Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, [the apostles] were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 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.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
‘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.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ”
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.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ”
—-
“In the last days it will be," God declares, “that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”
So begins Peter’s sermon on that strange, unexpected, fiery day of Pentecost.
This particular day of Pentecost began like any other. Pentecost was a Jewish festival celebrated at the end of the fiftieth day of the “Feast of Weeks,” a harvest festival. So Jerusalem was filled with people, pilgrims from nations near and far, who had come to the holy city for this holy celebration.
But very quickly - by 9:00 a.m.! - everything went off the rails.
Wind, tongues of fire, a cacophony of languages, general confusion and chaos, a Holy Spirit who had already been a part of the story of Jesus and the disciples, now doing a new thing, bursting open the doors, and setting in motion the spread of the story of Jesus, moving outward from Jerusalem like ripples spreading across water.
It is a day where three thousand people jump in the water of baptism and jump onto the Jesus train.
What I love about Peter in the book of Acts is that, whenever the Spirit stirs up holy chaos and confusion, Peter’s first instinct is to stand up and preach a sermon. It happens a lot.
And it starts here, on this strange Pentecost morning, when people can’t decide of they’re hearing things, if they’re hallucinating, or if their morning coffee had a little something extra in it.
Peter stands up, assures everyone that it is far too early in the day for anyone here to be anything but sober, and then he preaches, kicking things off with a reminder of God’s promises through the prophet Joel:
“In the last days,” God declares, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”
I am captivated by one tiny word here. The word “out.”
When Jesus commissioned the disciples before his ascension, he told them that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. He has blessed them and sent them out. Outward from Jerusalem. Outward to the farthest reaches of the earth.
And this is, indeed, what happens as we move through the book of Acts. Fun fact: did you know that the full title of the book of Acts is actually “The Acts of the Apostles?” Fun fact #2: did you know that the word apostle, from the Greek, means, “one who is sent out?”
No longer are the eleven-plus-one called disciples, as they were referred to in the gospels. Now, in Acts, having received the Spirit in a new way, they are apostles. They are the ones sent out.
This is the new thing that the Spirit does here at Pentecost. The Spirit might have hovered over the waters at creation, and the Spirit might have filled and inspired the prophets, and he Spirit might have come down upon Jesus at his baptism, but now, the Spirit is moving in a new direction: out.
The Spirit pulls the apostles out from the center to all the ends of the earth. The Spirit pulls the apostles out of themselves. The Spirit draws out their hearts. The Spirit leads them out of thinking that the work of God is exclusive to one set of apostles, or one language, or one moment in time. This Spirit of drawing out, dear ones, is the Spirit that we each desperately, desperately need in our lives, too. The world depends on us.
The gravest danger to our spiritual lives and the greatest threat to the flourishing of our world is the ever-present temptation to turn inward and to close ourselves off from the world.
St. Augustine, in his work City of God, names the beginning of sin as the moment of pride “when the soul abandons [the God] to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”
Martin Luther expands on Augustine’s thought in his lectures on Romans, saying
“Our nature is so curved in upon itself at its deepest levels that it not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself in order to enjoy them…[but also] "uses" God in order to obtain them, but it does not even know that, in this wicked, twisted, crooked way, it seeks everything, including God, only for itself.”
Whether we call it pride or arrogance or self-centeredness or fear, this “inward curve” of our human nature tries to close us off to the needs of our neighbors and the needs of the world. It prioritizes our own desires over the good of others. It champions our own desire for freedom instead of fighting for the liberation of our neighbors. It makes God as small as our own convenience, instead of trusting in the God who created all, who is before all, and who will be unto eternity.”
“Our nature is so curved in upon itself at its deepest levels that it not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself in order to enjoy them…[but also] "uses" God in order to obtain them, but it does not even know that, in this wicked, twisted, crooked way, it seeks everything, including God, only for itself.”
Whether we call it pride or arrogance or self-centeredness or fear, this “inward curve” of our human nature tries to close us off to the needs of our neighbors and the needs of the world. It prioritizes our own desires over the good of others. It champions our own desire for freedom instead of fighting for the liberation of our neighbors. It makes God as small as our own convenience, instead of trusting in the God who created all, who is before all, and who will be unto eternity.”
This inward curve pulls us every day. It happens in subtle, small ways, certainly. We are always challenged to consider what that fine line is line between caring for ourselves and taking enjoyment in life…and crossing into self-centeredness or forgetfulness about the source of our joy.
The inward curve builds up, though. It aggregates. And this is the hardest thing about it. Because this inward curve, on a grand scale, over time, has its own destructive ripple effect on our hearts and our society and our world.
