Sermon: The One With All the Languages

  

First Presbyterian Church

May 24, 2026, Pentecost A

Numbers11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

 

The One with All the Languages

 

 

One of the things that sometimes needs to be set straight about Pentecost is that no, this is not the first time the Holy Spirit is invoked in scripture. Today's first reading provides one such counterexample, as a stressed-out Moses pleads for help and God invokes that Spirit to be bestowed upon seventy elders of the people of Israel so that they might share some of the burden of leadership. That Spirit's appearance is made manifest in an outburst of frenetic prophesying, one that spills over to include two men back in the camp, not numbered among those seventy. Joshua (in a typical fit of church leadership) wants to have those two men silenced and that unexpected outburst of Holy Spirit squelched, but Moses (in a typical fit of pastoral weariness) stuffs that idea, crying out that he wished everyone could prophesy. It's not how we typically expect to see the Spirit play out, to be sure, especially since this prophetic outburst is only a one-time thing, but it still serves to remind us that the Holy Spirit is not a new thing as the disciples show up for this Pentecost morning.

While the Holy Spirit isn't new in this case, there are certainly some distinctive features of this particular Spirit-event that are worth noting on this one day of the liturgical year when the Spirit comes to the forefront. The Ascension of Jesus got all of four words in the ancient creeds ("he ascended into heaven"), and in one case the Holy Spirit doesn't do a lot better. The Apostles' Creed, one of the oldest statements of faith in Christendom, has this to say on the subject:

 

I believe in the Holy Ghost...

 

That's it. Thankfully the Nicene Creed does a bit better, giving a whole paragraph to the subject. The church has some history of not really paying attention to this particular member of the Trinity, perhaps to its own harm; it is the Spirit most of all that is the most direct participant in the day-to-day life of the follower of Christ, and it is this Pentecost in-breaking of the Spirit that marks the ongoing truth of this presence and participation.

Since we last heard from this group, we know that they have indeed remained inJerusalem as they were instructed. Acts also mentions in an interesting aside that they elected one of their number to replace Judas, the traitor against Jesus whose grisly death is reported in an aside. And they have waited, probably wondering what exactly they were waiting for (as noted last week). Now they're about to find out.

The description itself lingers: "a sound like the rush of a violent wind"; "divided tongues, as of fire"; and then, the sound of all the languages.

Let's be clear; this group of followers is speaking languages they don't know, but that other peoples outside of Judea or Palestine do speak. Ecstatic utterances in tongues that require interpretation (what we commonly call "speaking in tongues") come later in Acts; this event is one of miraculous speech and hearing.

Those tongues matter because just outside their windows there is a crowd of folks gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of the harvest that was Pentecost in the Jewish tradition, a group ripe to hear something good each in their own language.

Have you had that experience of being in a crowd with people speaking any language but your own? The particular challenge of this was pressed home for me many years ago when I was in Quebec City for a conference back in my academic days. The conference itself was held in English but going out for dinner or frankly anything else meant being among French speakers. While some also spoke English well enough to understand me, that wasn't always the case. I'm horrible with languages, and French is one of my worst. At least in this case the worst that came of it was that I declined the sugar I very much wanted for my coffee.

These people were Jews from, as a Judean would have seen it, all over the world. The list of locations provided here literally denotes a whole range of nationalities from the east, north, west, and south of Jerusalem, a way of evoking that which we sometimes metaphorically call "the four corners" of the world. Before these followers of Jesus get sent out into the world, the world has come to them. And because of this outburst of the Holy Spirit, the world at the windows is able to hear good news, each in their own language.

This is not always a thing the church or the world has taken to heart. The Western world in particular has a particular imperial history of forcing their own languages upon those peoples whom they encounter, or frequently whom they conquer. On the North American frontier, those seeking to drive out or subjugate the Native peoples made a very specific and fixed point of pushing to eradicate the languages those so-called "savages" spoke. An Indian, in the vernacular of the time, could only be tolerated if every trace of "Indian-ness" was driven out of them, and it was presumed that one of the surest ways to do so was to take away their language, especially in the "Indian" schools that appeared on those frontiers. (I first learned of these schools while down in Lawrence, KS, where one such school was eventually changed into the current Haskell Indian Nations University, there were two such schools in Illinois in the late 19th century). The students at such schools were forbidden to speak their own language, being forced to speak English, or possibly French in Canadian schools. This, of course, was in addition to numerous other oppressions visited upon them, quite literally as a means of separating them from their families and their peoples for good.

