Our scripture reading today is the story of Pentecost in the book of Acts. [Invite the congregation, as they listen to and envision this Pentecost scene, to rub their hands together to approximate the sound of the rush of wind in the story.]
Let’s listen together for what the Spirit is saying to the church in Acts 2:1–21:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they 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 people 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, “Fellow Jews 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.”
The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Did you hear it just now—a hint of that rush of wind the author of Luke and Acts described?
Did you feel the heat between your hands—even just a little bit—and imagine those tongues as of fire resting upon the people?
So overwhelming is the experience of Pentecost that the writer struggles even to describe it, offering mixed metaphors that still fall flat in most of our liturgical celebrations of this day.
Maybe turning to another writer for a moment will help us get a better picture of the kind of divine power on display here. “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” Annie Dillard asks pointedly and continues:
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of 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 someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (1)
In this story from Acts, the Spirit is not subtle. As New Testament scholar Margaret Aymer puts it, “The Holy Spirit proves not to be a quiet, heavenly dove but, rather, a violent force that blows the church into being.” (2)
Do we have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? I suspect few of us come to church on Sundays expecting all heaven to break loose as described here. Maybe we tend to favor decency and order—in fact, we have a book devoted to it almost as thick as the Bible itself—and we have built up a cultural resistance to being surprised by an in-breaking of the Holy Spirit.
Referring to mainline churches like us, Dillard writes:
“The higher Christian churches—where, if anywhere, I belong—come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.” (3)
One thing is for sure: Whether we crave a larger-than-life assurance of God’s presence, or are repelled by or skeptical of the very idea, we cannot manufacture such a powerful encounter with the divine.
When I worked as a camp counselor for two summers during college, the story of how one church group tried to do exactly that became an apocryphal legend. As camp stories tend to do, the tale evolved over time depending on who told it, but this is how I remember it.
When church retreat leaders began to line the winding gravel road from the pavilion to the waterfront with luminaries, the camp director realized it would be no ordinary vesper service. Further confirmation arrived when elders from the church marched behind worshipers, blasting Gregorian chants from a boombox as they made their solemn procession down to the lakeside.
The director suspected the best was still yet to come because that afternoon, he had fielded an odd question from the planning committee: “Does Jesus have to wear a life preserver?” Having explained that, unless the real Jesus had actually come back to walk on water once again, he would be well advised to put on that vest, he waited for the high point of the service as the chanting faded.
Then, just as the sun set the sky ablaze with watercolor hues before retiring behind the hills and leaving the congregation enveloped in darkness, the sound of a motorboat pierced the silence! Their “Jesus” arrived on waterskis, illuminated by a spotlight and looking like a linebacker with his bright, white robe fitting snugly over his life preserver.
The people were astonished. Some gaped on in stunned silence while others shouted with joy and still others laughed. Sensitive children who had managed to weather all the chanting with only occasional whimpers finally shed tears of terror while others erupted into applause. For better or for worse, this encounter had a dramatic effect!
So, too, did the coming of the promised Spirit at Pentecost when “all were amazed and perplexed;” however, the unprecedented encounter with the divine at Pentecost served to fulfill prophecy and to create a community out of chaos. It was neither theatrics nor solely a disruptive in-breaking of divine power, but was, and is, also a broadening of expectations about whom God empowers and includes in the household of God.
The Jewish Jesus followers who gathered in a Jerusalem home on the feast day of Shavuot, 50 days after Passover, represented a diverse and largely immigrant Judaism that was multicultural and multilingual. No one seemed to expect this wild outpouring of the Spirit, even despite the prologue of Jesus’ ascension and promise to send the Holy Spirit to give them power to be “[Jesus’] witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:6; cf. Acts 1:1–12; Luke 24:50–53). Who could blame them?
Just seven weeks prior, the powers of the Roman empire thought they had extinguished by crucifixion Jesus’ power to kindle the fires of religious or cultural uprising. We can
imagine that as his followers gathered on the day of Pentecost, they were still processing their shock and grief and were perplexed by what the sending of the Spirit would look like or would mean for them.
