Pride and Pentecost

    This year, Pride Sunday in Winnipeg, MB falls on the liturgical Day of Pentecost. It is interesting to think of these two events happening in concurrence.

    According to Christian tradition, the Day of Pentecost commemorates the day when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples in Jerusalem after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Many Christians mark this date as the beginning of the Christian Church as we know it.

    This unusual event is found in the Christian Testament Book of Acts, chapter 2 verses 1 through 4:

"When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." (NRSV)

    Church services on this day are marked by red robes and banners signifying the fiery winds of the Holy Spirit. And a lot of sermons will be preached on the "reversal of Babel", or the reunification of God's people under one language. (The story goes that at Babel, God punished humans for not doing God's biding of populating the world by giving each other different languages so that they couldn't understand each other and then sent them out into the world in isolation from each other.)

    However, interpreters have moved away from the traditional views of sin and punishment and have begun to examine the story’s theme of cultural and linguistic origins. A new emphasis is being placed on the diversification of humanity after the flood. It states quite clearly within the passage that the people are building the tower and city in order to stay in one place and to avoid being scattered around the earth. The story then becomes less about pride and more about the desire to preserve the cultural homogeneity of the human race.  God’s response to humanity’s actions is to create the world’s cultures by introducing new languages and dispersing the people around the earth.

    God created us all differently, wanted us to experience life on earth differently from one another, and wants us to embrace our uniqueness.

    Celebrating Pride Sunday, Pride Week, and/or Pride Month is all about celebrating diversity. It is a month where the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community gets to celebrate who we are, how we live, how we raise our families, and on and on. It's more than just the parties and parades. It's about celebrating that we are still here even though the world doesn't seem to want us around.

    As an Anglican priest (who happens to be transgender) celebrating the Day of Pentecost on Pride Sunday, I want to reinforce the idea that the Holy Spirit was sent to us by God as a call to action. Through the Holy Spirit, God is reaching out to give us identity, power, grace, and, most importantly, love.

    According to the story from Acts, those who received the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues were thought to be drunk. Maybe they were intoxicated, but it was on the Holy Spirit, not on booze. This intoxication lead them to do a foolish thing. It lead them to follow Jesus! And we all know that Jesus is a man of action.

    So on this Day of Pentecost, I encourage everyone to embrace the fiery winds of the Holy Spirit and allow her to push you in directions you may not want to go, to places you may not be comfortable being, but to places where you are needed. God is calling you into action as a defender of God's creation that is full of diversity.

    God did not want us all to be uniform, so who are we to question our differences?

Happy Pride and Pentecost!