What happens in today's scripture is the complete and total opposite of that act of emotional violence. Those seekers who came to Jerusalem, thanks to the working of the Holy Spirit, were welcomed in their own languages. They weren't stripped of who they were, weren't denied their own humanity and worth, in order to hear the gospel. One could even say that this Holy Spirit outbreak was for these listeners, the ones who heard the commotion of that sound like a violent wind and wondered what was going on, as much as it was for these followers of Jesus, or maybe even more so.

We don't really know how it worked from here forward, as the believers (including possibly those who became believers on this day) were scattered from Jerusalem into, well, all the world. There were certainly going to be language barriers to be faced as these followers of Christ spread further and further out from Judea. But these followers knew from experience that the Holy Spirit would find a way for them to communicate with those waiting to hear the gospel.

Do we actually believe that? It can be a scary thing to find ourselves in a world where, more and more, it seems like most folks out there aren't speaking our "language," whether literally or more figuratively. While Pentecost can mean an awful lot of different things in the life of the church, sometimes it can be hard to remember that the Holy Spirit has experience with helping Christ's followers find the right language to speak, if we will listen and submit to that work. It might be disruptive, and it might take us out of our comfort zones, but it has been done, and it can be done.

At the same time, the Holy Spirit also has that experience of preparing those who listen, those who seek to hear, those who call upon the name of the Lord, to be able to hear that word in their own language and to be ready to respond.

For all the languages, and the Spirit's ability to speak them, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #291, Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness; #280, Come, O Spirit, Dwell Among Us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

acts 2

we couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone in the city

this great big city by itself 

but now

with so many visitors 

from so many nations 

speaking so many languages 

we truly couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone

when we tried to speak the local language 

nobody could understand us either

we would try to find food 

or a shelter 

and people would look at us 

like we were aliens

which I guess we were to them

but still

we kept getting lost

and were alone and hungry

and we didn’t know how to find the festival 

even with all the crowds 

or maybe because of them 

there was some commotion 

in a building 

maybe a house

off to one side

a lot of voices

many people crowded around 

we came closer

there were people speaking 

a lot of different languages 

but amazingly 

as clear as could be 

we heard a voice speaking our language 

we stood gaping

at this new word we could hear and 

understand

then

one of them stepped forward to speak 

to say they weren’t drunk at 9 a.m.

and then to quote a prophet 

and to talk about 

a Spirit being poured out on everybody

and then to talk more about someone 

named Jesus

others came through the crowd 

to help us 

one of them asked us 

not in our language 

if we needed anything 

I said 

as best as I could in their language 

we were hungry 

and somehow she understood 

and took us in

and gave us food to eat 

so we were fed twice that morning 

we knew then

that we would not be returning to 

our homeland alone

even if 

we would be traveling 

by ourselves

Sermon: The Spirit Poured Out

First Presbyterian Church

June 8, 2025, Pentecost C

Acts 2:1-21

 

The Spirit Poured Out

 

 

Here we are again, at one of those passages of scripture that we may not hear very often, but we do hear it at least once every year. It's the kind of scripture reading that we recognize almost immediately upon hearing, but that, if we're honest with ourselves, we don't really know all that well.

We know the basic beats of the story:

ü All of Jesus's followers, gathered in a room, waiting for...who knows?

ü The sound of a great wind, "divided tongues as of fire", suddenly speaking languages they'd never learned or known before;

ü The great crowd, in Jerusalem but from everywhere (a detailed list follows, representing the entire known world); that crowd hearing all the commotion and wondering what was going on up there;

ü Some terminally clever oaf in the crowd cracking wise about their being drunk;

ü Peter responding that it's only nine o'clock in the morning, and that nobody's drunk, but here's what's happening; and then quoting some spooky stuff from the prophet Joel, launching into a sermon from there (that we only get part of in today's reading).

Sometimes those familiar phrases, though, can get a little bit dull from repetition, so familiar that we don't really hear them. We might just slip into the thought, "oh, yeah, the Pentecost story" and go on autopilot, not really hearing.

For example: what does it suggest when Peter, following Joel 2:28-32 pretty directly, quotes God as saying "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh"? Does that strike up any particular image in your mind? Or has it become so familiar that it doesn't really strike up anything? 

Sometimes when I find myself in this rut I turn to the Cotton Patch Gospel, the work of biblical scholar Clarence Jordan, who not only translated much of the New Testament but created a version set in the Georgia of his day, namely the late 1950s. Jerusalem became Atlanta, the baby Jesus was born in Gainesville (Georgia, not Florida), and so forth. Being born and raised in Georgia, this naturally got my attention. Jordan's colorful and evocative language can be at times illuminating. It's not a substitute for a more straightforward translation, but it can be an interesting supplement at times.

