Pentecost doesn’t reverse the effects of Babel so much as it breaks open our imagination. Opens us to the possibility of connection and reconciliation even in a world of difference and diversity.

“About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.” I wonder what would sustain me in that dark night? What stories or poems would emerge from my internal library? And if not in a jail cell, then in the other dark watches of illness or despair, or of the trap of spiraling worry.

So, for all the hardship and need we see and experience, let’s commit to being a community that tends to its joy and its curiosity. Which means we not only learn together and pray together and serve together, but that we also eat and drink together, sing and laugh together, rejoice in all the ways we can together.

For most of our history, we Christians have been re-drawing the lines between who’s in and who’s out, between whose beliefs are correct and whose are not. For one group, fundamentalists might be the problem; for another, it’s woke liberals. For yet another, it could be terrorists or immigrants or environmentalists, rich people or poor people, or Muslims or atheists or God knows what else. Our hearts harden, our beliefs solidify, and we reduce God to a tidy formula, and we are on the verge of destroying everything that is beautiful and true and holy.

Just as Ananias embraced Saul as family by calling him, ‘Brother Saul,’ Ruthie and I will always think of you as ‘Sister Calvary.’ We are family to each other. You will always be in my and Ruthie’s hearts. And God’s ongoing story of conversion in all our hearts will never end.

Go be a Thomas. Not Thomas, the cool skeptic of tradition. But Thomas, who knows that an incarnate relationship with complicated people is what we’re made for, not membership in a religious club we join by storing beliefs in the attic of our mind, like furniture under bedsheets no one even thinks to sit on anymore.

Let the women at the tomb be our guides back into a love that’s at work in our lives still, right now, right here. Today.

I feel a kinship with the women in this kind of moment, in which the story is still unfurling. And I am grateful and profoundly moved by their witness, their belief, with only the barest bit of news to go on.

So say the prayers, whether it feels like anyone’s listening or not. Jesus did. Say the prayers, if only to remember that you’re not the only one whose ever felt like everything that matters is unsolved in their heart. Say the prayers as a way to be still, expand your soul to hold a little more life and hurt and, maybe even to pass back into this world something a little less like violence, and a little more like love.

When Jesus stood up and wrapped a towel around himself, in essence he taught them, ‘Do not be afraid to stoop down and offer the most humble service imaginable to one another. It is no more than I have done for you.’