Day of Pentecost: May 19, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Ezekiel 37:1-14 • Acts 2:1-21 • John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15 • Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Today is the final feast day in a liturgical journey that began with Christmas, when the Word that was with God in the beginning and was God, became flesh and dwelled among us. We followed the Word as we traveled from Bethlehem through Galilee and Judea to Jerusalem, listened to the good news proclaimed by Jesus and witnessed the coming of God’s reign in the signs and wonders that he performed. We walked with him in the last, agonizing week of his life as he encountered the violent resistance of the social, political, and religious elite who interpreted the Word among them as a threat to their power. We watched as one of his own betrayed him and another denied him, all while he suffered torture and execution.
We walked to the tomb with the women who had been his faithful companions on the Way and with them discovered it empty. In the wake of dashed hopes and expectations, we found ourselves with the other disciples in locked rooms and on dusty roads only to be encountered by Jesus who showed us his hands and his feet, who took bread and blessed and broke it to reveal himself as the resurrection and the life. We stood on a hillside with the others and heard Jesus’ instructions to go and wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit through which we would receive power to become Jesus’ witnesses in all the world.
Pentecost has always been the destination of this liturgical journey, the goal toward which all of the other feasts and fasts we’ve observed in these last five months points, and today we have arrived! i
In the book of Acts, Luke tells the story of the Day of Pentecost, the day we often cite as the birthday of the Church. And like the other stories that ground our major feasts and celebrations in our Church year, the story from Acts has become quite familiar to those of us who hear it every year:
Jesus commissions his disciples, instructs them to wait in Jerusalem, and is taken up into heaven.
The disciples do as they are told and wait in prayer.
The Holy Spirit comes.
The Church is born.
What’s missing from this summary is the fantastical language and imagery that Luke uses. It is tempting for us, in our present moment, to skip over or brush past the descriptions and parts of Luke’s narrative that we just can’t quite explain, becoming nothing more than extraneous details. I wonder, though, if this truncated version of the story doesn’t leave us with a truncated understanding of what it is we celebrate this day. I wonder if the fantastical language and imagery isn’t an integral and vital part of what Luke is intending to communicate.
Luke’s language helps us to understand something of the nature of the Spirit – the suddenness of the rushing, violent wind; the sound filling the entire house where the disciples were staying; the sudden appearance of divided tongues of flame resting on the disciples, and their immediate ability to speak in new languages – all of this is meant to convey the disruptive nature of the Spirit.
Not only was the coming of the Spirit disruptive for the disciples, but also for those who were passing by. God’s gift of the Spirit wasn’t specifically for the disciples. Rather, this gift was intended for the peoples of the whole world. Out of the din of voices, each onlooker hears in their own language the disciples’ proclamation of the mighty deeds of God.
Somehow, this bewildering, disruptive event that they are witnessing does not lead to chaos but to understanding. How is this possible?
Some biblical scholars think of Pentecost as a reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel. In Genesis, chapter eleven, we read that humankind all had one language and that
in their attempt to keep from being “scattered” throughout the world, they devised a plan to build the city of cities. However, God disapproved of that plan and to keep them from being successful, God “confuses their language” and “scatters them” throughout the world.
Many interpretations of this passage consider the “sin” of the people at Babel to be that the builders of the city were trying to take God’s place; they were, it seems, on track to succeed, so God thwarted their plans, and in their scattering, confused their language.
Rabbi Shai Held offers another way of looking at the Tower of Babel story. Instead of seeing humankind as grasping at equality with God, he sees their resistance to God’s command to fill the earth, to be fruitful and multiply; in other words, Rabi Held suggests that the problem in this story is not humanity’s grasping for divine power but humanity’s desire for sameness, for uniformity. If their plan continued without disruption, he argues, then humankind would sink into the abyss of anonymity.
