The following sermon was preached on Sunday May 28, 2023 at St George’s Transcona. You can learn more about St George’s and find links to their YouTube channel by clicking here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
One of the funniest things about being a priest is that people have a tendency to apologise whenever they swear around me.
I’m a priest and I know a lot of priests and trust me, you don’t need to apologise. Your priest most likely swears at least as much, if not more, than you do.
Language is such a funny thing isn’t it? Technically a word is just a combination of meaningless symbols and sounds. They shouldn’t have any power. It shouldn’t be possible to say that some words are bad and some are good.
But words do have tremendous power. Words can be used to uplift, to empower, to wound, to demean. Words can used to include or exclude.
There is a reason why we need to think carefully about the words we use.
Today’s reading from Acts is one of those readings that anyone who has ever volunteered to read the Bible in public dreads. It contains a rather impressive string of unpronounceable place names.
The reading begins, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” (1)
If you were a Jewish person in the first century, you would know that Pentecost is an agricultural festival celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover. It’s the day when you offer the first of your crops to God, partly as an expression of gratitude, and partly as a hope that the rest of the crops will grow well so you can feed your family.
You’d also know that Pentecost is more than just an agricultural festival. It’s also the day that you remember that your ancestors were once enslaved in Egypt and then were finally freed only to wander for fifty days in the wilderness before they came to Mount Sinai where Moses would speak to God directly and receive the law. The law that became a framework for the way of life that you and your ancestors have been trying to follow ever since.
If you were there on the particular Pentecost that our reading from Acts describes, or if you heard that story afterwards, you would see all of these earlier stories and symbols bubbling up and colouring this experience.
I think it would still have seemed pretty bizarre. Terrifying. Less Pentecost and more Pente-chaos.
Jesus has left his people for a second time – first when he died and then we he ascended to heaven – and no one knows what is going to happen next and so they have all gathered together.
It’s likely that everyone is gathered in one place because there is safety in numbers. It’s likely that everyone is gathered in one place because this group of Christ followers are afraid for their lives.
But it’s also likely, that they are gathered together because rituals and traditions are powerful ways of infusing a sense of stability, a sense of normalcy into turbulent times.
One of the hardest things about the early days of the pandemic was that we lost the ability to gather together. It made a hard time even harder.
But those first Christians could gather together and so they do gather together to celebrate Pentecost, just as their ancestors had done for generations.
But they are in for a surprise.
A sound comes from heaven like the rush of a violent wind which moves and fills the entire house. Tongues like fire appear and rest on everyone present. They are filled with the Holy Spirit and develop the ability to speak in multiple languages. (1-4)
These events were loud enough that people came from throughout Jerusalem to the house to see what had happened and pretty soon a large crowd had gathered. And each person in that crowd was shocked to discover that there was someone in the house who was able to speak to them… in their own indigenous language. (5-8)
It made no sense.
They weren’t all suddenly able to speak the same language. They weren’t suddenly all able to speak the same language as the people inside the house. Rather, all of the insiders were given the ability to speak all of the different languages of the crowd of outsiders who have assembled outside the house to find out what’s going on.
This gift, this ability to speak multiple languages was given to those first followers of Jesus, but it wasn’t for them.
God was calling God’s people into a new way of living, into a new way of being.
One mark of the Holy Spirit is that we are empowered to connect with others, not by expecting them to learn our language and customs, but by learning theirs.
Somewhere in our history, the church lost this message. We forgot that our job is to speak in ways that other people can understand. Ways that invite them in. Somewhere along the lines, we forgot this gift and began to believe that our beliefs, our cultural practices, and even our languages were superior to everyone else’s. We lost this Holy Spirit mindset in favour of a colonial one.
Eight years ago I spent a couple of months in Spain and I came to love the lispy lilting sounds of the particular type of Spanish that is spoken there.
But when I came back to Canada and began to study the language with a teacher from Mexico, I realized that the sounds that were so comforting to me, were a reminder of colonial oppression to him. When the Spanish explorers first came to his country they came to dominate it, and the Christian religion and the Spanish language were two of their most powerful tools of oppression. The colonial enterprise was successful – like most other people from Mexico he speaks Spanish – but his accent is not the accent of colonial Spain and his feelings about that country are infinitely more complicated than mine.
The same thing happened here in Canada, as indigenous people were forbidden to speak their own languages and forced to learn English and French.
Which is the exact opposite of what happens in our reading. The outsiders who rush to the house to find out what’s happening don’t first have to learn the insider’s language in order to do so. Instead, the insiders are given the ability to speak to everyone in their own languages.
A gift given for the sake of others is an odd thing, a threatening thing even, and not everyone who witnesses these events celebrates them.
Luke writes, “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” (12-13)
Whenever we encounter something new, something we cannot understand, we face a strong temptation to judge. To restore our sense of comfort and stability by saying that there is something wrong with this new thing.
Those who sneered and said, “They’re drunk,” could walk away riding the high of smug self-righteousness. But in doing so, they lost out on the chance to be transformed by this new thing.
Lost out at least for that moment, because the welcoming work of the Spirit means there is always time for a second, third, or three hundredth chance.
Judgement shuts down communication. It shuts down learning. It’s a barrier to relationship and community.
A better way to respond is to resist judgement and lean into curiosity instead. To ask good, open ended questions. Questions like, “What does this mean?”
The people were not drunk. God was doing a new thing. Those who were curious enough to ask would begin to discover just what that was.
So when some people have decided that these Christ followers are drunk, others ask, “What does it mean?” and to this question, Peter replies: “Indeed these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” (15)
Which is a fantastic detail if you ask me.
Also I think it’s sad that this is a detail of our story that we haven’t chosen to commemorate liturgically. Can you imagine it? What is we celebrated Pentecost by making sure we’re all out in public at 9:00 serving people in such an energetic and passionately loving way that people wondered if we were all drunk?
So Peter explains, “They’re not drunk,” and then he quotes from the prophet Joel:
17 ‘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.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
The Spirit will be poured out on all flesh, everyone is to be included – young and old, women and men, slave and free. Everyone will prophesy, everyone will speak God’s word into being. Peter wants everyone to know that on that day, the things Joel said would happen are in fact happening.
On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit’s arrival declared in no uncertain terms that anyone who wants to follow Jesus can follow Jesus. Just as they are. The Spirit came to break down barriers, not to build them.
Pentecost also tells us that the divine solution to our failure to understand each other is not conformity, getting everyone on the same page and believing the same thing. Everyone did not miraculously start speaking the same language at Pentecost, as humans did at the start of the Babel story. Each person retained his or her language and was divinely enabled to hear the good news in his or her own tongue. God met everyone exactly where they were, as the divine continues to do.”
God desires to meet us where we are at and God desires that we, empowered by the Spirit, would do the same for others.
May it be so. In the name of our God who creates, redeems, and sustains. Amen