Still thinking about Pentecost - I know it is a bit out of season now, but I've never been the fashionable type! Also, I suspect that charismatic groups/denominations will be across this concept already, but it was new to me.
Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit descended on the Church and people began to prophesy (I mean in the "forth telling the will of God" sense, not the "fore-telling" sense.) The Joel verse from the Hebrew Bible is here quoted in Acts 2: "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy….”
I find this an amazing statement of God's willingness, even desire, to use everyone. This is about as inclusive as the Hebrew Bible can get - specifically mentioning old and young, women and slaves, and even female slaves! Yet all of them are described as being speakers of God's truth, vessels of the Holy Spirit. I find it encouraging that women and slaves are explicitly given this high honour of speaking the words of God, both in the Hebrew Bible and in Acts.
I can't help wondering where the Early Church got off-track, where the Church lost this vision of all being equal in speaking the words of God? When we forgot that women should be equal in Christ? When were women forbidden to minister, to pastor, to lead churches? When was patriarchy and the surrounding culture allowed to override this sublime vision of egalitarian giftedness which the Early Church saw?
Now that we have all been baptized with water and with the Holy Spirit, we enter into a new and equal life together. The old categories are swept away - the old categories of age, of social class, of wealth, of ethnicity and of gender. We should allow God to speak with the gifts of the Holy Spirit through everyone - through women, through men, through Greek, through Jew, through slave and free. For we are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28)
It is from this key revelation that the concept of the "priesthood of all believers" comes, which is a foundational concept of Protestantism. I'm not strictly a Protestant, but I think this is something they got right. We have Christ, and no longer need any other mediator between ourselves and God. I don't need a priest to stand between me and God, or a pastor, or a man. I don't need someone appointed to take my confession or give me a penance, or even absolution. I can speak to God directly myself.
How could the church ever lose sight of that?
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