Rabbi Held sees the “punishment” of the “confusion of languages” as a re-affirmation of God’s intent for humankind to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth in the pattern of diversity that God created. As he explains it, “Jewish theology affirms that each and every human being is created in the image of God and that our uniqueness and individuality are a large part of what God treasures about us. To try and eradicate human uniqueness is to declare war on God’s image and thus to declare war on God.” God’s action in this story is a “reversing of an unhealthy, monolithic movement toward imposed homogeneity…and thus with God’s reaffirmation of the blessings of cultural, linguistic, and geographical diversity.” ii
This interpretation resonates with me: because, let’s face it, all we need to do is look at the diversity of creation to be able to see that God delights in difference! Whether or not we see Pentecost as the reversal of Babel, what is affirmed in God’s gift of the Spirit is God’s plan for and delight in the diversity of human being. The Spirit’s gift of languages at Pentecost is not a call back to a pre-Babel existence of unity as uniformity, of forced assimilation and annihilation of difference, but rather a declaration that unity is the very product of diversity. The languages gifted to the disciples that Day of Pentecost were the divine affirmation that God comes to us in the midst of our lived experiences, that God speaks to us in languages that we can understand – that the thing that is being removed from the diverse scattering of the people is not difference but misunderstanding.
In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus identifies the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth and promises that when the Spirit comes upon the disciples, the Spirit will guide them into all truth. What an incredible promise to keep sight of as we ponder the meaning of the Spirit’s gift of languages! This is a significant moment in God’s salvation history – Language is the primary way that we interpret the world around us, that we name and abide in truth, that allows us to make meaning of our lives. The Spirit’s gift of languages was about much more than the practical equipping of the disciples to carry out their task to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. At the heart of this gift is the proclamation that God comes to us in the midst of our lived experience, that there is no cultural boundary that God is unable to cross, and that the Spirit of Truth leads us into understanding.
When the onlookers saw the disciples and heard the mighty acts of God being proclaimed in their own language, they were all amazed and perplexed. Here was a group of people who witnessed the sudden, disruptive power of the Spirit; the path to understanding was opened; they heard the mighty deeds of God being proclaimed in their own languages – and they also heard the mighty acts of God being proclaimed in someone else’s language. Some of them wondered “what does this mean?”, while some others sneered and accused them of being drunk.
I wonder if the responses Luke records of the onlookers is a bit telling of the way we tend to respond to the Spirit’s disruption in our own lives. When we hear of others’ experiences, when we hear the mighty acts of God being proclaimed in ways that don’t line up with our own experiences and understanding – what is our response? Do we sneer? Do we question the validity of the proclamation? Do we hold so tightly to our own experience and language that all other experiences and languages become extraneous to our understanding of truth? How might we reckon this with Peter’s interpretation that the Pentecost experience ought to be understood through the lens of Joel who proclaims that the Spirit of God will be poured out on all flesh?
Friends, the truth proclaimed in our Feast of Pentecost is that God’s Word of liberation and healing, of restoration and reconciliation, of freedom and love cannot be contained in a single religious, social, communal, or linguistic expression. The good news of Jesus
Christ cannot be contained in a single monolith of experience and expression. We need the diversity of God’s creation to receive and tell out the whole truth of God’s Word. The Spirit invites us into a way of being that affirms God’s blessing of diversity and honors the dignity inherent to every single creature in existence. The power and presence of the Spirit is meant to be a disruption to all human effort to force assimilation and to eradicate difference.
Throughout the rest of the story we find in the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit is constantly leading the early community of Jesus-followers to cross boundaries of difference into a greater embodiment of inclusion and welcome. At every turn, they are challenged to dismantle the barriers created by their most cherished traditions and pious practices as the Spirit constitutes them as God’s beloved community. Today, the Spirit continues to be poured out on all flesh, drawing each of us onto the same path of transgression, into the same journey of dismantling the barriers that reduce human beings – and all of creation! – into a hierarchy of rank and status.
I wonder, Dear People of St Peter’s, what boundaries of difference might God be calling and equipping us to transgress? Where are we noticing the disruptive presence of the Spirit? My prayer for us today, on this Pentecost Sunday, is that we might find within the diversity of God’s creation not only understanding of one another’s lived experiences of God – but that we might also discover that the blessing of diversity is found in the dreams, visions, and prophecies that fuel our capacity to imagine a world where difference is no longer a threat! Come, Holy Spirit, Come! Amen.
i Jurgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Fortress Press, 1997, 15.
ii Shai Held, “The Babel Story is about the Dangers of Uniformity,” in The Christian Century, November 8, 2017.