And when the Spirit does descend, so wholly other is the experience, that when Peter steps forward to interpret the event, he reaches not for the cozy words that Jesus shared with his disciples in an upper room when he promised the Spirit would accompany them as another advocate after he was no longer physically with them (although that is another text frequently read on this day when we recount the Pentecost narrative). Instead, Peter grasps for the startling words of 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…
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (vv. 17–21; cf. Joel 2:28–32).
And so the Spirit is given not just to some but to all flesh. People of all genders, enslaved and free, hear God’s Word in their native languages and receive the power to see visions and dream dreams of another world beyond the visible divisions and hierarchies of this one—dreams of the heavenly realm come to earth by the democratizing power of the Holy Spirit working among God’s diverse people.
Indeed, the rest of the book of Acts narrates what kind of community the Spirit has begun and what kinds of practices carry forward the spirit of the Pentecost event: baptism, prayer, fellowship, the breaking of bread, the sharing of resources (vv. 41–47). Though they speak different languages, they become fluent in the practices of spiritual growth, love, and mutuality.
Back to Dillard’s distinction between the so-called “higher” and “low” churches, as we observe Pentecost Sunday in light of present anxieties about the long decline of
expressions of church we have come to call “mainline” that finally seems to be leveling off…
Consider that Christian Pentecostalism—a branch of the Protestant family tree that emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit, direct experience of God, and spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues—is growing exponentially all around the world. This is especially the case in the Global South (meaning Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean). In cultures already attuned to nonbiblical notions of an active spirit world, perhaps it is easy to see Christian Pentecostalism as an intuitive fit; however, across a diversity of cultures—ours included—one commonality seems to persist: People on the economic or social margins often have a profound sense of the power of the Spirit that the Pentecost narrative describes, an unpredictable and indiscriminate Spirit, a Spirit that blows where it will and threatens to obliterate the structures by which imperial forces have always sought to tame the gospel of Jesus Christ.
While the African Methodist Episcopal Church is not Pentecostal in the same sense as many of the rapidly growing churches around the world, such a profound respect for the Spirit is what drove that denomination to embrace the message of Jarena Lee as the first female Black preacher. So, too, did a respect for the Spirit’s work in the lives of diverse people spur on many of the changes in our own denomination over time.
So what might it mean for us to be Pentecost people today?
“Given the blueprint of Pentecost, we are to build communities that welcome and include in a world that excludes,” Teri McDowell Ott recently wrote in The Presbyterian Outlook. “We are to build institutions that prioritize and value diversity in a world that separates and segregates. We are to build relationships of mutual respect and understanding in a world full of people who talk over others, fail to listen, and dominate. We are to build a Pentecost alternative.” (4)
Not wait for a Pentecost alternative, or even just hope for one. Not even simply dream of one and then come to church and pray for it. Build it.
That may seem like a tall order as we look around us and see that the powers of empire, individualism, greed, tribalism, and fear and hatred of the other seem to dominate, but do we have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
The audacious promise of Pentecost is that the same Spirit who blew the church into being is still at work among us and all who call on the name of the Lord, giving us the power to be Jesus’ witnesses not only in this sanctuary, but also downstairs in the Heartbeat Denver shelter, on this city block, at the Habitat build and at Denver Pride, in Alamosa and Cuba, and even to the ends of the earth.
Our challenge—as we listen to one another and attune our attention to the margins of society, and as we work alongside community partners to bring glimpses of that Pentecost alternative into view—is to recognize the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as it breaks into the everyday….even—and perhaps especially—when the signs are subtle.
Sources:
(1) Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 40–41.
(2) Margaret Aymer, Commentary on Acts 2:1-21, Working Preacher, June 8, 2025 (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/day-of-pentecost-3/comment ary-on-acts-21-21-18).
(3) Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 59.
(4) Teri McDowell Ott, “Looking into the Lectionary: Pentecost Sunday—June 8, 2025” (Presbyterian Outlook website, May 26, 2025; https://pres-outlook.org/2025/05/pentecost-june-8-2025/?utm_source=).
