All right, Paxton, go ahead and have a seat and let's pray. God, you are the God of joy and mystery and chaos and love that even enters into moments that we find completely unexpected. So we are grateful for your Spirit's presence throughout all, all of history and especially remember the outpouring of your Spirit on Pentecost today. 

May we tune into your work that you started thousands of years ago, and we get to continue. Amen. So our Acts passage today begins with the gathering of Jewish folks from across the Diaspora entering Jerusalem for the pilgrimage of Shavuot, or 50 days after Passover, as they celebrate the gift of receiving Torah. So as the Spirit comes and descends on the disciples, we know this isn't the first time the Spirit has arrived. 

The Gospel of John and other gospels speak of the Spirit moving through the disciples and through Jesus ministry. But this time is different. The Spirit moves in a way that all these Jewish people across the Diaspora are spoken to in their native tongue, are met where they're at and are seen and fully known. Because of the Spirit's movement within. 

The disciples notice that God is not mandating that all Jewish folks gathered in this place only know Hebrew. Instead, the Spirit of God is moving through the people in a way that affirms and sees the fullness of their humanity, recognizes and celebrates the different cultures that they represent, even when they feel so far from home. The Spirit of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, her arrival is so expansive that it falls on everyone present. 

And hopefully we got confetti to almost everyone present today. The Spirit of God doesn't care about gender, culture, background, access to wealth, or whatever has happened in your past. The Spirit descends on all, advocates for, for all, accompanies all, and empowers all with God's love. The Spirit's work inside of us and 

in ways, in some ways despite of us, is to send us to be God's love, to take the fullness of who we are in the richness of our individual diversity, and to go and be God's love in the world in ways that only we can be, in places that only we can be. And I could probably come down just a little bit. I've got a slight ring. 

Went from nothing to a lot. And so we'll find that nice middle ground. The beauty of this story is that the way the Spirit moves through us can sometimes be mistaken as being intoxicated. Being so immersed in God's love doesn't make sense to a world that is so focused on power, violence and control. It is the same Spirit that accompanies Paul and Timothy in their imprisonment, which might be their last prison sentence before Paul is executed. 

And in that moment, Paul can see the movement of God around him in the depths of his pain and the suffering of others. He then pens the words, rejoice in the Lord. Always again I say rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Paul's mystical experience on the road to Damascus and his dedication to the Scripture and being in community with other people dedicated to God's love have fostered a connection with the divine that is deep enough to hold all of our pain and suffering and anxieties and yet still find joy. 

And I think the reality of pain and suffering is that we each experience it so differently and the only thing that remains true about all of it is that God is present with each of us in our suffering. Church. I don't know about y', all, but it has been a long week for me. I've had the opportunity to sit on hardwood floors for hours as I hold people in their despair and grief on the worst days of their lives. 

I've stood in the gap of hope and I've seen the glimmers of joy and love that remain even on the hardest days as people from across the globe gather to be with one another, to enter into each other's pain. And that's where we get the word compassion. Because passion means suffering and compassion is suffering with and one night this week I had the privilege to stay up entirely too late. 

I am one who typically loves my sleep and I might well, I can certainly count on less than one hand the number of all nighters I've ever pulled. I'm pretty sure it's only one because I didn't even Both grades were never important enough for me to pull an all nighter in college and so when I get home at like 3:40 in the morning in the full darkness of night, I found that there was no silence in my neighborhood, which is weird. It's 3:40 in the morning. 

Conveniently it's no one screaming. I was used to the light humps of cars because we live right off of 95, so that's usually the kind of background noise almost like a ceiling fan in a room. But I had to pause because as I'm getting out of my car, I realized birds were already singing. So me not knowing a whole lot of things, I pulled out the fancy app on my phone, Merlin, in order to find out what bird has the audacity to be up this early. Does anybody know? 

Because I think this is the bird where the early bird catches the worm phrase comes from. Anybody know which bird is this one? It is not the mourning dove, because the mourning dove is actually M o u r N I n g Mourning, like sorrow and grief. Because they sound like they're crying when they call, which is why I really, really love them. It's robins. 

Now, I knew the call sounded familiar because robins are everywhere, right? They like to hang out on the. They're weird, like they run across the ground. They very rarely fly, at least around my neighborhood. They'd rather just hang out where the food is and then fly away if there's a threat, which is relatable. 

So I found out that robins are the first to greet the sun every morning, the source of the radiant warmth of all of our days. And they're the first ones to proclaim the sun's coming because they have developed a vision that lets them see the sun hours before its arrival and in my mind, start proclaiming the goodness of what is to come. Even when everything else is silent, 

when it feels like we're surrounded by complete darkness, the robins know what's coming and they keep chirping throughout the day, stewarding joy in every place. Because I noticed once you notice the robins at three something in the morning, you start to notice the Robbins calls everywh. We know it was kind of gloomy this week, and as I was driving through a neighborhood and it was extra gloomy, what was the only bird I heard? The robins. 

And so the way that the Holy Spirit works through us is it helps us to develop this spiritual vision, this heart vision, where when everything else feels surrounded by the depths of silence and darkness, our hearts have been trained to find the glimmer of sunlight that's coming and stand confident in that knowing the fullness of what we're experiencing and also the joy that is to come. 

Never making our experiences the thing that make it so we can't do anything else at all, but also never neglecting them to the point where we're just bottling things up and not dealing with them, but inviting us into this in between space where we can hold both pain and joy at the exact same time. And it is because of the Spirit's movement in our lives that as St. Ignatius talks about, all burdens become easy because we have an accompaniment, an advocate, an accomplice 

holding these burdens with us wherever we go. So let us pray. God, we are so grateful for how your spirit moves among your people. And the way that your church has taken the time to really hash out and write down the ways that they wrestled with being community so that we can use their discernment as tools for our own. 

May we move through the rest of this week with the confidence that we never go alone, that the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit goes before us, advocates for us, and works with us as we move through this world so that we can be empowered to love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously. Amen.