Pentecost is upon us, the season of fire and purgation. Is this what we are seeing in Minneapolis? The anger is righteous, though the violence is not. The poet Yeats might have envisaged it as ‘mere anarchy loosed upon the world’. Random chaos, in other words. It’s easy to think of anarchy as random chaos but this anarchy, that we are seeing right now, is rooted in something. It is not random. It is the unforgiven sins of history being visited upon us, yet again. It is also a

With Pentecost comes the season of calling and gift, words that are often conflated with ministry. Like ministry, the word ‘gift’ can be deployed to elevate the most ordinary activity into something approaching the sublime. You can have a ‘ministry’ to song, or to routine admin, or even, as a friend of mine was once told by her mother in law, a ‘gift’ for stacking – stacking plates, apparently. It is also the season for talking about God in a way which can sound controlling a