05/30/2026
The Spirit’s Many Colors
Second Sunday of Pentecost
8:30 Contemplative Communion
10:00 Sanctuary Service with Kids United
Livestream: https://youtube.com/live/VTSMfHEG1p8?feature=share
"When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a ruach (wind/spirit/breath) from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light." (Genesis 1:1-2)
“The Spirit blows where it wills,” Jesus said to Nicodemus. He could have also said that the Spirit descends, refreshes, flows, creates, lights up, moves, appears, and a host of other verbs where it wills.
Last week we heard the Pentecost story where God’s Spirit showed up as a blast of wind and tongues of fire. But throughout both the Hebrew Bible and Christian scripture, that same Spirit blesses the earth with rain and human bodies with cooling water. It appears as a dove when Jesus is baptized, and as the unseen Force that gives dreams and visions. Even the word for Spirit is multifaceted. The Hebrew word for “spirit”—ruach—can also mean “breath” or “wind.” The same is true for the Greek word πνεῦμα (pneuma--as in “pneumonia”) that’s also translated as “breath” or “wind,” as well as “spirit.”
Why cogitate about various manifestations of God’s Spirit? Because it means that Spirit isn’t limited to one thing or one time or one way of engaging life – be it human life or all life. Even a specific symbol for the Spirit – like fire—can be multi-faceted, from leaping tongues to smoldering embers. Fire is also multicolored –red, gold, orange, even blue.
Doves—another symbol for God’s Spirit—are generally portrayed as pure white. But in the Middle East, doves can be brown or grey. They can also be multicolored, like the Laughing Dove or the Turtle Dove migrating up from Africa.
Even the color of water—another symbol of God’s Spirit—varies from blue to aqua, Golden Pond to The Odyssey’s wine-dark sea.
This linguistical natural history focus on wind, breath, fire, doves, and water is important. As powerful as the first Pentecost story is, we do the Spirit—and ourselves—a disservice to constrain it to one symbol, one color, one experience. In the words of poet Gerald Manley Hopkins:
The earth is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil, . . .
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
This Sunday is a chance to expand our vision and imagine all the ways God’s Spirit infuses our lives and the life of all creation.
And perhaps in doing so, we might look at God’s creation with new eyes and a new commitment to love this grand Spirit-filled, bright-winged world and all its multi-colored people and multicolored creatures as God so loves.
See you Sunday! Blessings, Talitha
