Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

Lord send your spirit upon us and bless us with your presence as we seek to draw closer to you that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you our rock and our redeemer.

Today is the great festival of Pentecost in the church.  It is one of my favorite holidays because in is one of the only major Christian holidays that has not been taken over by the wider culture.  I doubt any of you saw big Pentecost displays in the stores this week or spent a lot of time putting up Pentecost decorations or planning Pentecost parties.  It’s not a national holiday with days off from work or school.  Most people outside of the church and probably many from within the church especially from less-liturgical traditions probably couldn’t even tell you what Pentecost is or why we celebrate it. Yet here within the church it is one of the most important days of the church year.  It is the Birthday of the church, the day we commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit and celebrate our life together as a people of God.  It is a day we remember when God spoke his words into his people through the gift of the Spirit.  

Now most of you would likely assume that Pentecost is a purely Christian holiday.  That it was founded just about 2000 years ago to remember the great event that we just heard about in our reading from Acts today.  But this is not actually the case. For you see Pentecost was already a holiday long before there was a Christian church to celebrate it, and even long before Jesus came to dwell among us.  Pentecost as it was known in Greek, or Shavuot as it is called in Hebrew is actually a Jewish holiday one that had been celebrated for centuries before the time of Christ.  

It was one of the three major pilgrimage festivals of the ancient Israelites where all adult males came together in Jerusalem to make sacrifices and give thanks for the Lord’s bounty and continued protection.  Each festival corresponded to one of the major harvest times in Israel and also to a major biblical event in the lives of the people of Israel.  First the Passover, which took place at the barley harvest and of course commemorated the salvation of Israelite firstborn sons and the people’s escape from Egypt.  Succoth which took place in the fall at the fruit and olive harvest and commemorates the end of the people’s time in the dessert and their entry into the promised land and Pentecost or Shavuot which took place 50 days after Passover at the wheat harvest and commemorates the creation of the covenant and the giving of the law at Mt Sinai.  In Jesus’s time, each year, Jews from every corner of the Holy Land and all over the world came to offer the first fruits of their harvest to God in thanksgiving for all he had done for them and to give thanks for the way that God had spoken to them through the Law that God had given them at Sinai.  

As Christians, we celebrate this day as the birthday of the church, as the beginning of the community of the body of Christ drawn together by the Holy Spirit, we remember it as the day when God sent his Spirit upon a tiny, frightened and disparate group of people and made them into a church filled with apostles who would spread the word of God to all the world.  But for the people who were there that day it was already a birthday.  It was the day that God had drawn together a scattered and disparate group of slaves who had fled into the dessert at night and formed them into a nation.  The day he made escaped slaves into free people bound together by a common way of life formed by the Torah.  This was the day that God spoke his word to the Israelites so that he might teach them to be free.

And then 1500 years later, he spoke to them again, in the Spirit of Truth, teaching them not only how to be free from physical slavery but how to be free from slavery to sin and death.  And all through the 2000 years since that day, God has continued to speak his word to our hearts.  

Now Pentecost can be a bit of an intimidating holiday.  When we think of the story of Pentecost we often focus on the disciples, on their powerful and strange experience, violent rushing wind, tongues of fire, suddenly speaking foreign languages.  It can make the whole thing seem a bit weird and strange.  This is not an experience that many of us have had and probably most of us would just as soon not have happen to us.  But perhaps we are focusing in the wrong place in the story.  What about all of those pilgrims who have come from all over the world to celebrate the Pentecost, the coming of the Torah, to hear again God’s word spoken to his people?  It is not just that the disciples spoke, but that the people heard that makes the story.   The true miracle is that the whole world heard God speak directly to them in the language of their hearts.  

For this is the center of God’s promise to us, we hear it in Paul’s words to the Romans when he tells us of how the Spirit intercedes for us when we are unable to pray in sighs too deep for words.  We hear it in the words of Jesus as he promises the coming of the Advocate, the Spirit of truth who will guide us into all truth and we see it lived out in the Pentecost story from Acts where all the people who have gathered from all the corners of the Earth hear the word of God spoken to each in their own native language.

Now they didn’t all immediately believe, many it seems initially rejected the message or even mocked its truth, but God still spoke to them, in their own language, in their own understanding, they and all the world are still invited to hear the Word of God.  Just as God spoke to the people through the Torah given at Sinai, he speaks to us today through the Holy Spirit.

Today we are reminded that God’s word has power, the power to set people free, the power to transform lives and communities, to bring order out of chaos, the power to move mountains, but also the power to whisper, to speak in ways unknown to others, to move silently in the dark places of our hearts and always, always to tell us exactly what we need to hear.

For today we celebrate the Word of God poured out upon us, not only in ancient words written in books, in rules and laws and sacred story, but in the words of the Spirit poured out onto all flesh, in the words of comfort spoken at a bedside by a dear friend, in the words of instruction spoken to a child, in the notes and lyrics of the great hymns, in hands held and meals served, in coincidental occurrences and life changing decisions.  In every language of our hearts, God is speaking.  Whether or not actual words are necessary, Whether we want to hear it or not, whether we accept it as truth or not.  As many times as it takes, God sends his Spirit upon us to guide us in his word, just as he always has, since Sinai, since Pentecost, since God first dreamed of setting his people free.  And that is truly something to be thankful for.  Amen.