Monday, May 13th:
- Ezekiel 37:1-14
The people’s bones are languishing outside the land of Israel. This text speaks to the rich connection between people and their homeland, and reminds us of something many Christians in the West have been socialized out of acknowledging, namely, that place matters. For ancient people, whose selves were formed in a particular landscape, place was constitutive of identity. Imagining that a meaningful Israelite afterlife could take place outside the land would be akin to sketching a vision of heaven in which one’s loved ones are absent. For many, that simply would not constitute a hopeful view of an afterlife.
Amy Erickson
Tuesday, May 14th:
- Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b
Easter has a tendency to peter out by the seventh Sunday of the season, with the breath of the Spirit at Pentecost coming in as a last gasp of joy. We need to reverse this way of thinking. Pentecost ought to be understood as the dramatic culmination of the season of resurrection, with a long crescendo leading up to this great day. Just as the Lord’s Day is sometimes called the “eighth day” of the week – a day of new creation – the Day of Pentecost ought to be celebrated as the Eighth Sunday of Easter, a glorious commendation of God’s life-giving, faith shaping, world-changing work.
David Gambrell
Wednesday, May 15th:
- Acts 2: 1-21
The most dramatic sign of the Spirit is the miracle of mutual understanding. Women and men, slaves, free, Jews, Gentile proselytes, and people from every known land and ethnicity participate in the gift of the Spirit. A miracle of recognition transpires: across impossible boundaries of class, ethnicity, and religion, people joyfully communicate. It is as if they are intoxicated – as they are, but not with wine.
It is significant that the primary sign of the inspiration of the Spirit, the founding event of the new Christian community, is the ability to speak to and understand a diversity of people.
Wendy Farley
Thursday, May 16th:
- Romans 8: 22-27
The very animating, life-giving Spirit meets us in our weakness, in our experience of day. She prays for us. She wraps up our weakness and our cries of desperation, not in neat packages of religious platitudes tied with bows of piety. The Spirit groans for and with us. She joins her voice to our own sobs and pleas…She shows solidarity with human suffering. Because the Spirit groans and suffers with us, and because God knows the “mind of the Spirit”, we can be confident that God too knows and hears our sighs.
Christopher T. Holmes
Friday, May 17th:
- John 15:26-27, 16: 4b-15
The Fourth Gospel is simply admitting that it would have been impossible for the earthly Jesus to have said all that the community would ever need to hear about how to think and feel and act in every conceivable new situation…. This is the role of the Spirit…The situations faced by believing communities today will call for new interpretations and new words – words borne of the Spirit of the risen one, who is still articulate in our midst, saying new things in order to remain faithful to the work that began so long ago.
Lance Pape