And for this passage, Clarence Jordan offers "I will share my spirit with all mankind." OK, there's the dated language "mankind," as if women weren't included, but the main verb is "share." It's an effective enough verb, to be sure, and it's definitely accurate enough in this context, but for those who respond to imagery and vividness of language, it perhaps doesn't offer as much help. 

Another, much more recent reading of the scriptures in a different cultural context is First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament, published only four years ago. This work, produced by a council of Native religious leaders and teachers and scholars, sought to perform a task not unlike Jordan's Cotton Patch Gospel, but not exactly the same; the setting is not changed, but the names of places and persons are given in a Native idiom and the style of the account is rendered as much as possible in the style of a storyteller in the oral tradition of the many nations and tribes of North America. 

In this reading, after the "sound of a great windstorm" and "flames of fire" have come and the crowd is hearing in their many languages, Peter's reading of Joel is rendered as "'In the last days,' says Creator, 'I will rain down my Spirit upon all human beings...'."

Now there's something. 

The thing about something being poured out is that if you're not directly under whatever is being poured from, you might well miss it. Rain, on the other hand, is not so easy to escape. If you're outside when it starts to rain, you get wet. There's no sidestepping the rain or jumping out of the way of it. You get wet. 

Maybe this helps drive home the fact of the Spirit being poured out on everyone. No one is left out. Everyone gets wet. 

This doesn't go down well for a lot of people. It's been true in every age and it's most definitely true now; too much of the church wants this pouring out of the Spirit to be for just us, or maybe more specifically not them. We're the "special" ones, they insist; we're God's chosen, God's favorites. Not those people who don't look like us, who don't sound like us, who don't flatter us or cozy up to us or make us feel important. Not them. The Spirit doesn't pour down on them. That's how an awful lot of people want it to be.

But when we think of the Spirit raining down? As the old verse says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust. It doesn't miss anybody. There's no getting left out, there's no Great Replacement anything, there's no "for me but not for thee," none of that. The Spirit rains down on everyone, whether we like it or not. Everybody gets wet.

Does everybody respond to the Spirit the same way? No, they don't. Think again about the rain; your first impulse is to seek shelter, yes? Or perhaps pull out an umbrella? For some people, the Spirit is a disruption, maybe even a threat. You never know what's going to happen when the Holy Spirit gets loose. Life might get uncomfortable. We might be led places we're not comfortable going. Best get out of the rain before you get too wet. But then there are those lovely souls who, when the rain comes down, will take it all in and maybe skip about and kick around a few puddles when they form. The Spirit truly soaks them with all that it is.

This is one rainstorm from which we don't need to take shelter. The Holy Spirit, raining down on all humanity? In the dried-up wilderness that is increasingly the world in which we live, that raining down is nothing less than life itself. The church, big or small, local or global, dare not try to shelter against this rain, not if we want to live up to the label "Christian," or (even better) terms like "Christlike," or "follower of Christ." 

One more thing: the Holy Spirit didn't go away after Pentecost. It keeps raining all through the book of Acts (we've taken in a couple of such passages back in the month of May). Even more, that same Spirit is still raining down on all human beings. The Holy Spirit - third person of the Trinity, remember; in other words, God - continues to rain down upon humanity, seeking to wash us and renew us and fill us with what we need to do Christlike things in a decidedly non-Christlike world.

This is one rain from which you don't want to seek shelter or pop up an umbrella.

It's time to let it rain. 

It's time to get wet.

For the raining down of the Holy Spirit, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God; #285, Like the Murmur of the Dove's Song

 

 

References:

 

Clarence Jordan's Cotton Patch Gospel, the Complete Collection. Macon: Smith & Helwys Publishing, 2012.

 

First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021. 

Sermon: Purposeful Chaos

First Presbyterian Church

May 19, 2024, Pentecost B

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-27

 

Purposeful Chaos

 

 

It’s a scene out of a Hollywood special-effects dream. A great rushing wind blowing through the room. “Tongues of fire.” A glut of languages – a sound of chaos. Really, the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark has nothing on this.

The Pentecost story is a strange one, in that on one hand its regular return in our liturgy almost guarantees that it suffers from the extreme familiarity that comes with such repetition, the kind that can cause us to tune out unconsciously; on the other hand, it’s rather a strange story, and one that has gained some uncomfortable associations for us mainline types, and therefore we tend to shy away from it. In short, it is both extremely familiar and extremely unfamiliar at the same time. 

Perhaps we can break through both of those roadblocks by breaking the story down a bit, and maybe clear away some of the misconceptions and misunderstandings that have been attached to Pentecost, starting perhaps with those two vivid images from the first four verses; wind and fire.

First of all, these are not literal statements. What came from heaven was “a sound ... like the howling of a fierce wind,” and “what seemed to be individual flames of fire.” In other words, these are examples of that favorite literary device, the simile.

