Interpretive Lens for Pentecost

Why Pentecost? We know what happened at Pentecost--the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, filled the house where the disciples were, and rested upon them like tongues of fire, giving them the ability to speak in other languages. That's the story of Acts 2, which we read this Sunday. That's what. But the harder question is why. Why does it matter? Why is the story significant?

On the surface, we can see that it happened so that the good news of Jesus Christ could be shared across ethnic, linguistic barriers. From this moment, throughout the Acts of the Apostles, the gospel spreads from Jerusalem to the ends of the known earth. It is passed on from Jews to Samaritans to non-Jewish proselytes and on to Gentiles. But surely Pentecost is more than that.

There are other gifts of the Spirit, of course. Peter is recorded as performing miracles similar to those that Jesus performed--healing the sick, raising the dead. Sometimes the Spirit gives them visions. Certainly it gives them boldness. Paul goes on to write about the gifts of the Spirit as central to the work of the church. But none of those is highlighted in the Pentecost moment, except, perhaps, the wisdom and prophecy he reveals in his Spirit-led address to the crowd.

This week, our Sunday school class looked at the Acts 2 reading in detail, and we noticed that Peter himself gives us an important interpretation of Pentecost that is usually missed by most preachers, including me. How does Peter understand this event? "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.'" For Peter, the coming of the Holy Spirit is the inauguration of the last days, and he turns to Joel's vision of portents and blood and fire and smoky mist to describe them.

I don't often think of Pentecost as an apocalyptic moment. I prefer to think of the Spirit's linguistic gift as a unifying force that enables all peoples to be united in the one faith. But isn't that an apocalyptic vision?

This year, we will read Genesis 11 as our first lesson and hear the strange story of the Tower of Babel. I plan to write more about Babel in another blog post this week, but the etiological story of the development of languages speaks to an ancient (even prehistoric) confusion of our identity that Pentecost unscrambles. For Peter, the gift of the Spirit was a clear sign that God was reversing the disorder that had developed since the Fall. And that kind of reordering represents a change so huge that it cannot be received except as threatening--as a day when "the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day."

There are many reasons to celebrate on Pentecost. It's the "birthday of the church." It's a fun day to wear red and, sometimes, to pose for a parish photo. But it's also a day to celebrate the beginning of the end--the great reordering of the world that draws all people together. That's threatening to those of us who like things the way they are--those who benefit from the marginalization of some and the preferential treatment of others. Pentecost is God's reversal of that on God's own terms. I wonder how often that truth is celebrated on Pentecost.