As I sit here trying to process what it means that by no stretch of the imagination 100,000 people could be dead in Myanmar after a cyclone ripped through the country I am struck by the language of Acts where the Holy Spirit is said to sound "like a violent wind." After a tragedy like this one some variation of the question "why did God do this?" alway arises. It is all the more powerful a question with the unfortunate word choice in the Acts lesson for Pentecost Sunday. While I have no real answers to questions like this, I do have my theological best guesses. And, like many I know, it is all about sin. Not that the people of Myanmar did anything to deserve God's wrath in the form a cyclone and an oppressive government that is slowing aid, but the world family has created the conditions such that storms like this and governments like that are not only possible, but, without a return to Kingdom living, are more and more likely.
Perhaps we would do well to take the image of the Holy Spirit as a violent wind and claim it, not as a powerful force that punishes, but as a powerful force that clears out all the parts of our lives that we hold onto; all the sin, all the messiness, all the evil. Then, when we've reclaimed that vision of the Holy Spirit, perhaps we should look to other story of the coming of the Spirit in John's gospel as see that by it we are sent (perhaps as wind drives a sailboat) out to help those who have been negatively affected by the sin systems that have long been in place.
The CNN headline this morning says, "Rotting corpses pile up as Myanmar stalls on aid." A violent wind created part the first half of the problem, sin is directly involved in the second, but the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to work toward redemption; to blow the crap out of our souls so that we can be sent, in the same vein as Jesus, to a world in desperate need.
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