But similes matter. When a biblical author like Luke invokes things like wind or fire, even in this comparison fashion, it is no accident. These images evoke a long history of God’s interaction with the people of Israel.

Think, for example, of the burning bush that set Moses on his path to the Exodus; engulfed in fire, yet not consumed. Think of the pillar of fire proceeding by night before the people of Israel during that Exodus. Think of the fire that consumed Elijah’s thoroughly soaked altar and the altars of the Ba’al prophets in that contest on Mount Carmel.

Think of the strong wind that drove back the Red Sea, so that the people of Israel might cross ahead of the Egyptian army. Think of the whirlwind out of which God spoke to Job. Think of the very breath breathed into humanity at creation. And think of those dry bones.

The Hebrew word ru’ah has a complex of meanings; it can refer to breath, to the wind, or to spirit. When Ezekiel is commanded to prophesy to the winds, to the breath, to breathe life into the lifeless, this whole complex is evoked. Similarly the Greek word pneuma carries both “breath” and “spirit” in its complex of meanings. We see this kind of association played up in hymns like the old hymn “Holy Spirit, breathe on me.”

So is the Spirit a wind, or a fire? No, but something about wind or fire gives us a picture, an idea of how the Spirit is, or how it moves or acts. It’s a useful simile or metaphor, but we should do our best to avoid getting too caught up in the metaphor and confusing it with fact or literal description. In fact, we should probably just steer clear of anything that goads us into thinking we’ve got it down, that we have any kind of firm grasp on the nature and substance of anything about God, Holy Spirit included.

Ezekiel’s vision points us toward another misconception that can be cleared up; this Pentecost story should not be construed as the first-ever appearance of the Holy Spirit in the history of God in humanity. It isn’t “new”; it has been, from the beginning, with God, as also is true of God the Son. What happens here is not a debut, but closer to an unleashing. The Holy Spirit is loose, not bound by any physical form or invocation. Nor, for that matter, is it bound by the rules and regulations of the Temple, or the Torah, or by any decree or proclamation of the nascent church itself.  The Spirit doesn’t follow your script; if anything it’s much more likely to rewrite it.

Something else we might want to think about is what happens in verse 13. The Spirit has driven the disciples out to proclaim, in these languages heretofore unknown to them, but that just happen to be the languages spoken by the crowds who are in Jerusalem for this particular festival (more on that in a moment). These crowds are portrayed by Luke as being from some of the most remote regions known to the people of Jerusalem and basically every direction one could go from Jerusalem – our curious metaphor about “the four corners of the earth” is the effect of the varied regions Luke describes. While they are puzzling over the fact that these people – who didn’t exactly look like linguistic scholars to anybody – were somehow speaking to them, each hearing exactly their own language (and not in the broken fashion of a non-native speaker either), the naysayers make their presence known. While people are wondering just what’s going on, the catcalls begin. “They are filled with new wine.” Go home, apostles, you’re drunk.

Now this just doesn’t make sense. Personally I’m not a wine-drinker, but I’ve never observed anyone for whom drinking wine was a means of speaking a language new to them. I’ve seen plenty of people who had trouble speaking their own language after a few glasses, but not the opposite. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t really the point. In the face of something inexplicable, beyond any kind of miraculous that they had seen before, and maybe a little threatening, there were those who resorted to belittling, meanness, and spite.

It is not the work of the Holy Spirit to make you more popular. It is not the work of the Holy Spirit to make you respectable, or socially esteemed. It is not the Holy Spirit’s task to make your life easier. To the degree that your life is shaped and moved and motivated by the working of the Holy Spirit within you, there’s a real strong chance your life will sometimes include others deriding you, ridiculing you, belittling you, and even calling you a "freak" or a “heathen” or something similar. And there’s even a real good chance those people belittling or deriding you will be the “good church people.” Go home, 'followers of Christ, you’re drunk'. In the end, these disciples would find their lives being required of them, once they were moved by the work of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit wasn’t there to make their lives easier, not by a long shot.

So, what is the Holy Spirit about? What is it up to?

There are huge crowds in Jerusalem, from all those compass points of the earth. Many if not most of them are Jews, living abroad – expatriates, if you will, returned for the Festival of Weeks, an event on the Jewish calendar timed to occur fifty days after Passover – hence, Greek-speakers called the festival “Pentecost.” (Today the equivalent Jewish feast is called “Shauvot.”)

These visitors would have most likely known nothing of the events that had formed this local group of Christ-followers – the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, not to mention the ascended Christ. Their reason for being in Jerusalem was about Shauvot, marking the event of the reading of the Torah to the people of Israel. Jesus? Who was he, and why would they care?

