Language of the Holy Spirit

Acts 2:1-21 (Genesis 11:1-9)

It can be tempting to celebrate Pentecost as a singular fixed moment in time, as the birthday for the church and just leave it at that, as the day to commemorate the moment when the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit descend on the apostles as a sign of the outpouring of this divine gift, of the presence of God among them. We could celebrate this event as a final, complete moment in itself, in which no other can compare.

We could box up the Spirit in our tidy, commercialized language of success. I frequently overhear other ministers talk about the work of the spirit in their churches, and more often than not it has something to do with a shiny new building or an influx of new members—God can do amazing things! Like help us build this new gymnasium. As if to say the presence of the Holy Spirit in our congregations is measured by our numbers or by the amount of money we receive. As though God created a finalized product in the church, that we must simply maintain now, keeping up our numbers and appearances. At which point we have domesticated God, tamed the divine down to tiny little expectations.

There are other stories, though rarer, of churches who send people out into the world, who fully embrace mission locally and globally and choose to believe that the transforming power of the Holy Spirit—the flaming tongues of Pentecost have more to do with working to change the world—in very real and tangible ways, that move beyond supporting an established institution and an expensive infrastructure, more than “playing church”, but actually being “church” for a world that is broken and hurting.

The event of Pentecost is truly an amazing, miraculous story, which informs us that amazing, miraculous stories are still possible for the church today. (more than nostalgia for a past when God was active)

Pentecost was already a Jewish holiday occurring 50 days after Passover. The eleven remaining disciples were gathered to observe this Holy Day. Of course, they had already been through a lot at this point—Jesus had left them once again, this time ascending into heaven. And these men from Galilee are gathered to worship and to remember the event of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the gift of law for the people. And in the midst of this—this moment that so defines the birth of their religion, the law and ordering of their lives, their ritual is disrupted by a loud, rushing, mighty wind, that draws attention to them and a crowd forms around the house. They are inundated with the Spirit of God the same that moved across the chaotic waters of Creation, assaulted with tongues as of fire, and babbling in languages they can’t even understand, to be ridiculed by those who do not understand and find comic relief in accusing them of being drunk!

But they are not drunk with wine, they are intoxicated with the incredible power of the Holy Spirit and that is how they are each able to speak the message of God in a language that is foreign to them, but recognizable to the diversity of the crowd. The message of God, instantly translated into a dozen different languages, allowing for clear communication and unity.

In the book of Genesis, we find the story of the tower of Babel. Human beings had become numerous on earth and decided they wanted to build a tower to the sky, to reach God in heaven. But God didn’t like this plan and realized that if the people could not communicate well to each other, they could not successfully pull off a big project like a tower to heaven. So God, who created the world with a single spoken Word, scattered the people to far reaches of the earth and jumbled their languages, thus creating a diverse world.

The event of Pentecost reverses the tower of Babel—at least temporarily. It doesn’t eradicate all languages and unify them into one, rather the people are able to hear the message of God in their own native languages, and to understand. The diversity continues to exist, but there is new understanding, new community within the Holy Spirit.

Language can create and unify and it can destroy and scatter. We are increasingly separated through language. Not just different linguistic families, but also through rhetoric and jargon. It is difficult for Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Muslims, to speak with one another, rather than at and against. It’s difficult to find even an objective news story because everyone has an opinion and hardly anyone can look at an issue from several angles. It’s either all good or all bad, the solution to the problem or the death toll for us all.

For the thousands of Jews gathered in Jerusalem, language kept them divided, but through the Holy Spirit they were able to truly hear one another for the first time.

Hear the words that Peter quotes from Joel: telling the critics that in the last days, God will pour out the Holy Spirit on everyone and sons and daughters will prophesy, young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams, slaves will also prophesy, and there will be signs in heaven and on earth, the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood.

There will be much, much more than simply speaking in other languages, there will be visions and dreams, probably some of hope and some of terror, and there will be a reversal of creation as the bright shining sun goes dark and the luminous yellow moon turns blood red to show the “great and glorious,” wonderful and fearful return of the Lord.

The Spirit of God is serious business, powerful and transformative—she is not just sweet and comforting.

In our prayers, we invoke the Holy Spirit, asking God to descend upon us, to unify us. When we say these familiar words, we better know for sure what we’re asking!

Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk writes “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."[1]

It is madness to ask God to help us achieve our church or personal goals unless we are willing to ask God what our goals should be in the first place. We may invite God into our lives hoping for protection from life’s trauma and our own foolishness, we may be mostly hoping for good health and personal satisfaction, but we often forget about the terrifying God on the other end of the deal—the one who’s will we ask be done, without the foggiest idea what that will might be, without really comprehending just what God might ask of us, what God might truly demand of us, how God might really shape and form us. The terrifying Poet, T. S. Eliot, has this to say to us:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.[2]

Pentecost is not some remembrance of a past event, of the one-time only birth of the church, sprung fully formed from the mind of God, instead it is the ongoing, often painful, growing and shaping of the community of faith in the world. Thanks be to God.

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[1] Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982

[2] Eliot, T.S. “The Dove Descending.”