Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Pentecost, May 19, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Numbers 11:16-17, 24-29; I Corinthians 12:4-13; Acts 2:1-18 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 2:3-4
There's a play on words here that got lost in translation. In the Greek version of this passage, the word for tongues and the word for languages is the same word. It actually would work in English too. The word tongue doesn't just mean that muscular thing in the middle of your mouth that you use to eat and to talk; tongue is also a synonym for language. So we also could say that a tongue of fire rested on each of them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues.
Speaking in tongues. Speaking and being understood in languages they never learned. That's the miracle of Pentecost. At Christmas we have the virgin birth, at Easter we have the resurrection, at Pentecost we have this speaking in tongues. As miracles go, I'd say that understanding and being understood rank right up there with the virgin birth, wouldn't you? This is the birth of Christian community. The birth of the church.
And it's the de-Babelization of the world. You remember. It's in the Book of Genesis, right after the Flood and the Ark and the rainbow sign.
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves." And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth. Therefore it was called Babel, because it was there that the Lord confused the language of all the earth.
And by the way, that's where the word babble came from. But at Pentecost the Spirit of God undoes the confusion of tongues and gives us back the ability to understand each other.
So I can hear you asking, why don't we understand each other? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Arabs, Afghans, Bosnians, Russians, Zimbabweans, Hispanics, Québécois, Hip-Hop Rappers, and residents of Exeter and Brentwood and Stratham, why can't they comprehend each other? I guess the answer is that the Holy Spirit still hasn't penetrated everybody's thick skulls. But the gift, God's gift of the Spirit, is there for anyone who will receive it. We have been given the power to undo the curse of Babel. Maybe we'd rather not have it.
This ambivalence has been around from the get-go. These very same disciples who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost became involved not long afterward in their very first argument with each other. Paul and others began preaching the Gospel to Gentiles. Peter and others objected. They said, all us Christians are Jews! Paul said, true, but you don't have to be Jewish to be Christian. Eventually Paul's side won, and that's why you and I, or most of us anyway, are not Jewish. The Jews would say that's our loss, and they may be right.
Pentecost was a Jewish holiday before we got our hands on it. Still is. It's the Greek word for fifty. Fifty days after Easter, therefore fifty days after the Passover. At Passover God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, out of slavery and across the Red Sea on dry land. Fifty days or seven weeks later, God came down on Mount Sinai and gave them the Torah, the Holy Law, the law that set them free. The Jews call Pentecost the Feast of Weeks.
So the Jews celebrate the giving of God's Law, while the Christians celebrate the giving of God's Holy Spirit. Law there, Spirit here. Law and spirit are opposites, right? Wrong. They're two sides of the same coin. In both of them God is saying the same thing: You do not belong to your individual selves, you and you and you. You belong to me, and since you all belong to me you belong to each other. That's the way it is. Get used to it. Live it.
Just as you don't have to be Jewish to be Christian, you don't have to be Christian to get the Holy Spirit. Look at Eldad and Medad and those other seventy elders upon whom God sent the Holy Spirit so they could help Moses to bear the burden of his people. That's what the Holy Spirit is up to, you know. It doesn't come to you to give you some kind of a private high, up on a mountaintop with God. It drafts you to bear people's burdens. People who belong to you. People to whom you belong. It recruits you, and disciplines you, and inflames you, to serve.
Now Moses and Eldad and Medad and Peter and Paul are all history. They're long gone. The age of the Biblical heroes and heroines is over. And what is there to take their place? The thing that was born at Pentecost, of course. The church. God help us, the church. The sorry Catholics and the haughty Episcopalians and the pious Lutherans and the righteous Presbyterians and the enthusiastic Methodists and the mystical Orthodoxers and the soaking-wet Baptists, and don't forget the Jews and the Muslims either. And last and possibly least there's us, this little clump of a million and a half middle-class Americans who have the gall to call ourselves The United Church of Christ.
All of these do claim to be God's people. And all of them are God's people, only they've all got one big thing wrong. The claim isn't theirs to make. It's the other way around. God's the one who does the claiming. All of us earthlings are the claimees.
When we own our covenant, as we did this morning, we're not creating God's people. We're only saying Yes to what God has already done and is continually doing among us. Yes, go ahead, grab us, gather us, set us on fire, give us the power to understand each other and to make ourselves understood to each other. That's who we are. We'll try to get used to it.
The Gospel story that began in Advent and climaxed at Easter comes to a close at Pentecost. And then what? Then comes the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts means Doings. What they did. What the church did. And the Bible goes on being written in the Doings of the church. We are the latter-day heroes and heroines of the Bible. This is the locus of the Good News. Ringers of bells, sorters of canned goods, scrubbers of soup kitchens, missionaries to California, visitors to shut-ins, people who have owned the covenant for decades and people who have only just begun to own it and people who are still getting ready to own it and people who think we're all drunk. Pentecost is here. The Spirit has taken up residence among us. Thank God.
Amen