The Holy Spirit moved among the Christ-followers, placing languages on their lips and on their tongues specifically to reach out to these souls, to proclaim to these people from all over the earth – children of God, all of them – the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And this means that all of these people are welcome, male or female, slave or free, young or old, to be drenched in the Spirit in ways unimaginable before.

The Spirit is not the property of prophets or kings, scribes or priests or elders. The unleashed Spirit will work through anyone to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God come near. Because this band of Christ-followers waited in prayer (remember last week's reading), they were ready to be messengers of Christ, even in languages they had never known before.

This was no random chaotic event. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost was at work to proclaim gospel to the nations. Not only the miracle of the Christ-followers speaking languages they didn’t know, but the miracle of all those in the crowd hearing the message, each one in his or her own tongue, was all about spreading the Word. Here was a step on the way to fulfilling the promise that Jesus had made back in 1:8, about being witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 

A quick interjection from the Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, reminds us that not all of the Spirit's work is quite so brash or dramatic. Indeed, the Spirit is at work within us and among us constantly; the Spirit "intercedes for us with wordless groans" as the NIV in your pews puts it, or "unexpressed groans" as found in the CEB. Here is one case where the New Revised Standard Version, where the Spirit intercedes with "sighs too deep for words", gets it so much better.) The Holy Spirit is an agent of purposeful chaos, yes, but also an agent of relief when needed.

Back to the disciples. In the days to come they would be pulling their resources together, supporting one another and lifting one another up. Peter and John would be confronted by the sight of the paralyzed man in the Temple, and responding to the moving of the Spirit, would heal that man and thus be brought to take a stand before the Temple authorities. Before long the followers of Christ would be scattered throughout the region, and the Word would be truly proclaimed “in all Judea and Samaria,” and the Word would find the Spirit moving hearts to hear and receive it, not only of Jews but also of Gentiles eventually. For the moment it may have sounded like chaos, but the Holy Spirit was working for a purpose, and will always be working towards that purpose.

For the purposeful chaos of the Holy Spirit, Thanks be to God. Amen.  

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #292, As the Wind Song; #291, Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness

Sermon: All the Languages

First Presbyterian Church

May 28, 2023, Pentecost A

Numbers 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

 

All the Languages

 

 

One of the things that sometimes needs to be set straight about Pentecost is that no, this is not the first time the Holy Spirit is invoked in scripture. Today's first reading provides one such counterexample, as a stressed-out Moses pleads for help and God invokes that Spirit to be bestowed upon seventy elders of the people of Israel so that they might share some of the burden of leadership. That Spirit's appearance is made manifest in an outburst of frenetic prophesying, one that spills over to include two men back in the camp, not numbered among those seventy. Joshua (in a typical fit of church leadership) wants to have those two men silenced and that unexpected outburst of Holy Spirit squelched, but Moses (in a typical fit of pastoral weariness) stuffs that idea, crying out that he wished everyone could prophesy. It's not how we typically expect to see the Spirit play out, to be sure, especially since this prophetic outburst is only a one-time thing, but it still serves to remind us that the Holy Spirit is not a new thing as the disciples show up for this Pentecost morning.

While the Holy Spirit isn't new in this case, there are certainly some distinctive features of this particular Spirit-event that are worth noting on this one day of the liturgical year when the Spirit comes to the forefront. In last week's sermon I noted how the Ascension of Jesus got all of four words in the ancient creeds, and in one case the Holy Spirit doesn't do a lot better. The Apostles' Creed, one of the oldest statements of faith in Christendom, has this to say on the subject: 

 

I believe in the Holy Ghost...

 

That's it. Thankfully the Nicene Creed does a bit better, giving a whole paragraph to the subject. The church has some history of not really paying attention to this particular member of the Trinity, perhaps to its own harm; it is the Spirit most of all that is the most direct participant in the day-to-day life of the follower of Christ, and it is this Pentecost in-breaking of the Spirit that marks the ongoing truth of this presence and participation.

Since we last heard from this group, we know that they have indeed remained in Jerusalem as they were instructed. Acts also mentions in an interesting aside that they elected one of their number to replace Judas, the traitor against Jesus whose grisly death is reported in an aside. And they have waited, probably wondering what exactly they were waiting for. Now they're about to find out.

The description itself lingers: "a sound like the rush of a violent wind"; "divided tongues, as of fire"; and then, the sound of all the languages.

Let's be clear; this group of followers is speaking languages they don't know, but that other peoples outside of Judea or Palestine do speak. Ecstatic utterances in tongues that require interpretation (what we commonly call "speaking in tongues") come later in Acts; this event is one of miraculous speech and hearing.

