Open Our Locked Doors: A Pentecost Message

Dear Siblings in Christ, 

Each year, as the days lengthen and the world around us breathes again into fullness, Pentecost arrives — not as an anniversary, but as a living summons. The wind blows where it will. The flame rests where it chooses. And the Spirit of God, who hovered over the waters at the beginning of all things, continues to hover over us, over this diocese, over every gathered community in our diocese. 

I find myself returning, this year especially, to that upper room in Jerusalem. The disciples were not on a stage. They were behind a locked door — frightened, uncertain, grieving the shape of a world that had been cracked open but not yet remade. Does that sound familiar? I suspect it might. Many of us know the locked rooms of our own lives: the places where hope has grown thin, where the path forward is obscured, where the courage to step out has not yet come. 

And yet. Into that very room — locked, fearful, ordinary — the Holy Spirit came. Not because the room was worthy nor because the people in it had figured everything out. The Spirit came because God is faithful. Because the promise made at Easter does not wait for us to be ready.  

In the Diocese of Niagara, we are a community of many rooms. We gather in century stone churches, in contemporary spaces, in small towns where everyone knows each other’s names and in neighbourhoods where anonymity is the norm. We carry different histories, different wounds, different gifts. But the Spirit is no respecter of the size of our buildings or the length of our pews. The same fire that fell on Jerusalem falls on us – all of us. The same breath that stirred those first disciples and gave them the courage they needed, stirs us still. 

What I want to say to you this Pentecost is this: the Spirit is already at work among you. I see it in the ways our congregations have turned outward — toward the hungry, the isolated, the newcomer still learning the shape of this country. I see it in the difficult, holy conversations we are learning to have with one another across difference. I see it in the young people who ask hard questions and refuse easy answers, which is, I think, very much a sign of the Spirit’s presence. 

Pentecost is not a memory. It is a mandate. We are called, each of us, to carry the fire of God’s love into the places we inhabit — our families, our workplaces, our streets, our politics. This is not always comfortable work. The Spirit, as the scriptures remind us, does not simply offer consolation. The Spirit also convicts, disrupts, and sends. Being people of Pentecost means being willing to be sent. 

 So let us open our locked doors. Let us receive once more the gift that has been poured out for us so lavishly, so extravagantly, so freely.  

 And let us go — in the power of that same Spirit — into the beautiful, broken, beloved world that God refuses to stop loving. 

Come, Holy Spirit. Come. 

Yours in the fellowship of the Spirit, 

 The Right Reverend Dr. Susan Bell 

Bishop of Niagara