By: Eli
It’s 2014 and my mother has put me in my best dress and shiny leather shoes so I can sit pretty in the pew for Pentecost. “It is the Church’s birthday,” she says, “and you do not show up in rags for a birthday.” I spend the service using my eyes to trace beams that support the ceiling’s arch because I am not a patient, proper child, despite my mother’s best efforts to dress me like one.
Here, years later, I am not any more patient, nor proper, as an adult. I am skeptical of dress codes and choose to show my personality through raccoon t-shirts. Still, I dress myself in slacks and a crisp button-up because some part of me cannot let go of the formality of Pentecost. But, here, years later, I choose to perch at the back of the sanctuary because my mother is three thousand miles away and there is no one here to wax poetry about her deteriorating vision. The wooden pews still press against my back, the lectern still stands solemn on center right. A child shuffles up to the platform, his hands clutching today’s passage, looking over his shoulder for smiles of encouragement from his mother. Though I am no longer in my best dress and shiny leather shoes, the scene is too nostalgic to imagine myself otherwise.
Years later, three thousand miles away, though the words are shaped by a different mouth, Acts 20 feels familiar in a way that hides how much I’ve really changed.
Coming back to church feels like returning to a childhood home that’s been renovated and restored, but there’s an inexplicable certainty within you that remembers every stroke of the crayon masterpiece you drew on the wall when you were five. You know, without having to peel back the layers, that this wall was yours once upon a time, but the new owner’s blazing orange paint is just foreign enough that it gives you pause. My crayon masterpiece is still having the Lord’s prayer memorized and finding myself humming worship songs on a random Tuesday. The orange is everything that happened in between – seeing people use God’s name to justify the oppression of trans kids, women’s reproductive autonomy, and immigrants, hearing preachers harp about the “heaven-bound soul” of a man who thinks himself king…
I am uncertain of what it means to be a Christian in these times. I am uncertain if I can even be considered a Christian at all.
Have I skipped Sunday communion one too many times?
Yes.
Yet something draws me back to the pew this Pentecost. Not because it makes me forget the orange in any way, but because it inspires some fickle hope in me that we can do better. The Church has a long history of evils, but at every turn, there have always been Christians that refuse to let the prejudice of institutions of power dictate their beliefs, who dare to go defy doctrine and fight for their neighbours, friends, and lovers. I sit in this pew hoping I can be one of these people in the world today.
Pentecost is about the formation of the Church, but this anniversary is also an invitation to imagine what the Church could be.