Those tongues matter because just outside their windows there is a crowd of folks gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of the harvest that was Pentecost in the Jewish tradition, a group ripe to hear something good each in their own language.

Have you had that experience of being in a crowd with people speaking any language but your own? The particular challenge of this was pressed home for me many years ago when I was in Quebec City for a conference back in my academic days. The conference itself was held in English but going out for dinner or frankly anything else meant being among French speakers. While some also spoke English well enough to understand me, that wasn't always the case. I'm horrible with languages, and French is one of my worst. At least in this case the worst that came to me was that I declined the sugar I very much wanted for my coffee. 

These people were Jews from, as a Judean would have seen it, all over the world. The list of locations provided here literally denotes a whole range of nationalities from the east, north, west, and south of Jerusalem, a way of evoking that which we sometimes metaphorically call "the four corners" of the world. Before these followers of Jesus get sent out into the world, the world has come to them. And because of this outburst of the Holy Spirit, the world at the windows is able to hear good news, each in their own language.

This is not always a thing the church or the world has taken to heart. The Western world in particular has a particular imperial history of forcing their own languages upon those peoples whom they encounter, or frequently whom they conquer. On the North American frontier, those seeking to drive out or subjugate the Native peoples made a very specific and fixed point of pushing to  eradicate the languages those so-called "savages" spoke. An Indian, in the vernacular of the time, could only be tolerated if every trace of "Indian-ness" was driven out of them, and it was presumed that one of the surest ways to do so was to take away their language, especially in the "Indian" schools that appeared on those frontiers (one of which was just up the way in Lawrence, since changed into Haskell Indian Nations University). The students at such schools were forbidden to speak their own language, being forced to speak English, or possibly French in Canadian schools. This, of course, was in addition to numerous other oppressions visited upon them, quite literally as a means of separating them from their families and their peoples for good.

What happens in today's scripture is the complete and total opposite of that act of emotional violence. Those seekers who came to Jerusalem, thanks to the working of the Holy Spirit, were welcomed in their own languages. They weren't stripped of who they were, weren't denied their own humanity and worth, in order to hear the gospel. One could even say that this Holy Spirit outbreak was for these listeners, the ones who heard the commotion of that sound like a violent wind and wondered what was going on, as much as it was for these followers of Jesus, or maybe even more so. 

We don't really know how it worked from here forward, as the believers (including possibly those who became believers on this day) were scattered from Jerusalem into, well, all the world. There were certainly going to be language barriers to be faced as these followers of Christ spread further and further out from Judea. But these followers knew from experience that the Holy Spirit would find a way for them to communicate with those waiting to hear the gospel. 

Do we have that same confidence? Does the church today, which can struggle with getting a worship service posted onto Facebook or YouTube, have the confidence to find a way into a world of Instagram or TikTok or whatever social media outlet comes next, outlets where exactly the folks who don't darken the doors of the church find a kind of media "home"?

On the flip side, it can be a scary thing to find ourselves in a world where, more and more, it seems like most folks out there aren't speaking our "language," whether literally or more figuratively. While Pentecost can mean an awful lot of different things in the life of the church, sometimes it can be hard to remember that the Holy Spirit has experience with helping Christ's followers find the right language to speak, if we will listen and submit to that work. It might be disruptive, and it might take us out of our comfort zones, but it has been done, and it can be done. 

At the same time, the Holy Spirit also has that experience of preparing those who listen, those who seek to hear, those who call upon the name of the Lord, to be able to hear that word in their own language and to be ready to respond. 

For all the languages, and the Spirit's ability to speak them, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #292, As the Wind Song; #66, Every Time I Feel the Spirit

 

Dear Pastor: Music is not the Holy Spirit

So, dear pastor, have any of these things ever happened to you?

*In order to make worship more "exciting," you, or some members of your governing body, or perhaps some fringe member, or an advertisement that comes in your mail suggests switching the style of worship in your church to something more "contemporary." It's hard to find good organists, after all, and nobody sings those fusty old hymns anymore.

*Your organist/choir director is seeking to augment the choir with some professional soloists, possibly from the local opera company or university school of music or conservatory. With such singers hired, naturally (in addition to the choir's anthem each week) those soloists are going to need to sing, well, a solo, to help justify the expense. Also, the extra singers are effective and this means that the choir becomes a main attraction, which means possibly more than one choral anthem per service. When this causes the service to get long and unwieldy, the obvious response is to drop one of the congregational hymns or songs.

*So the hymn sings are kind of fun on occasion, but it seems like those have to happen more and more often to keep the congregation's interest, even though inevitably those hymn sings become trapped in the same little rotation of eight to ten hymns, every time. (Not to mention, you end up preaching less and less.)

