There were 3 great festivals in the Jewish year in which all Jewish males
were, ideally, required to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These agricultural feasts required an offering of first fruits of the harvest as a thank offering and celebrated aspects of the foundational story of Jewish identity: the Exodus.
The first and most important was Passover. Held in the spring, it commemorated the fact that the angel of death “passed over” Hebrew homes and slayed the firstborn – human and animal – of the Egyptians, thus persuading Pharoah to let the Hebrew slaves go. The Passover festival saw an ingathering of the barley harvest.
The third festival, in the fall, was the Feast of Tabernacles – or Booths, which commemorated God’s providential care of the Hebrew tribes in the desert for 40 years, living in make-shift dwellings or booths. This festival saw an ingathering of the first fruits of the grape and olive harvest.
The second feast was the Festival of Weeks which celebrated the giving of the Torah, the law, on Mount Sinai and was the ingathering of the wheat harvest. The Festival of Weeks was to be held 7 weeks after Passover. Seven weeks equals 50 days. The Greek word for 50 is “Pentecost.”
The story of Pentecost, read this morning, comes following the events Luke describes in Acts chapter one. In the first chapter, Luke tells us that after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his followers over a period of 40 days, at the end of which he instructed them to remain in Jerusalem and await the gift promised by John the Baptizer: a baptism by fire. For what purpose? So that “you shall be my witnesses in Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”
The followers numbered about 120. That included the eleven remaining apostles following the suicide of Judas: the brothers of Jesus, Mary, Jesus’ mother, and “the women” – which suggests that a high percentage of the followers were, from the beginning, women. The apostles draw lots to determine
who should replace Judas. One who had been present from the beginning. And the lot falls on … Matthias, who is then enrolled as one of the twelve.
So when the Pentecost story unfolds in Acts 2, the “they” likely refers to the 120 followers. On them, the Spirit of God descends, described here as fire and wind.
Fire and wind are Biblical metaphors for God’s presence. God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush – fire. The escaping Jewish slaves were led through the desert at night by a pillar of fire. The Hebrew and the Greek word for “wind” can also be rendered as “breath” or “spirit.” At the beginning of creation, God’s breath hovered over the primordial waters, bringing order out of chaos. In John’s gospel, on Easter night, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says “receive the Holy Spirit.”
And so on Pentecost, these followers – the sum total of the Jesus movement – receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, experienced as a new power. They begin to proclaim Jesus in languages not their own – to be precise, in the languages of the Jewish Diaspora, the 15 nations of pilgrims in Jerusalem for the
Feast of Weeks. Symbolically then, the whole world. Now to be clear: this is not glossolalia or speaking in tongues. Glossolalia is defined as “an outpouring of inarticulate sounds as the result of overpowering religious emotion.” It was a common experience in the primitive Church and early on, it was eagerly sought as a sure sign that one was possessed by the divine.
St. Paul discouraged it because it did not edify non-believers, created disorder in worship, and could be easily counterfeited. On his list of spiritual gifts, Paul ranks it as 8 of 9. He wrote “anyone who speaks in a tongue edifies themselves but one who prophesies” – recall, prophesy is not telling the future but rather speaking the mind of God to the present – the one who prophesies “edifies the church. Since you are eager for the gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the Church.” (1 Corinthians 14)
Fascinatingly, 1873 years later, there was another visitation of the Spirit – in downtown Los Angeles. Called “The Azuza Street Miracle,” an itinerant black
preacher named William Seymour, on April 9, 1906, held a revival in the warehouse district in downtown LA, in which people began speaking in tongues.
But here’s the thing. Their interpretation of that event was that they were, like those first century followers, speaking foreign languages. The Azuza Street Miracle lasted until about 1915 and over that time, evangelists embarked from LA throughout the world, assuming that when they arrived, they would be enabled to do what those early followers did – to be witnesses for Jesus.
This was the birth of the Pentecostal movement. Naivety and zeal would produce an amazing harvest. Predictably, what destroyed the Azuza Street Mission was the resentment of white Christians who distrusted any spirit which saw black, white, Asian and Latinos worshipping together, women in leadership with authority over men, and an African American as the chief pastor.
A century later, in 2014, white Pentecostals formally apologized to black Pentecostals for the racism in the Assemblies of God: the unwillingness to welcome blacks among themselves.
But wind and fire had been unleashed in LA in 1906 as on that first Pentecost – but what does it mean?
In the 11th chapter of Genesis, after Noah’s flood but before the call of Abraham, there is the unsettling story of the Tower of Babel. The people all spoke the same language, living together in a great city. They conspired to build a great tower, presumably to reach heaven and to conquer it. God destroys the tower, scatters the people over the face of the earth, and confounds their language so that they cannot come together and conspire to build another tower.
The Pentecost story in Acts is the reversal of the Babel story. Where in Genesis, the scattering led to conflict and rivalry, the Pentecost story is the beginning of a reunification of humankind. Just as the Festival of Weeks celebrated the giving of the Torah which created a new community of one identity out of the disparate desert tribes, so the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost created the possibility of a new sort of human community, the Church. The Church, where as Paul writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave
or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are One in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
When a cynic in the crowd accuses the followers of Jesus of being drunk, Peter explains that it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning (although what that has to do with it, I’m not sure). Peter explains all of this by quoting the Book of Joel.
All flesh – not just a few especially chosen individuals – but the old and the young, male and female, slave and free, shall be empowered by the Spirit to prophesy; it reveals God’s dream for humankind – of reconciliation, sufficiency for all, of justice flowing like a river and of a beloved community of peace.
All prophets – from Jeremiah to Jesus, John the Baptist to Martin King, Miriam to Dorothy Day – hold out blessing and curse. A blessing if we seek and do justice, calamity and woe if we do not. But speaking up for God is hard; it’s far easier to remain silent.
Just a quick story: back when I was a newly minted priest serving in Milwaukee, on behalf of the social action committee, I submitted a resolution at convention in support of the United Farm Workers. The radical action proposed to educate our parishioners about the struggle for higher pay and better working conditions. Someone immediately stood to object, saying: God had made Mexicans short so that they wouldn’t have to stoop so low to pick our produce. The resolution was swiftly tabled.
I was stunned silent; shocked to hear such naked bigotry in a house of prayer. In saying nothing, I shamed myself by choosing prudence over prophesy.
The British theologian N.T. Wright wrote this in The Challenge of Easter:
“Our task is to announce in deed and in word that the exile is over… doing things differently, planting flags in hostile soil, setting up signposts that say there is a different way to be human… The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ… with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world and to the love of God.” Amen.