pentecost celebration!