Getting Weird
- St. Aidan's
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Pentecost A: Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37;
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 7:37-39
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
May 24, 2026
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.
When I was in the ordination process in the Diocese of Massachusetts, well over twenty years ago now, each of us would serve as a chaplain accompanying one of our bishops on a visitation to a congregation. In the case of our diocesan bishop, we were to drive him. The idea was that once a year we would get a sense of congregations beyond our sponsoring ones, to get more of a window onto the diocese as a dynamic and varied whole. And on the way we could talk with the bishop, more than we might get to in an office meeting. One year I had to drive my bishop from Cambridge to someplace on Cape Cod. Perhaps the sheer distance inspired the unexpected story that popped up along the way. Some years earlier a congregation of the diocese was doing a building project—as we are right now. Along the way something unexpected came up, as can happen. A new closet door on an upper floor of the building was stained (as happened with the new doors to our dry storage closet this week, it just so happens). The stain brought out an image in the wood that had previously been invisible: it looked remarkably like the face of Jesus. Kind of like the shroud of Turin if you’ve seen that before. The resemblance was not subtle – everyone who saw the door remarked upon it. Word got out about this occurrence, and people from all around the area started flocking to the parish to see Jesus in the door. The congregation took it from the closet and put it on display in another part of the building for greater access. As its popularity grew the rector reached out to the bishop about how to handle this—the parish leadership felt very awkward and overwhelmed. The bishop agreed to come and lead a reflection on images or icons of Jesus and praying with them. After that he stopped hearing anything about it. At his next visitation he asked, “whatever happened with Jesus in the door?” They had returned it to the closet, facing inward.
In the story of Pentecost, which we heard multiply voiced in our first reading this morning, there is a moment when the outward and visible sign of the presence of the divine becomes too much. The disciples were gathered in the house where they were staying. The text doesn’t specifically tell us what they were doing – were they praying? Meeting? Were they expectant? Because suddenly something happened. There was a strange sound that filled the house. “Divided tongues as of fire” suddenly appeared among them, “resting on them” (Acts 2:3). The scene is traditionally rendered with flames hovering over their heads. They were filled with the Holy Spirit which spontaneously gave them the ability to speak in languages other than their own, and to be understood by the multilingual crowd now drawn to this house buzzing with divine presence. What they spoke of were God’s deeds of power (2:11), much like we shared and heard at the Easter Vigil fifty days ago. For this was Pentecost, the fiftieth day of what we now call Eastertide, the days of glorying in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus had ascended to the divine Parent days before, and now the Holy Spirit had come in his stead, activating the disciples to go out and share the Good News of Jesus’ life and ministry, his death and resurrection, of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom and the call to join its transformative impact. All of this was tumbling out in a buzz of voices and language, of activity and presence. It was overwhelming. Too much. It inspired a sneer: “they are filled with new wine” (2:13).
But no, said Peter, not drunk. Activated, yes. Inebriated by the Spirit, we might say. Inhabiting anew the prophetic words of Joel through whom God had declared, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh” (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17). Not simply to those whom we may think of as expected or authorized, but to all. People of all ages, ethnicities, genders, sexualities. People who are bound by human systems of enslavement. The Spirit will burst these bonds, gathering community across and beyond all borders. It is too much. Too much for the orderly patterns human beings set up, whether benign or toxic. Too much for our limited minds fully to comprehend. The uncontainable God will not leave the earth and all its creatures alone, but sends forth the divine Spirit, shaking us, blowing through us, pouring forth streams of living water in our hearts, renewing the very face of the earth (John 7:38; Psalm 104:31). How do we respond to this? I think of Martha and Jesus talking in the road, when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life” and then asks, “do you believe this?” (John 11:25-27) Do you believe the power of God that bursts the very bonds of death, working in and among us to do infinitely more than we can ask for or imagine? Like Martha, can we open our minds, our hearts, our imaginations, to say yes, yes, I believe that you are “the one coming into the world” (John 11:27). Coming into the world.
This week I was in a conversation as part of a spiritual leadership cohort I have been a part of this past year. The leader asked us to consider the call of Christian communities to “announce the reign of God.” The description of this call referenced the Ascension passage from Acts that we heard last week: “When Jesus tells the disciples ‘you will be my witnesses when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,’” Jesus was promising them both that they would see God at work in the world, and that they were called to bear witness to that presence and work so that others might notice it too. A colleague who was not able to join us had written ahead of time to share his thoughts. He wrote of how in response to this call to bear witness, congregations can have a “fear of getting weird,” or perhaps of being perceived as odd. Distortions of the gospel, particularly in Christian nationalism, widely afoot and enmeshed in oppressive political currents, this person shared, can cause us to “lack courage in practicing a more authentic and human sharing” of the Good News.
This language of the “fear of getting weird” made me think of the sneer of “new wine.” The call to courage in authentic sharing of the Good News drew forth a question in me. How are we called to bear witness to the God has come among us in Jesus Christ, whose Holy Spirit is at work in the world? What gets in the way of our bearing forth that witness? I thought of the image of Jesus in the door, what that must have been like for that congregation, that priest, and of the challenge of handling the weird life that bubbled out of that unexpected discovery. I thought about St. Aidan’s and our particular charism expressed in our tagline, “a joyful community of the Spirit.” I thought of how our own building has a particular connection to the Spirit in the form of the flame, which is a key symbol of Aidan of Lindisfarne. Our website proclaims, “An enormous open flame is emblazoned on the front of the church, painted in the prism colors of fire. The flame is the symbol of Saint Aidan, a welcoming beacon of light and an invitation to all who see it to join us in celebration of the Good News of God’s Love and Grace.”[1] As it happens, we are in the process of exploring the possibility of both power-washing and painting our exterior – as we step into a new chapter of our life with our kitchen construction drawing near to its completion, this seems a fitting time to refresh our exterior, to let our flame shine more clearly and brightly. As some of us have begun exploring this possibility, we have noticed that the large corner flame is not the only one that has adorned our building. There are silhouettes of others, not only here in this space but on the outside of the building, facing Diamond Heights Boulevard and our driveway. This week I discovered on a shelf in my office a paper written by a Stanford Architecture student in 1976 that describes our building. It turns out that the flames were part of a design by the Noe Valley artist Mark Adams who designed tapestries, murals, and stained glass for various communities of faith across San Francisco from St. Thomas Moore Roman Catholic Church to Temple Emanuel-El to Grace Cathedral.[2] The flames here were actually murals, interpretive expressions of the radically embracing flame of the Spirit.[3] At some point most of them were painted over. Yet their presence remains, hidden.
I don’t presume to know the answer at this point, but this hidden history raises a question, how might we be called to shine our flame now? And more broadly I wonder, for us as a community and for each of us as individuals seeking the presence and guidance of the living God: what might it look like for us to courageously and authentically bear witness to the in-breaking of God’s reign, of the power of God working in this world to burst the bonds of death and destruction, to bring forth new life? How might we shine afresh the light God has given us? Might we be willing to get a little weird?
[2] https://stmchurch.com/about-us/art-and-environment/; https://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2006/March/Mark.html
[3] As ModernDiamondHeights has observed: https://www.instagram.com/p/CkTpwH9PatF/?hl=bn
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