Pentecost anyone?

Today is Pentecost but you would hardly know it where I live.  First of all most of the churches are non-liturgical so they do not follow a calendar which might tell them what to name the day.  Second, so many things have displaced the feasts, festivals, and commemorations of the liturgical calendar, that some find it hard to remember the Biblical day in the face of graduations honored and other things from the secular calendar.  Finally, because this usually falls on Memorial Day weekend or in the midst of a wedding and graduation season — the first after more than a year of pandemic, we have other things on our minds rather than Pentecost.  We are ready to announce that summer has finally come and with it the time to focus on things decidedly not churchly.  So if it where not enough to fight the things happening on the calendars at the end of the school year and the wedding season, we also have the onset of the very time of year when vacation, vacation home, time off, and a weekend to celebrate the end of the pandemic in sight -- all of which become a higher priority than the things of the Lord's House.  

This is a sad day because Pentecost is so strongly tied to Easter (just as Ascension) and it is like leaving in the midst of the meal to duck out before the promise of the Father in Jesus' name is fulfilled among God's people -- the climactic end to the Easter season and to the festival side of the Church Year. 

The Day of Pentecost, is a moveable feast, celebrated on the 50th day (the seventh Sunday) from Easter Sunday.  It commemorates the fulfillment of Jesus' promise and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1–31).  Especially in the UK, the holiday is called "White Sunday" or "Whitsunday," where traditionally the next day, Whit Monday, was also a public holiday (since 1971 fixed by statute on the last Monday in May). The Monday after Pentecost is also a legal holiday in many European countries.  Pentecost is one of the Great feasts in the Eastern Orthodox Church, a Solemnity in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, one of the chief festivals in the Lutheran Churches, and a Principal Feast in the Anglican Communion.

When we gather on Sunday, we will hear the Acts 2 account of languages not learned and then in one accord, all ears hearing together:  "And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'  This is no small thing and it points us to what Pentecost is -- less a nod to the diversity of peoples and languages and cultures who hear the Gospel than it is a unifying of them all in the one Lord, one faith, and one baptism of God.  Here we acknowledge that the Church is its own culture, one that transcends earthly divisions.  Here we rejoice that God has spoken the one Word that breaks through every division and barrier.

The color is red.  The focus is on fulfillment of the promise.  The center of it all is Jesus.  Although the world around us will be distracted, those within the Lord's House will not.   The hymns vary from the wonderful "Holy Spirit, the Dove Sent from Heaven" which has a sound rather new to most Lutherans to the "Come Down, O Love Divine" with its prayerful bidding of the Spirit to visit and complete His work in the life of the Christian to the very Lutheran "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord"...

A blessed Pentecost!