Let us pray: Come, Spirit, gather us as one. Gather us for worship and praise; gather us to be formed in your word and your ways. Come, Spirit, scatter us, one for all. Scatter us as your Body of Christ for the sake of this God-loved world. Amen.

Some of you, having taken a glance at the title for this reflection, might be wondering if you are about to hear a theological reflection on the music of the Chicago Rhythm and Blues band, that had a good deal of success a decade or more ago. If you were looking forward to that prospect – I'm sorry to disappoint you, and if you were hoping beyond hope that I was not going to say anything about Earth Wind and Fire – the musical group, well this is the only mention I am going to make.

The reference to Earth Wind and Fire in today's reflection is of course not connected to the Chicago music scene at all. Hopefully, after hearing the readings this morning, you will have caught the connection with Wind and Fire – a description of Pentecost as experienced by the gathered community in a whirling, confusing, crazy-making, wind-blown event. Of course the description is meant to weave for us a tapestry of something beyond explanation – something that defies description due to its importance for the community of faith and the symbolism of something new and mystical happening for the followers of Jesus in the post-Easter reality.

Pentecost carries with it the magical, mysterious, at the same time exciting and scary, promise of something new and very different. Old understandings are replaced by new ones. Confused language becomes understood language. Normal behaviour is replaced by what seems like drunken behaviour. It's quite the scene!

But this is not chaos for chaos sake. It's an invitation to shed the shell of convention, the mask of status quo, the pressure of needing to fit in, the concern about what others will think, the worry about consequences and shyness about who will make fun of us. As it says in the book of Acts – echoing the words of the prophet Joel - "I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people: Your sons will prophesy, also your daughters; Your young men will see visions, your old men dream dreams.”

This is imagining about how the world could be, about how people could relate more wholly and wholesomely with each other. This is an invitation to drop the anxiety about how we are going to get there and just imagine the world we want to have, the way we imagine God wants the world to be.

There is an oft-quoted verse, Proverbs 29:18, and in this case it is the old King James Version which has the nicest turn of phrase, which reads this way: Where there is no vision, the people perish.

In the euphoric, but also very scary days surrounding the last US Presidential election – euphoric because people were given the opportunity to dream dreams – in fact there was an almost Pentecost type of feeling surrounding the campaign, the feelings many Americans and in fact many people around the world had after the election and certainly on that dramatic day of Inauguration when so many people gathered on the streets of Washington to witness history being made. On the street interviewers, stopping to ask people how they felt, were almost universally greeted by people who had a sense that something new and exciting had just happened. That was the euphoria. But along with all this excitement in the days surrounding the election campaign and the days following, there were also some very scary days as the economy spiralled downward. Many people felt sorry for Barack Obama and the economic situation he inherited, putting a severe damper on any plans he might have to put those many dreams and visions, as described by the people on the street, into action. There was talk during the election campaign about hitting the “reset” button. Some felt that the economic collapse was in effect a figurative hitting of the “reset” button.

Some may have felt that a corner had been turned with respect to the economic situation in those days of 2008 and 2009. But the news from the economic front this week conjured up some of the same concerns we were hearing about a year and a half ago. Once again we are left wondering about “reset” buttons.

I see Pentecost as a metaphorical “reset” button. In some ways it was just that for a community of faith. A group of people – I read something this week that suggested one hundred and twenty was the number of people gathered when they experienced the wind and fire of Pentecost. This is often called the birthday of the Christian church, the event that marked the beginning of a new community of faith – a community of followers of Jesus. Whatever spiritual journey these people had followed previously, the words and actions and the life of Jesus in general compelled them to meet in new community. As we've heard over the past weeks in the season of Easter the community became an ever widening circle that included people of ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. It became a community of wide inclusion, of acceptance of difference in favour of uniting oneness, a community marked by a rite of initiation that included baptism with water and the spirit – with the spirit being an important element in the marking of their belonging in this new community.

But Pentecost is not a once only occurrence. We are continually called to dream dreams, to see visions, to hold before us the wonder and excitement that comes with being able to imagine things in new ways. And that's where the “Earth” comes in Earth Wind and Fire. Our relationship with the earth is desperately in need of a new vision, a time of Pentecost. How can we watch video clips of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and not think that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we live our lives. How can we watch desperate and ultimately ineffective attempts to stop the spread of oil across beaches and bayous, on ocean bottoms and in ocean currents and not want a different vision? How can we see thousands of ducks perish in a tar sands tailings pond and not think that the current way of doing things is wrong? How can we note the decline of caribou in our northern lands and not want to hit the “reset” button in our understanding of the ways in which human activity is having a dramatic effect on our relationship with the land and all other life that inhabits it.

In some ways, today's story of Pentecost is a flash back for the people of the newly formed “Way”. In past weeks we heard of Peter's vision as he imagined the message of Jesus spreading out to all different kinds of people. We heard of Paul's travel to Macedonia to share the news of Jesus and his life and message with Lydia and other women gathered in prayer at the river. This is how the people involved in that experience of Pentecost began to live out their visions.

It's as if we have a movie in which we cut to a number of scenes in which people of different cultures, races, and language are drawn into an ever-widening circle of inclusion and acceptance. We see these scenes portrayed in city and country, in desert lands and in lush river valleys, in busy market and at lonely rural well and then we ask – where did this come from, how did this happen, why are these people doing what they are doing – to be led to the flashback in which we see the Pentecost wind and fire – leading them to dream dreams and see visions. That's where they came from, that's how it all got started.

And of course we need to write our own screenplay of new relationship – recognizing the holy in people all around us, recognizing holy relationship both lived and desired in people who may not be part of our community of faith, but who in large part share common values and common spirit with us and our concern for the earth. Once again in the words of the prophet Joel: “I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people.” God bless us with visions and energy to work to make them come true. Amen.