'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.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
`In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.' "'
--Acts 2: 1-21
Happy Birthday, Church! This past Sunday we celebrated the solemnity of the Day of Pentecost, which is regarded as the birthday of the Church – big C – when the Holy Spirit blew through a little apartment in Jerusalem and set a group of misfits’ hearts on fire to go out into the streets and tell the story; a story of hope, of mercy, of love, of redemption, of grace – the story of God’s salvific work in the world, how God’s very self was made known to the world in Jesus of Nazareth, and how, even in that moment, the words of the prophet Joel were being fulfilled, as the Spirit of the Lord was, right then and there, coming upon them. What a day!
Pentecost was already a day of great significance. It was, and still is, called Shavout – the Festival of Weeks – and it is called that because it takes place eight weeks after the Passover. It celebrates the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai and is also a thanksgiving for a successful spring harvest. Along with Passover and the Festival of Booths, it is a mandatory high holy day that all Jewish folks are meant to celebrate, which meant coming to the Temple in Jerusalem prior to its destruction in 70 AD.
So, the scene is set. God’s timing is perfect, with all these folks already gathered together from a wide variety of places in the known world – well, known to those folks, at least. A miracle occurs when that band of misfits who just had to say goodbye to Jesus for a second time go out into those Jerusalem streets, and as they speak the common language – most likely Aramaic – these tourists and pilgrims hear them in their own language. This isn’t speaking in tongues, mind you, but a wild moment in which God seems to erase the language barrier that God had originally set up way, way back in the Book of Genesis when humanity tried building a tower into the heavens to “make a name for themselves,” and God got somewhat peeved and destroyed the tower, scattering the people, and confusing and confounding them by making them speak different languages. And with this moment, this bold preaching by the apostles, and the ability of those gathered to hear what they needed to hear in the language they needed to hear it, the Church is born.
But what do we even mean when we say that? It ain’t a church with any kind of structure, that’s for sure. There’s no building. There’s no pastor, no hierarchy of any kind. All of those things will come later, and all of those things have their place and are important, but what is born on this day is what Saint Paul will call the ecclesia, which is a gathering, an assembly, of people. And they are gathered, they are assembled, not to debate how any angels can dance on the head of a pin, but to continue the work that the one they recognized as both Savior and God – Jesus of Nazareth – had begun. The ecclesia held no private property or goods. They cared for each person as they needed – so the poorest among them received more, while the rich received less. They made sure the folks who were too often abandoned by the secular authorities – widows, orphans, people suffering from incurable diseases – were cared for. They got together to pray, to tell stories about Jesus and how they were seeing him still alive in the world. They broke bread and sang songs, and no matter what positions they held in the secular world, around that table they were brothers and sisters, bound by the love of Jesus, and inspired by the Holy Spirit. That’s what was born on Pentecost.
And the birthing agent on that day was the Holy Spirit, the one Jesus had called the paraclete, the comforter, the advocate, the person of God who had moved over the waters of creation, been breathed into the nostrils of the the first human being, brought dry bones together in the days of the prophet Ezekiel, and had come upon Jesus in the form of a dove when he was baptized. We profess this quality of the Spirit each week in our Nicene Creed when we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the giver of life.” Yet the Spirit is not just the giver of life, as in when the Church was born on Pentecost, she is the enlivener and beautifier of creation every single day. What happened on that day wasn’t necessarily a new life entirely or some kind of discontinuity with what had come in preceding years – after all, the Spirit had shown up before in all those examples I just mentioned – but rather, her arrival in this fashion was more of a renewal of a “newness of life,” as we say. Pentecost may be the birth of the Church, but it’s also a re-birth for the world, and despite what we may tell ourselves, those two are inextricably linked. No matter how much we may not want to bring the world into our churches or vice versa, they are forever embedded one to another because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This makes all of us…wait for it….Pentecostals! The movement that we regard as the modern Pentecostal Church began in the early 20th century and was characterized by what folks called a baptism of the Holy Spirit. The water, they said, wasn’t enough, you had to have a rebirth of the heart. How would you know this? Well, there were signs like speaking in tongues or taking up serpents without them killing you – and yes, they pointed to the words of Jesus himself in the added, longer version of the ending of Mark’s Gospel as proof of this. In doing so, they believed that the they were reviving the church that was born on that day of Pentecost because in the years after the Church would lay down the cross, would become too politicized and influenced by the world, and so Christians needed to get back to what was the “real church.” These methods may seem strange to us – and to be fair, not all Pentecostals take up snakes – but there is something commendable that they understood then and still do today: that the Holy Spirit is alive, every bit now as on that day. The Holy Spirit is still moving and speaking and calling the Church into holiness, into the image of Jesus for a broken, hurting, fearful world. I’ve had the honor over the years to worship in solidarity and community with several of our Pentecostal congregations in Randolph County, most of whom are predominantly Black. Every time I’m with them I feel the Spirit, and I leave more ready, more eager to be part of the ecclesia of Jesus in whatever ways Jesus needs me and the Spirit leads me.
When Jesus breathed on his apostles and told them to receive the Spirit, he was commissioning them for the work that was to come. He knew that such work would be hard, but the promise he made then to them and makes still to us is that the work is never done in isolation or alone. Church, we don’t do any of this for ourselves or by ourselves. We do it with and for each other, the people outside these walls, and most importantly, Jesus. Without Jesus we have no message, no power, no strength, no enlightenment, no hope. With Jesus, we have everything we need. With the Spirit breathing into us and blowing through us and setting our hearts ablaze, we are given exactly what we need for the work of ministry, to do what the apostles did before us, to go into the world proclaiming Christ’s message of liberation and love and rejoicing in the power of the Spirit, come what may. This is what it means to be Pentecostal, to be the Church.
