“Colours of Pentecost” was the theme
of this year’s chapel celebration as friends and members gathered for their annual
Pentecost Service which included a Service of Holy Communion. During a colourful ceremony and power-point
presentation candles were lit under the Pentecost Flame tree, the congregation
wore Flame hats and waved fiery red Pentecost sticks to the sound effects of
wind. The Lord’s Prayer was said in several different languages, the music of
Thomas Tallis’s “If you love me; keep my commandments,” provided an introit and
John Rutter “I will sing with the Spirit” the anthem.
White
was the original colour of a Bank Holiday/ Whitsun weekend; often
children in earlier days would wear white during
their town’s Whit Walks - based on the practice at one time of newly
baptised members being received into the church at Whitsun. Today the colour has changed, Pentecost is now coloured red, red:
red for fire, red for heat, red for the flames hanging over the apostles' heads
that first Pentecost, red for the burning bush and pillar of flame, red for the
fiery cloud at the giving of
the law on the holy mountain and red for
passion and death.
But
there a gentler more cooler language to the Spirit too. St John speaks of the new birth in
‘water and spirit' and of how the Spirit is a spring of water that wells up to
eternal life. In John's account of how the Spirit is given to the
disciples, it happens in the upper room where Jesus had washed their feet and
taught them the meaning of love and service. And
that in turn recalls how the wind or spirit of God, ruah, hovered over the face of the deep at
creation and gave it shape, order and consciousness. This is the
language perhaps of ‘blue' rather than red, Aquarian
rather than Arian, watery rather than fiery.
Green too is a colour of Pentecost; 50 days after
Passover it was a harvest festival. In that harvest of the promised land,
slaves, orphans, strangers and widows were expressly given a share. St Paul
speaks about the fruit of the Spirit, growing in us the harvest of love, joy,
peace, kindness, gentleness - the qualities that alone can change the
world. Pentecost is nothing unless it is about a world being
renewed. We proclaim and live out the word and works of God in all the
rainbow's colours.
Ray Anglesea is a self supporting
minister working in Durham Cathedral Bookshop and at St Andrew’s Dawson Street
LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit
