It’s dandelion season here on the farm.
The farmers spray them to put a quick end to them.
We collect them to make oil infusions for soap.
Our kids pick them and blow on them to scatter their seeds across the yard.
When I consider the design of the dandelion, it seems that this scattering is part and parcel to its intended process. The yellow flower like a lions mane turns to seed, and these seeds are light and ready to be caught up in the wind.
In my current transitional context, we’re going to be sitting with the stories of holy disruption in and around Pentecost. The big ‘C’ Church is born in Acts, and if we’re honest, we see that very little of the story centres around buildings, temples, or Sunday gatherings. Instead, the big story of Acts is one of the Spirit scattering the people of God like dandelion seeds out from Jerusalem and into the surrounding communities. A great example of this is found in Acts 11, when we see that a community of the Spirit is popping up in Antioch. It wasn’t the result of Peter or John or any of the other twelve; it was the result of the scattering breath and wind of the Holy Spirit that sent the people of God into places near and far.
If we sit in the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, we’ll notice the descriptor of a violent wind. At the end of the story of Acts we encounter a story about a shipwreck. Both feature this language of a gentle breeze that becomes a violent wind that becomes a disorienting storm. Is it possible that we have read in a gentler, more tame, more passive understanding of the Spirit? If the Spirit is truly one that comes like a tempestuous windstorm, how do we see this playing out in our hearts, in our communities, and in our cultural systems? Could it be that the Holy Spirit comes huffing and puffing and blowing the house down, because, as we see, the birth of the Church isn’t about a building but about a scattered community? This community of the Spirit shares its resources (disrupting economic systems of power), breaks bread together in homes (disrupting systems of exclusion), and shares their every day life together (disrupting systems of death and depravity).
It’s worth noting and naming that the violent storm comes with confusion. We see it in the Acts 2 story. We see it in the shipwreck in Acts 27. Author Jonathan Martin writes, “The trademark of the Spirit is to first bewilder, not clarify. The fog that comes doesn’t always obscure the Spirit – sometimes it is the Spirit. To welcome Pentecost is to open ourselves to the possibility that God may be working in that which at first only appears to be confusion.”
When we reflect on our own lives, it’s worth asking how the Spirit has blown in like a disorienting storm. At first it brings confusion, but then it brings clarity and new life. The Spirit often interacts with our hearts and minds to lead us to a new awareness. The old has to be disrupted and blown down in order for the new to develop.
When the Spirit is first poured out on the church in Acts 2, she does not come gentle—she does not manifest as a dove. Instead, “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” fills the house. The sound of the hurricane was the sound of the Spirit filling the room. Beneath the noise—the splitting of the wood and of your own heart—listen closer. Is the Spirit blowing in on the wind to you, even while the ship is still going down?
-Jonathan Martin, How to Survive a Shipwreck