If you're the type who actually reads this blog, you probably observed Pentecost in some way during your service this Sunday morning. Whether through visual representations of the "tongues, like fire" that marked the Acts account, or the evocation of multiple languages in that reading, or any number of hymns or anthems that might work for the day (even if you went all crazy and preached on the alternate reading from Ezekiel -- the "dry bones" vision -- like some crazy pastor around here), in some way or another the Holy Spirit was a prominent focus or subject of the service. That's quite natural for the one day on the liturgical calendar that more or less focuses pastors who would much rather avoid the subject of the Holy Spirit to avoid avoiding the subject.

To a large degree that will be it for formal acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit as a theme of worship. That doesn't mean, however, that the Spirit isn't of concern throughout the rest of the church's week-to-week life, even if the Spirit isn't acknowledged by name.

We are seeking the Spirit when we wonder what we need to do, for example, to "get people excited" about church, or to "get more young people" (who will, if we're honest, turn around and act and think exactly like the old people, so that everybody will get along) in the church, or any number of other convoluted ways we talk about wishing things were different or somehow better in our church. At root, we're seeking some kind of action of the Holy Spirit in the life of our congregation.

Except, really, we're not. Or only limitedly so.

We want the Spirit to do something safe. We want something predictable that will look good and have obvious tangible impact -- something that shows up in counting statistics, preferably. And that's not how the Spirit operates.

This explains, I think, why churches are so often prone to use music as a substitute or proxy for a genuine in-breaking experience of the Holy Spirit.

Music is not tame or neutral, as was hopefully made clear in the previous entry here. It inevitably affects any words to which it is joined, any audience to which it is played, any event in which it is introduced. And it is true enough that you don't necessarily know absolutely for sure what that effect is going to be, or at least not for every person involved (different styles of music will cause different people to respond differently and all that).

You don't know for sure, but you do have a pretty good idea, or at least an expectation, what that result will be.

For one thing, in the cases noted at the beginning of this entry, you've probably already got some feedback about the use of "praise & worship" music (still, no one has ever explained to me how those two things got separated) or a professionalized choir or hymn repertory, whether you asked for that feedback or not.

Some of what you can know is more or less baked into the style of music in question; by about the third contemporary worship song, at the latest, some of the congregation will be lifting holy hands or something. That's just how that goes. After the professionalized choir essays a movement of a Mozart mass, their efforts will be rewarded with judicious, tasteful, proper applause. Congregants will get all nostalgic and weepy when they've sung "Amazing Grace" at the thirteenth straight hymn sing. We know these things.

In short, music (yes, including congregational singing) is good at producing all the feels, as some of my seminary classmates would say, and so it becomes a quick and safe way of generating a series of largely emotional (maybe sometimes intellectual) reactions that can be passed off as "the moving of the Spirit" in the congregation.

It's not.

Music isn't neutral, remember; it really does have a first and foremost tendency to call attention to itself before anything else. It will have its affect; it will produce joy or sadness or rage or melancholy or any number of other responses if deployed without regard for that affective quality that is, frankly, a lot of the pleasure in most of the music that even has a chance of entering most churches (the likes of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez etc. have mostly not entered the church's musical repertoire).

Music can, when chosen and prepared with diligence and prayerful insight, be a vehicle through which the Spirit can move. It can and has happened, sometimes even working through those affective qualities that can otherwise make music more distraction than witness. The mere presentation of music in worship, however, is no guarantee of the Spirit's action in worship. People may well be moved, yes, but not necessarily by anything other than well-done music. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but by no means is it the main thing as far as worship is concerned.

Given that, about the best you can do, dear pastor, is choose what is yours to choose with the same mind and theological training you use to prepare your sermon; work with your musicians to prepare and present that music with the most skill and understanding possible; and to see that song of the people as an intrinsic part of the gathering of the congregation, the proclamation of and response to the Word, and the sending of the people out to be the body of Christ in the world. In other words, treat the hymns as if they are important parts of worship.

They are, right?

None of the musical types represented here guarantee that the Holy Spirit will show up and do what you want it to do. None of them. Okay?

Sermon: The World At Our Window

Grace Presbyterian Church

May 15, 2016, Pentecost C

Acts 2:1-21

The World At Our Window

According to its website, the University of Florida hosts around six thousand students a year, between its undergraduate and graduate programs, who come to the university from countries other than the United States. That’s not uncommon for a university of UF’s size; Ohio State University has over seven thousand international students among its nearly sixty thousand total enrollment. Even a smaller university – like the University of Kansas, my former employer – hosts nearly 2400 international students among its total enrollment of a little over 24,000. Even in my own music history classes I routinely counted students from East Asia – Japan, Korea, and China in particular – as well as the Caribbean, South America, and Eastern Europe.

