Reading: Acts 2:1-21
The reading is the story of what happens among the disciples Jesus gathered in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. The name “Pentecost” comes from the Greek word for “Fiftieth” and it was so called because it is a Jewish Feast on the fiftieth day after the beginning of the wheat harvest – a feast of thanksgiving for God’s continuing care and provision for God’s people.
By the time of Jesus, Pentecost also included a celebration of God’s ancient covenant with Noah to sustain the cycle of the seasons and all life on Earth. It was a day to remember and celebrate God’s desire for the well-being of all Earth, and Jews came home to Jerusalem from all over the known world to renew their role in living out God’s on-going love for all the created world.
When the day of Pentecost came, the followers of Jesus were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Now God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven were staying in Jerusalem for the Festival. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?”
“We speak in all the different languages of the Empire and beyond, and each of us hears them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongue!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of the followers of Jesus and said, “They have had too much wine.”
Then Peter
stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow
Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen
carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only
nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
“‘In the
last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons
and daughters will speak God’s truth,
your young men and women will see God’s way,
your old men and women will dream God’s dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will speak God’s truth.
I will show
wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and billows of smoke.”
The sun will
be turned to darkness and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and glorious day of the
Lord.
And everyone
who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Meditation
When the day of Pentecost came, the followers of Jesus were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind filled the whole house. They saw tongues of fire separate and come to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.
How the heck can we celebrate and share in Pentecost if we aren’t all together in one place? How on Earth are we to know the outpouring of holy Spirit if we aren’t able to gather?
In so many ways we affirm the corporate nature of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit of God as a communal reality.
It’s why at church business meetings we don’t allow absentee ballots. Our experience is that we come to know God’s wisdom and the movement of the Spirit among us best when we meet face-to-face and we open ourselves to real-time interaction and dialogue.
And when it comes to personal growth and discernment, we also know the value of being open and accountable to a spiritual companion, and part of a spiritual community. We feel suspicious of people who identify their gifts and God’s calling on their life all by themselves. Even ministers are advised to have a minister themselves. Just like the fabled desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries, who lived as holy hermits and who others came to for advice, also knew they needed to keep in touch with one another, and be accountable to one another to keep from falling into spiritual delusion, temptation or apathy.
So how can we know the presence and purpose of Holy Spirit in our lives, if we can’t be together?
Unless … if the Spirit really is gift, and the coming of the Spirit is from heaven and by God’s design rather than from our own efforts and practices … maybe the question is not how can we know the holy Spirit in a time of isolation and distancing, but how do we know the Spirit of God in these times? How does God work through the challenge of the times we are in.
Think of your life right now. Who are your spiritual companions these days? Where do you find holy community to support you and hold you accountable in your spiritual journey and your openness to God? Who or what helps you know you are not alone? That you live in God’s world? That you believe in God? That you are part of a living community of faith?
The answers may be quite traditional – your church, your usual Christian friends, spiritual practices and companions you’ve always relied on to keep you steady, and keep you in touch with God’s presence and God’s purpose in your life.
Or, these days you may be finding support and spiritual nurture and companionship in new ways and from new directions. From people and things and in places and ways you never before considered to be spiritual, and part of God’s way of blessing your life.
And that’s okay, because there are other ways in which we and other people come to be “gathered together in one place,” other than in a church as we know it, and other than at a prayer meeting or a service of worship as we’re used to having them. And the experience of Pentecost is not intended a one-time-only kind of thing, but is experienced over and over again in a hundred million kinds of ways.
Back in 2014, Karen Wiseman, Associate Professor of Homiletics at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, preached a Pentecost sermon in which she referred to the international response to the kidnapping of 276 girls from a Nigerian school by Boko Haram as a Pentecost moment.
In the midst of all the chatter and chaos of sound and sound bytes that we call news, public discourse and social media, she says, this incident was so shocking that within weeks it seemed all the world was united in outrage, in concern, and in efforts to somehow save the girls’ lives. Every tongue and every media were used to express one simple, holy desire: “Bring Back Our Girls” and everyone heard it in their own tongue and by their own favourite media.
Of course, the moment did not last long. News channels and social media soon tired of the one story, felt a need to move on to other things. But still, that moment was real, when an otherwise fractured world was united in a single good purpose in its awareness of evil at work and tragedy suffered. It gave us a glimpse of what can be, and what sometimes is true of humanity created to live in the in the image and likeness of God.
It makes me think of other moments when people have found themselves “in one place” and on the same page about something of global significance. In my time, the assassination of JFK – an event so shocking that it united all the world in the deep holiness of shared grief. The death of Lady Di. More recently the murder of George Floyd.
And it’s not always “bad stuff.” There was the Apollo 11 moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s world-famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” A global celebration of what humans can accomplish. Two years before was the world’s first successful human heart transplant performed on Louis Washkansky by Dr. Christian Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa, using the heart of donor Denise Duvall. And every four years, do the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics maybe also gather us in to share in something that unites and elevates us as a species beyond the things that divide us and threaten, rather than serve the goodness of life on Earth?
And that’s what Pentecost is about. Pentecost is a festival held 50 after the beginning of the wheat harvest. It’s a feast of thanksgiving for the maturing and fruition of what’s been sown, in spite of all the risks and anxieties about it along the way. It’s a celebration of God’s continued provision of food and blessing for the people, no matter how disastrous any year or how perilous any season may seem.
In the rituals of the festival, it’s also a time to recommit to taking one’s part in God’s good purpose for the well-being of all the Earth. To hear once again the call to live on Earth as children of God, in God’s image and likeness, caring together for all the Earth and all its people and creatures. It’s about the maturing and coming to fullness of the seed of a world and of humanity in it, that was planted in the beginning in the Garden of Eden, and the appearing – the flowering and maturing, even just for a season, of what was intended and envisioned from the start.
I wonder if the pandemic we’re still in has been a kind of Pentecost moment as well. An experience and a glimpse of a kind of maturing – at least for a moment, of what we are meant to be. Like the days after the death of Jesus – a time of tragic loss and sorrow, that becomes the ground of holy clarity and wisdom.
Do you remember some of the things everyone seemed to be saying and hearing in any way we could – in every tongue and by every media, in the first few months of COVID-19? Things like the celebration of simplified living? The resurgence of nature? The acceptance of limits? The realization that we’re all in this together? That grocery store clerks and cashiers and garbage collectors are as essential to society as firefighters, police officers and medical personnel? And that none of us really are safe unless all – including the poor and the weak, especially the poor and the weak, are safe and well-cared for?
Can we see that maybe as part of Pentecost 2020 – men and women, young and old, of all classes and levels of society, seeing God’s singular truth, and speaking it and hearing in every language and by every media available to us? All of us, not physically in one place, but all of us, on the same page.
It hasn’t taken long, of course, for the harvest of a mature humanity to pass, and for us to fall back into division, greed, self-centredness and short-sightedness.
But that’s nothing new, and we needn’t despair.
What’s new once again is the glimpse of a more mature humanity that we had for a while when the pandemic put us all on the same page. Gathered us all together in one place. And we felt a new breeze blow among us. Were warmed by a new kind of fire within us. And at least for a while we all spoke and heard God’s truth about life in all the tongues we knew.
And now in the wake of that harvest, we once again have some good new seed to re-sow back into our own lives and into the life of the world as we are able, and as it's needed.
Thanks be to God.
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