Faith In Everyday Life: Pentecost and the gift of not knowing

The Spirit shows up like wind and fire — and nobody asked for that.

Read the second chapter of Acts carefully and you will notice something the Sunday school version tends to smooth over: the disciples were not ready. They were not in the middle of a prayer meeting, expectantly waiting for the Spirit to descend. They were hiding. Gathered behind locked doors, fifty days after the resurrection, still not entirely sure what had happened or what was supposed to happen next.

And into that uncertainty — into that room full of people who did not know what they were doing — the Spirit arrived like a rushing wind and divided tongues of flame and a sound that brought the whole neighborhood running.

Nobody had a plan for that.

The Spirit did not wait for the disciples to have a plan. It arrived into their uncertainty and set it on fire.

This is the first and most important thing Pentecost teaches us: the Spirit does not wait for us to be ready. It does not require our certainty as a precondition for its arrival. It moves where it will — through locked rooms and open windows, through prepared souls and unprepared ones, through the people who have everything figured out and, perhaps especially, through the people who do not.

Which is, on most days, most of us.

The Trouble with Certainty

We live in a world that rewards certainty. Confidence is currency. The person who sounds like they know exactly what they are doing commands more attention than the person who is genuinely, humbly searching. We perform certainty even when we do not feel it — in our careers, in our relationships, sometimes even in our faith.

The church has not always been innocent of this. There have been centuries when theological certainty was enforced rather than invited, when doubt was treated as failure rather than as the beginning of honest faith. We have sometimes presented Christianity as a system of settled answers rather than a life of deepening questions.

Pentecost pushes back against all of that.

The Spirit, in Scripture, is almost never described as settling things. It unsettles them.

It unsettles the comfortable. It disrupts the expected. It gives voice to the voiceless — on that first Pentecost, people heard the gospel in their own languages, languages the disciples had no business speaking. It crosses every boundary we have carefully maintained. It shows up in places we would not have chosen and through people we would not have predicted.

The Spirit is, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis about Aslan, not a tame lion. It cannot be managed, scheduled, or contained within the structures we have built to contain it — not even the very good structures, not even the liturgical ones.

What Not Knowing Opens

There is a spiritual tradition — found in the Christian mystics, in Ignatian spirituality, in the contemplative stream that runs through our own Anglican heritage — that speaks of the via negativa: the way of not-knowing. The understanding that God is always larger than our concepts of God. That every image, every name, every theological formula points toward the holy but does not exhaust it.

This is not agnosticism. It is not the giving up of belief. It is the giving up of the idol of certainty — the insistence that God must fit within the boundaries of what we have already understood.

What opens when we release that insistence is something the mystics called disponibilité — a French word meaning availability, openness, the willingness to be surprised. It is the posture of the disciples in that upper room, frightened and uncertain and, despite themselves, available.

The Spirit filled the available space.

It still does.

Every rigid certainty is a door we have closed. Not-knowing is not the absence of faith — it is the posture that keeps the doors open for what God might do next.

Think about the moments in your own life when God has felt most alive, most present, most undeniable. My guess — and it is a pastoral guess born from years of these conversations — is that most of those moments came not when you had everything figured out, but when something had just fallen apart. When the plan had failed. When the certainty had crumbled and you were left, unexpectedly, with open hands.

That is Pentecost weather. That is when the wind moves.

Living Pentecost Every Day

Pentecost is not only a Sunday in late May. It inaugurates the longest season of the liturgical year — what we call Ordinary Time, the great green stretch of Sundays between Pentecost and Advent. All those weeks in green vestments, all those Sundays of ordinary life, are meant to be lived in Pentecost light. In the awareness that the Spirit is still moving. Still arriving uninvited into locked rooms. Still setting fire to things we thought were settled.

What does that look like on a Wednesday?

It looks like holding your plans loosely enough that God can interrupt them. It looks like paying attention to the unexpected — the conversation that opens a door you did not know was there, the stranger who says something that stops you cold, the moment of beauty or grief or clarity that arrives without warning and insists on being received.

It looks like asking, regularly and genuinely: Spirit, where are you moving right now? And then — this is the harder part — being willing to follow the answer even when it leads somewhere inconvenient.

The disciples did not stay in the upper room after Pentecost. They could not. The fire had made staying impossible.

That is the gift and the disruption of the Spirit, arriving together in the same flame. You are changed. You are sent. You do not get to go back to not knowing what you now know.

But you also — and this is the grace at the center of it all — you also do not have to go alone.

The same Spirit that arrived in wind and fire in Jerusalem is present here, in Coral Springs, on an ordinary Sunday in May.

Still moving.

Still arriving uninvited.

Still making room for what none of us could have planned.

For Reflection This Week

Where in your life is the Spirit asking you to let go of control — of a plan, an outcome, a certainty you have been holding tightly? You don't have to release it all at once. Just notice where the grip is tightest. And ask, with whatever faith you have: Spirit, what are you doing here? Then stay open long enough to find out.

Grace and peace,

Lee+

Also in this series: Advent Is Not Christmas Prep · Lent for People Who Hate Lent

The church begins its year in darkness and waiting — on purpose. And Lent is not about chocolate. Series IV continues with the two seasons that most stubbornly refuse to be domesticated.