Of course, those totals are only of students. The international numbers only get larger when one begins to include faculty and staff from other nations – which, at a large university like UF, is going to be substantial – but a number of you know that far better than I do, from personal experience.

A city like Gainesville (or other such university towns like Columbus or Lawrence) is not far distant from the scene depicted in today’s very familiar reading from the book of Acts. It’s a part of the story that is significant as part of the plot, but easy to overlook in all the welter of strange and unpredictable action depicted in it, the familiar part to us.

Much of the story is familiar; the apostles gathered in the upper room in prayer; the sound like a rushing wind, and the strange and disruptive appearance of those things like tongues of fire; the sound of languages they didn’t know; the disciples on the balcony, with the gospel going out in may languages…

But then we might overlook what Luke tells us in verses 7-11. First of all, the nature of the language miracle is made clear; the languages being spoken by the disciples in verse 4 are revealed to be the native languages of the crowd outside, in the city of Jersualem. That multi-national (maybe today we’d say multicultural?) crowd might first have been drawn to the disciples’ building by that sound of rushing wind and what looked like “divided tongues, as of fire” but what got them to stay and listen was the gospel, being proclaimed to each in her or his own language.

And about that crowd… .

There’s something unusual about that list Luke gives us in verses 9-11; not all the references are contemporary – some of them are names of peoples who had lived in regions to the north, east, west, and south of Jerusalem many centuries past, rather than using contemporary terms for those peoples. In both its geographical and chronological diversity, Luke is cluing his readers in on a key point; the world was there, from the four corners of the earth, outside the disciples’ window, waiting for a good word.

Intellectually we know this. Sometimes, though, we don’t do a very good job of remembering this. For example; we do get a good bit of bewailing, in American Christian circles, of how “the church is dying.” If you’re speaking of a specific individual church, or of a denomination, you may not be completely out of line, although fretting about dying seems odd for a church with its very origins in resurrection, as my friend Rev. Ginna Bairby points out in a recent issue of Presbyterians Today. But speaking of the church as dying is shortsighted and maybe a little racist, given that the church continues to grow in places like South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia. The church is there, too, you know.

But in this world and in this town, there is a world outside our window. Persons from many different countries, persons from many different parts of the United States, and persons from every social strata imaginable. Persons steeped in privilege, persons shackled in grinding poverty. And they are waiting for a gospel from us.

The church in this country has gotten pretty good at giving a bad word. The media is always quick to let us know of a church or group of Christians who have been quite insistent about pronouncing a bad word; in the history of Christianity in the US one can find examples of the church, or substantial parts of it, pronouncing a bad word, a word of hatred and exclusion, against: blacks, Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Germans again, Russians and other Eastern Europeans, Arabs, Muslims (the two aren’t synonymous, you know), Mexicans, gays, and most lately trans persons, who seem to be the designated objects of hatred at the moment. The church has a pretty long history of pronouncing a bad word, but it seems like it’s been a long while since the world out there has heard a good word, a real gospel, from us. And the world out there includes the world at our window.

Divided tongues of fire or not, the Spirit wants to speak through us as the Spirit did through those disciples. The Spirit even wants us to prophesy – not make lame predictions about the end times, but to tell the truth, to see the world around us and speak truth to it, to speak God’s good news, to speak gospel. Peter doesn’t go out on the balcony and make up something new; he first turns to the prophet Joel, and then interprets Joel’s words through the life of Jesus, bringing in some other sources from the scripture he knew along the way. He pronounces gospel, even if at times it’s difficult.

And that’s what we’re called to do. We are charged by Jesus, and moved and enabled by the Holy Spirit, to speak gospel to the world at our window.

The Spirit really isn’t random; notice that in this story from Acts the Holy Spirit incites the disciples at the moment when there’s a large, diverse audience waiting to hear that good word. Well, that audience is out there, outside our window, so to speak. You’d best believe the Holy Spirit is inciting us to bear that good word. The Spirit may sound like an unusual hymn in which we learn to hear from the church all around the world – all around us – or it may sound like a life unlike any we could imagine, unlike ours, in which we learn to see the Spirit moving among us. But we are called and charged to speak gospel.

Will we follow? Will we listen to the Spirit when it doesn’t sound like what we’ve been accustomed to hearing? Can we speak gospel, no matter the language?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns, from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal

#289                  On Pentecost They Gathered

#287                  Gracious Spirit, Heed Our Pleading

#292                  As the Wind Song
#853                  We Are Marching In the Light of God

Credit: agnusday.org. I'm with you, kid...