"When the day of Pentecost had come, the apostles 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."
--Acts 1: 1-4
When
was the last time you went to a family reunion? Where I come from in the mountains of
Virginia family reunions happened, it seemed, every year. I found that a little strange; I mean, how
can you miss someone if they never go away? But the flip side of that was my own family,
who had a reunion in 1989—when I was five years old—and
didn’t have another one until this past
April! As I said to one of my cousins,
whom I don’t even remember being at that first reunion, 30
years is way, way too long to be away from your family!
The Epps family reunited for the first time in 30 years back in April.
Do you know what is even worse than 30 years?
2200 years! That’s
about how long it took for humanity to have its family reunion. In an attempt to explain why the world is the
way that it is, the Scriptures of the Hebrew people—written
while those folks were scattered in exile throughout the empire of Babylon—offered
an explanation for the phenomenon of why people speak different languages. According to the Book of Genesis (chapter 11, verses 1-9), humanity once
spoke a common language around the time of the reign of a king named Nimrod,
who ruled over 2000 before the time of Jesus.
According to the story humanity got a little big for its britches, and
built a great city called Babel, in which was a tower that was erected in the
sky in order to “make a name for ourselves.” God didn’t like this, and
the result was the destruction of the tower and humanity’s
hubris repaid in the form of different languages that caused confusion and frustration
of all kinds. The human family was
scattered to the winds following the destruction of Babel.
An artist's rendering of the city and tower of Babel.
But
they wouldn’t stay that way. Nope.
God had other ideas. It took a
while—22 centuries, give or take—but
a new wind was about to blow and reunite the human family. On that day of Pentecost, a holy day for the Hebrew
people, God showed up once more, but not to punish or chide or confuse the
people. No, this time God showed up to
bring the people together. A mighty wind blew through the upper room of a house in Jerusalem. A small bind
of brothers and sisters, still caught in a place of fear and confusion, like the
people were when Babel fell, were caught up in that wind, which was the very breath of
God. Tongues of fire rested on their
heads—common tongues—and
the Spirit of God drove them out into the streets to preach about the loving,
liberating, and life-giving God that they had come to know through the
teachings of their friend and rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. And in that moment, as they preached and men
and women from all cultures and languages heard them speaking in their native
tongue, confusion ceased. Fear was
abated. God showed up. The gift of universally intelligible
languages was God’s practical joke undoing the Babel
event. The reunion was on!
The fresco of a church ceiling depicting the Day of Pentecost.
Now,
y’all know how family reunions go. There’s a feast, a
catching up with one another, and a promise that is always made to stay in
touch, to not let so much time go by, and there’s almost always one
member of the family who is tasked with making sure this happens, isn’t
there? A dutiful aunt who keeps the phone numbers or email lists, and every now
and then sends out something to the rest of the family to make sure nobody
loses that connection. Often times that auunt is the one who hosted the reunion and prepared the feast, am I
right? In the case of Pentecost that aunt,
that member of the family who orchestrates the whole thing, is the Holy Spirit,
and it is she who makes sure nobody loses the
connection from that day forward. For the rest of the book of
Acts, the Holy Spirit is so significant that she might as well be considered
the main character of the whole book! It’s
the Spirit who initiates the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, an outsider for both his racial and sexual identities. It's the Spirit that facilitates the conversions of Paul and Cornelius. It’s
the Spirit that compels the followers of Jesus to include Gentiles—non-Jews who had been excluded from the family of God—in their new community of faith. It’s the Spirit—the
same Spirit that conceived, empowered, and guided Jesus—who
has drives those frightened and confused folks into the streets to reunite the
whole human family.
But
about that dutiful aunt: she can be a
little pushy, can’t she?
She might be the family member who is always getting us out of our comfort
zones, telling us we are more than we think we are, that we are strong and
beautiful. And to be sure, the Holy
Spirit is pushy. She is the storm, the
wind that blows through and disturbs us, takes us out of the shelter and
comfort of our upper rooms and into the dangerous world to stand in the courageous
power of the love of God. This past week I
have thought a lot about the Holy Spirit and her power to move
people, to inspire people, to unite people.
When a tyrant dared say that a whole population of the human family were
like vermin that needed to be exterminated, the Holy Spirit moved men and women into action, and 75 years ago this past week on a beach called Omaha, they
courageously stormed like the wind and fire of the Spirit to remind everyone of the unity
of the human family and God’s dream of justice
and dignity for every member.
Soldiers charge Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
And fifty
years ago this month, another small group of people huddled in fear at a bar called Stonewall went out into another set
of city streets and proclaimed to those who had denied their dignity that they
would no longer be silenced and abused, and led by the Spirit, they took pride
in the inherent beauty and strength that God had given them. We honor that pride
with which they took to the streets as we too march and proclaim God’s
dream of equality for the whole human family.
The Spirit may be pushy, but she is the wind that blows over and
transforms this dusty old world.
A march takes place after the Stonewall Riots in June, 1969.
She is still moving, brothers and sisters.
She is still comforting the afflicted and afflicting the
comfortable. She is still calling men
and women to go into the dangerous places and to proclaim freedom, hope, and
justice for God’s people. Three weeks ago at the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis, The
Rev. William Barber declared to a room of about 2000 preachers that we need
another Pentecost. We need, he said, to
speak in tongues, the tongues from heaven, the tongues that society doesn’t
always speak with, and declare that the Spirit is still moving. And in those places where the Spirit is
moving the rejected are not longer afraid, and the people of God all go out
together and speak against the idolatrous culture that seeks to “make
a name for themselves” by way of power, prestige, and
possessions. The Church—with a big C—that
was born on that Day of Pentecost, was born of the Spirit that blew through
that day, and the Church must lead people who are born of that Spirit into a
way of being that is grounded in the work of hope, justice, and love—work
that is cooperative between us and God.
The Greek scholar Preston Epps, my great-grandfather and the person in whose honor my family gathered for that reunion in April, once wrote that Christianity, for him, boiled down to this: ““God
and humanity extend to each other in the cooperative enterprise of humanity
becoming as like as possible to the God portrayed in the Gospels.”
The Spirit makes this enterprise possible.
My great-grandfather, Dr. Preston H. Epps.