Collect
Heavenly Father, on the Sixth Day of Creation Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of humanity and Adam’s body became a living soul; and on the Day of Pentecost Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the first disciples, and Your Body became a living Church. Today let your Spirit breathe into us the unpredictable breath of the wind that blows where it will, that we might proclaim a greater Gospel than we ourselves can ever understand, and welcome a wider world than we ourselves have ever envisioned. This we pray in the Name of the One who promises to send us the Spirit, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.
Left Panel: The Church
Well, this is embarrassing, isn’t it? I mean, here we are, all modern, educated, twenty-first century Christians, and we have to face this text full of wind and fire and speaking in tongues! Well, if it helps at all, we aren’t the first to blush over Pentecost.
John Calvin, the great Reformer, actually theologized the whole thing away, arguing that the Age of Miracles ended with the close of the New Testament era. Healing the sick and raising the dead, let alone miraculous utterances - all that was just to get Christianity going, like start-up money from a venture capitalist. But we’re well established now, showing a profit, and no longer in need of that sort of thing.
Another dodge is to point out that the “tongues” here aren’t some kind of private prayer language. That may be what Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians, but this is clearly a matter of known earthly languages that the speaker has never learned. But I’m not sure how that helps, since it just shows more clearly than ever that we do not share this experience.
If you’re a Baptist, like me, there’s an even easier solution to a passage like this: Just ignore it. As my friend Dr. Dana Moore, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi says, as Baptists we believe in the Holy Spirit - we just have issues with Him! Sure, we believe in the Trinity, but we like to think of the Third Member as a kind of silent partner.
But even that won’t work for you, because here it is, right in the Lectionary. Worse still, you use the liturgical calendar, which sets aside an entire Sunday to commemorate this event, on the actual anniversary of the day that Luke describes here.
Even my Pentecostal friends are - or should be - more embarrassed than proud of this passage. I mean, after all, as I said before, this isn’t just ecstatic utterance; this is unlearned earthly languages, as if I suddenly began preaching in perfect Mandarin. I’m not saying that those who claim to speak in tongues are faking it, but it is easier for a purely emotional experience to result in babbling than for a work of the Spirit to produce fluency in Portuguese. And anyway, the real miracle is three thousand souls saved and baptized and nobody’s seeing that on a regular basis.
It’s just embarrassing. The liturgical color for this day in the church calendar is red, presumably to commemorate the tongues of flame that flickered above the apostles’ heads. I wonder, however, if it might not also be to commemorate the color we turn as we blush at the reading of this primitive passage which we think we’ve outgrown but in fact have never really grown into.
Central Panel: The Text
But let’s set the language business aside for a minute. That is the literal part of the passage, the thing that actually happens. Let’s look instead for a moment at the images involved. There are three, by my count: wind, fire, and drunkenness. Notice the language of the text: Verse 2 says “there was a noise like a violent rushing wind.” Verse 3 tells us there were “tongues as of fire.” In verse 13 the bystanders think the apostles have had a few too many, but Peter effectively refutes that charge in verse 15. Now, I’m not denying that there was a literal wind or literal fire but what seems to interest Luke is the image of these things. This is what a movement of the Holy Spirit over the church looks and feels like. So what’s the point?
I think the common element in all of these is the idea of being out of control. A violent, rushing wind? We had tornado warnings all over South Texas a week or so ago. A funnel cloud actually touched down in Gregory a week ago Friday and turned over a toolshed. Witnesses said that whirling vortex snatched up golf carts and even a forklift and tossed them around like a child’s toys! In other words, big, heavy objects whipped through the air and no one could control their movement.
What about tongues of fire? When a forest fire breaks out, it’s the lack of control that terrifies us. Back in 2011 over thirty thousand fires ripped through four million acres in Central Texas and wiped out nearly three thousand homes - two thousand of them over a single Labor Day weekend! And what did they say on every newscast? “The fires are now X percent under control.” And of course we wanted to see that number increase. We fear fire that rampages out of control.
Then, of course, there is drunkenness, which may be the very definition of being out of control. A drunk person loses control of his body, of her speech, of his behavior - the whole of her person. I remember in high school when friends would ask why I didn’t drink, I’d often reply, “I’ve done some incredibly stupid things when I was in full possession of myself. I’d hate to think what kind of idiocy I could perpetrate if I was out of control!”
And not only do we have imagery of things being out of control, but it turns out that these images only serve as warning signs of what is actually about to happen. Just take verse 17, for example: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” In case you missed that, Peter hammers at it again in verse 18: “Even on my bondslaves, both men and women, I will in those days pour forth my Spirit. And they shall prophesy.”
Now, that doesn’t bother good Disciples like yourselves, but it slings a meat-axe sideways through the delicate machinery of my Baptist culture. Peter says that Joel says that GOD SAYS women will preach! And he sandwiches this between all kinds of apocalyptic language: This will occur “in the last days” (v.17) when “the sun (is) turned into darkness and the moon into blood” (v.20). I know people who think that women in the pulpit would be the end of the world. . .and they’re right! Women in the pulpit is just one more sign that the old world, the world of oppression and privilege, has received its death sentence and the new world of the Kingdom of Heaven, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ, has come about!
But don’t get cocky.
