Thoughts on Pentecost

This coming Sunday is the Day of Pentecost. Among the Jews, Pentecost was a day to celebrate God's gift of the Sinai Covenant (Ten Commandments) through Moses, fifty days after Passover. Jews from all over the known world sojourned to Jerusalem in order to observe the day. That's why there were Jews from Parthia, Media, Elam, and the like in the "Holy City." God used that moment to energize and equip Jesus' disciples to go out and proclaim the Resurrection Good News among the Jewish pilgrims. The church came to life when inspired disciples began to share the Gospel in the language of the visitors. Can you imagine how it all must have sounded?

Martin Luther once said that the Church was a "mouth-house" not a "pen-house." He envisioned the church as a people who would talk about Jesus. His sense of things was that the written word is the servant of oral proclamation. The analogy could be made to musical notation. Staffs with clefs, key signatures, time signatures, notes and rests are not music themselves; they are but the printed map to guide in the reproduction of a particular musical work.

You could say the same thing about the printed Bible, I think. The dried, ordered ink on the Bible's page is like the musical score. It must be somehow "vocalized" in order to do its proper work. Perhaps sound waves do not need to be produced (God's Word can be received by the deaf, after all), but nonetheless, the ink on the page needs some kind of sensory interpretation. In order to be God's Word for us, it must also be received. The old rhetorical question on this topic goes like this: If no one heard the tree fall, did it make a sound?

I suppose a church blog is something like that, too. It has life only when people are engaged by the words here and use them as a springboard for their own conversation and/or witness.

Your comments will help these electronic ink spots sing!