Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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As astounding as co-eternity and co-equality with the Father in majesty and glory is, this is not the most significant answer Jesus gave in this Gospel reading, not for us at least.
Our daily remembrance of baptism, our daily dying and rising, is a daily joining to Jesus and His death and resurrection for us.
The celebration of Trinity Sunday–the only church festival specifically dedicated to a doctrine–reminds us of the necessity of confessing that the one God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That on Pentecost God’s Spirit should function through a dozen seeming inebriates should be no surprise when this same God saves through the ignominy of the cross.
At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is poured out and the language of man is united again for the Gospel to be preached to the ends of the earth.
How might your preaching of the work of the Spirit expand your own view of the Spirit’s work, and help your hearers gain an appreciation for the Holy Spirit’s activity in their lives beyond a standalone celebration, one day a year?
Pentecost is a flashback. It drives us back to the past. It also propels us forward into the future.
The glimpse of this final vision of healing has healed us before, it heals us here and now, and it will heal us again.
Just as the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, so we, through the working of the Holy Spirit, recognize our Lord in the Word and Sacraments.
Now, in the New Testament, the number for the Church remains twelve as Jesus calls twelve Apostles to be trained by Him to carry out the ministry following His ascension.
So, we pray. Not just in times of need, but we pray at all times. Because this is part of what it means to be saved.
There were no discussions, no committee meetings, no master planning, he and his group simply went to Macedonia.