Happy Pentecost! Happy birthday, the birthday of the church! Happy baptism day – happy day of endings and beginnings, as Father AJ talked about last week – we approach the end of 50 days of Easter and celebrate the season to come. And today we are telling the story of the beginning of our Church, wearing red and waving banners and singing the Holy Spirit into this room with us. Happy Pentecost!
And imagine that Pentecost, nearly two thousand years ago, in the city of Jerusalem, in the festival season. Imagine walking the streets of the city and hearing so many languages spoken around you, a whirl of accents and dialects and worlds of meaning, shouting, talking, laughing, this beautiful swirl of people from so many different countries and cultures, finding themselves neighbors with each other, for a few days or a few lifetimes, in this thriving center of faith and commerce and trade and travel in the first century.
Today’s passage from Acts is the event that Jesus tells his disciples about in today’s Gospel. Today’s passage from Acts tells the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit, the beginning of a new chapter in the life of our faith and our church, a quiet blossoming revolution in a noisy and diverse place, a world upended by the life of Jesus Christ. It’s an invitation into a new world, a new life, a new baptism, announced by the mysterious and uncontrollable elements of wind and fire. It’s a story about what is now and what is to come. It’s a story about faith and skepticism, about empire and individual. And it’s a story about language, about listening and hearing and understanding the Word of God in the language of the heart, hearing the good news of the Gospel spoken through our mouths and in our ears, not in some divine language but in all of the everyday dialects that we and they grew up speaking. As Baptist theologian Willie James Jennings puts it, Pentecost is “the revolution of the intimate” – “This” story, he writes, “is God touching, taking hold of tongue and voice, mind, heart, and body.”[1]
Pentecost is about God reaching across eternity to spark us into life and love. Pentecost is about the baptism of the spirit.
Listen again:
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Often when we see this passage depicted or if we imagine it, we see of the Twelve Disciples, but some scholars interpret “the disciples were all together” to mean all believers, not just the disciples. And at time, we’re told that believers numbered around 120 people – men and women, enslaved and free. So 120 people, surrounded by wind and fire, suddenly all speaking in different languages – and yet, the people surrounding them, all of these different people from different countries and cultures and backgrounds, pilgrims and immigrants in the city of Jerusalem, hear these 120 people speaking to them in their own languages – they understand what the disciples are saying – it isn’t chaos – it’s this beautiful outpouring of the words of faith spoken in a complicated music. God is speaking to God’s people through God’s people, and God is speaking to God’s people in the language of their hearts.
And that is what God gave them, and what God gives us. God speaks to us in our heart languages, the languages that are closest to our souls.
Walter Brueggemann died this week. He was a brilliant and kind writer, a sort of Old Testament theology rock star with gray hair and a gray beard – he was 92 years old. He wrote about two stories that we hear today – the familiar story from Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel, and about the Pentecost of the book of Acts – two interesting stories to hear together, about God using language first to divide and scatter us, and then to bring us back together again.
Brueggemann writes about the language of the empire or of society, and what are sometimes called our heart languages, those dialects we speak that are specific to our culture, our origins, our souls[2]. The language the Holy Spirit inspires is a language that is not about conformity or power – the language the Holy Spirit inspires is about faith, about communion and community.
The language of the Holy Spirit, Brueggemann says, “traffics in neighbors and not commodities… it affirms that relationships constitute the… currency of the future, and… it summons” us “to passionate self-giving and not self-protection.”
The language of the Holy Spirit is the language God speaks to us in baptism, when God calls us by name to a life of love and justice.
On this day, and on all the days to follow, God speaks to us in our own “dialects,” affirming and loving our differences, welcoming us in all our diversity.
Theologian Diana Butler Bass writes[3] that Pentecost is “the birth of something much bigger – the birth of a new humanity. ‘In the last days,’ God declares, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.’” And Bass points out: “All flesh. Not just some people.
“Literally, in Greek,” Bass writes, “‘the whole of human nature’ or ‘every physical body.’ Pentecost is the story of the world’s baptism in holy fire.”
We called to do the same thing, to open ourselves to the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit, to the work of the Holy Spirit through us, speaking to us, listening through us, building community, not towers to the heavens; friendships, not walls. And the building of community and friendship is hard work, and it’s shared work, and it’s baptismal work, as we’re reminded every time we return to our baptismal vows, as we will do in a few minutes this morning. We do this work by following the example of Jesus’ life, in the love of God, and with the help of the Holy Spirit. We carry with us always the flame of Pentecost.
Poet and Methodist minister Jan Richardson, one of my theological touchstones, wrote this blessing for Pentecost[4], reminding us of the community we are called into by baptism, and by the life of Christ in Jerusalem and beyond – the life that we are called into by wind and fire and water and the Holy Spirit. Here are some of her words, to close:
This is the blessing
we cannot speak
by ourselves.
This is the blessing
we cannot summon
by our own devices,
cannot shape
to our purpose,
cannot bend
to our will.
This is the blessing
that comes
when we leave behind
our aloneness
when we gather
together
when we turn
toward one another…
All the blessings of Pentecost to you.
Amen.
[1] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, 28
[2] https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/the-peculiar-dialect-of-faith
[3] https://substack.com/@dianabutlerbass/p-165455770
[4] https://paintedprayerbook.com/2013/05/14/pentecost-when-we-breathe-together/