It is the inward curve that causes us to prioritize our own white feelings of shame, guilt, fear, or denial, instead of dismantling what needs dismantling for the sake of racial justice, because giving up comfort or freedom or institutions that we hold dear seems too hard.
The inward curve looks like sticking a rainbow decal on our church doors or on our car windows, but holding back from publicly sharing pronouns and advocating for LGBTQ health care access and supporting parents of transgender children, because somewhere down the line, somebody told us that God’s love doesn’t quite reach that far, and we’re still afraid they might be right.
The inward curve leads us to assume that systemic poverty and homelessness and addiction among us don’t exist if we can’t see them, because we have luxury of not needing to scratch below the surface of our community.
The inward curve leads us to believe that the mission of the church is to save our own souls and to separate us from the world, because that feels like a much nicer version of faith than one that asks us to touch lepers and eat with sinners.
The inward curve makes us flinch when faced with inconvenient asks on our time and our money. The inward curve causes us to resist people’s stories of pain and trauma when those stories don’t match with our own experiences.
I’ll be honest here. The hardest part of this past year of pandemic, for me, has been watching our nation and our world at battle over the individual versus the communal. Watching us come to blows over masks and vaccines and quarantine and science, and so much of it so callous to the enormous loss of life that our world has grieved.
Friends, this is not how we have been called to live.
Paul writes to the Romans, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” But the groaning of creation is not the way things are meant to be. And it’s not what we are resigned to. Paul continues, reminding us, “For in hope we were saved.”
And not just saved.
But on the rush of a mighty wind and in the crackle of descending fire, in the sound of new languages and rapidly beating hearts, we have also been sent out.
Debie Thomas, in this week’s “Journey With Jesus” online magazine, writes “There is no way to overstate how much we need to gather as God’s people right now and ask the Holy Spirit to instruct us, shape us, remake us, and commission us. We need fresh languages of bridge-building. We need new words to rekindle love. We need the wind and fire of God to challenge our complacencies, reset our priorities, ease our anxieties, and move us out.”
The Holy Spirit is, as Jesus taught us, both the Spirit of comfort and the Spirit of truth. The Spirit is what hovers beside us and what nudges us forward and what draws us out and what sometimes drags us by our hair to get where we need to go - to move out to where God is at work and waiting for us to catch up.
What does moving out look like in your own life?
Where do you feel your heart yearning to go that you haven’t yet had courage to follow?
What would it look like for you to get out of your head?
What would it look like for you to get out of your fear?
How are you being drawn out into uncharted waters?
What is out there that God is calling you to see and be and do?
Where do you feel your heart yearning to go that you haven’t yet had courage to follow?
What would it look like for you to get out of your head?
What would it look like for you to get out of your fear?
How are you being drawn out into uncharted waters?
What is out there that God is calling you to see and be and do?
If we truly believe that Jesus has conquered all things, even death itself; if we truly believe what we pray when we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done;” if we read the story of Pentecost honestly and with listening hearts…
…then we cannot ignore the call, like the call of Jesus to Lazarus, that says, “come out!” Come out from the caves that have walled you in, move out into the open air. Lift your head from places of fear and death, and turn your gaze outward into the shining of this new day. And then go. Go out into the world. And tell everyone what God has done.
Let us pray.
Spirit, you are alive in me.
And sometimes I’m afraid.
Spirit, you nudge me.
You whisper in my ear.
You blow around me,
Urging me to action.
And sometimes I’m afraid.
You whisper in my ear.
You blow around me,
Urging me to action.
And sometimes I’m afraid.
Spirit, you are alive in me.
And you are always here.
Always moving, always calling.
And I am unaware.
And sometimes I’m afraid.
And you are always here.
Always moving, always calling.
And I am unaware.
And sometimes I’m afraid.
Afraid of the task.
Afraid of caring.
Afraid of responsibility.
Afraid of myself.
Afraid of caring.
Afraid of responsibility.
Afraid of myself.
Spirit, you are alive in me.
And I will let you lead me.
And I will hear you call me.
And I will journey with you,
Even when I’m afraid.
And I will let you lead me.
And I will hear you call me.
And I will journey with you,
Even when I’m afraid.
Spirit, you are alive in me,
and I am alive in you.
and I am alive in you.
Amen.
[Closing prayer by Judy Judd, in Peter Judd, ed., Prayers and Readings for Worship, Volume 2 (Herald Publishing House, 1996, ISBN 9780830907199), 20.]