All of those doing the preaching were Jews, and all of those listening were Jews, but in the first century world there were Jews and Jews. Here’s what I mean: Some Jews grew up in what was then called Palestine, in the Promised Land. They spoke Hebrew, or at least Aramaic, and read the Scriptures in Hebrew, and lived near enough to Jerusalem to go to the temple for the great festivals on a regular basis. Their ancestors had returned to Judea from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC. Other Jews lived in the Dispersion, in the Gentile territories. They spoke Greek and read the Scriptures in a Greek translation and might make it to Jerusalem once in a lifetime to celebrate the Passover. Their ancestors had stayed behind after the captivity. Well, Palestinian Jews sort of looked down on Dispersion Jews; that’s the whole trouble with food distribution to widows in Acts 6. But here God makes these good Palestinian Jews preach the gospel, not in pure, godly Hebrew, but in the various native languages of those Dispersion Jews.
And of course it gets worse: In Acts 8.14 God sends people to preach to Samaritans (who were half-breed Jews). They receive this same exact gift of tongues, which Peter finds so hard t stomach that he has to come down himself from corporate to check it out. A little later, God sends Peter in person even to witness this gift given to pure Gentiles without a drop of Jewish blood. This grosses Peter out so bad that God has to send him a vision and repeat it three times just to convince him! (Acts 10)
My point is that once the Holy Spirit gets involved in the church, things quickly spin out of our control! The Spirit whips us up in the swirling vortex of God’s love and we just have to wait and see where we land! The Spirit ignites our familiar and fruitful soil and leaves it so scorched that we have to hot-foot it elsewhere without the time to figure out our destination in advance! The Spirit hits our bloodstream until we blow a .25 Jesus-level on the Bible breath-a-lyzer, legally drunk on the love of God and apt to stagger into places we’d never normally go and throw our arms around people we’d not usually speak to! Criminals, rabble-rousers, bikers, Republicans - there’s no telling and no stopping once the Spirit takes over. In fact, we probably are not living out Pentecost until we catch ourselves saying, “If I do that, it’ll be the end of the world!” In fact, until things are out of control, we have not come into Pentecost.
I like what the great Christian thinker G. K. Chesterton said about this: “While Christianity establishes a rule and order, the chief aim of that order (is) to give room for good things to run wild.” Pentecost celebrates the controlled rampaging of the good things of the Kingdom of God - things like mercy, forgiveness, grace, and radical community.
It’s an interesting thing about Pentecost: It undoes one of the great deeds of human history. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it re-does one of the great undoings of human history. In Genesis 11 we read about the Tower of Babel when, after the flood, the human race all spoke one language, and they said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." (Gn 11.4)
Do you hear the theme there? “A tower whose top will reach into heaven” - the idea is probably some form of astrology. This was to be a tower from which men could observe the movement of the stars and planets and thus control their destiny. Why? So they would not “be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” In other words, so they could control where they went. They made a grab for unity and permanence on their own terms. And what was the result? God confused their speech and scattered their community.
Do you see it? The effort at control resulted in chaos. The effort at purity resulted in dispersion. Now, at Pentecost, God sends the chaos of the Spirit to establish control. God brings in the dispersed so there can be true unity. The real miracle and message of Pentecost is that when we give up control we find peace, and when we embrace diversity we find unity, and when we turn loose we finally find a place to hold onto.
Right Panel: The World
The other day the the NPR program "All Things Considered" aired a piece about a robot. Some really brilliant scientists at the University of California at Berkeley invented it. They call it BRETT: "Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks." Well, one task: BRETT can fold towels. Well, BRETT can fold one towel. . .in twenty minutes. See, the problem is that robots are only good at repetitive patterns, while each pile of laundry contains lots of different items - socks, shorts, shirts, pants - and each pile of laundry jumbles these items in different piles and layers. All that variety - all that chaos - confuses BRETT terribly. He can’t find any corners, and until he knows where the corners are - where the boundaries are - he’s stumped.
We’re all worried these days about whether robots are going to take our jobs. And not just factory assembly line jobs, either: In his book The Rise of the Robots author Martin Ford theorizes that the automatons could even steal white collar jobs. It turns out, though, that in a robot-controlled world, chaos may be the key to continued human thriving. The NPR report said, “Machines need clear rules. One of the ways to figure out if a robot is going to take your job is to ask yourself: What are the rules here? Is my job a series decisions based on an orderly pattern? Or is my job really more like a giant pile of messy laundry?”
So it’s important to remember, when we want to push back against the great Godly higgledy-piggledy of our ongoing Pentecost, that the Third Member of the Trinity is not the Holy Algorithm but the Holy Spirit! He does not download God onto us; He breathes God into us. What we need is not a program but Pentecost. There may not be clear-cut corners with neat ninety-degree angles and clean edges. According to the story of today’s text, the Church is not about rules, but is more like a giant pile of messy laundry, all of which, though scarlet with sin, will be as white as snow, and though red like crimson shall be like wool (Isa 1.18).
Benediction
May the wind of the Holy Spirit
Rush unresisted through the rooms of your heart.
May the flame of the Holy Spirit
Blaze unbound above the thoughts of your head.
May the wine of the Holy Spirit
Leap unleashed from the language of your tongue.
In the Name of the Father,
And of the Son,
And of the Holy Spirit,
One God now and forever,
Amen.
