Day of Pentecost
“Got Their Fill” of the Spirit
I waited tables in college to pay the bills. Generally, the tips were better when folks had enough to eat, their drinks were topped off regularly, and they enjoyed good company. You could tell by the satiated look on people’s faces when they “got their fill.”
But what’s the look of a people who “got their fill” of the Spirit, filled to overflowing by God’s blessings of faith, hope, love?
In February 1960, four North Carolina A&T students sat at a segregated dining establishment and would not be waited on. This pivotal moment at the Woolworth lunch counter was the beginning of the sit-in movement that swept through the South as a strategy to buckle Jim Crow. In Nashville, Tennessee, the movement was led by James Lawson, an African American Methodist preacher, who taught students for months how to put nonviolent love into practice in the freedom struggle. The result was that Nashville’s campaign raised up such leaders as Bernard Lafayette, C. T. Vivian, John Lewis, and Diane Nash.
Nash would later coin a term to describe what Rev. Lawson was dishing out to those young leaders: agapic energy. She created that term by tweaking the Greek word agape—which is how we refer to Jesus’ selfless, liberating love—to describe how they were being energized to “act out the love for humanity.”
People who have agapic energy put into transformative practice the inclusive, reparative, and healing justice rooted in God’s love through Jesus Christ. They show clearly that they have been dining with the Holy Spirit and “got their fill.”
May we pray today to be filled ourselves to overflowing with agapic energy, and may our communities and world be better because we act out Christ’s love for humanity.
Russ May, Anthony’s Plot
Winston-Salem, North Carolina