Fire, Water, Wind, Heart | Acts 2:1-21 | 5.24.26

Thank you so much for uh for being here today.

We're about to do two scripture readings.

The first uh is from the book of Genesis, uh, which Lauren's gonna read for us.

And then uh the second one is from Acts.

Um let's uh give give our hearts and minds to the Spirit and see if we can sense the Spirit today.

Our Hebrew Bible reading for this morning is from the book of Genesis, chapter 11, verses 1 through 9.

Genesis 11:1–9

Let's listen together for God's word to us today.

All people on the earth had one language in the same words.

When they traveled east, they found a memory in the land of Shem and settled there.

They said to each other, hmm.

Let's make bricks and make them hurt.

They used bricks for stems and disability for mortar.

They said, hmm, when it's built for their symbols, a city and a town with a stem in the stem.

And let's make a name for their symbols that we won't be dispersed over all the earth.

Then the Lord came down to the city and the town that the humans built.

And the Lord said there is nine one people, and they all have one language.

This is what they have begun to do, and then all that they plan to do will be possible for them.

Hmm.

Let's go down and mix up their language there so they won't understand each other's language.

And then the Lord dispersed them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.

Therefore, it is named Bemble, because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord dispersed them all over the earth.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to him.

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Not too long ago, um, somebody asked me why it's called Pentecost.

And I realized uh that a lot of us church folks sometimes make assumptions about what people know.

We don't always stop to explain why we're doing what we're doing.

Uh so the name uh predates Christianity.

Uh Pentecost was the Greek name uh for the Jewish uh harvest festival, the spring harvest festival called Shavuot.

And it was a celebration of the harvest and of the giving of God's law, and it took place seven weeks after Passover, plus a day on the 50th day.

Pentecost means 50th.

So it's the 50th day after Passover.

For Christians, this is the Sunday that we remember that the church was born by the Holy Spirit, that God's universal love and radical grace are on the loose in the world.

God's Spirit will not be housed or contained or trapped inside a church building, a book, or a language or any earthly boundary.

And though she cannot be contained, the spirit can be followed and found by looking for her fruits: love and joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Each Pentecost we read from Acts, the Spirit descending as a wind and fire, and how through all the chaos and cacophony those gathered somehow understood each other, each speaking new languages and each hearing in their own language.

The church was founded on a unity within a diversity, a unity grounded in what God had done and in the translating work of God's Spirit.

So as we listen for God's Spirit this morning, would you pray with me?

Come, Holy Spirit, illumine your word to us today and stir our hearts to greater love for you and greater love of our neighbors.

We ask this by your word made flesh, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

So this is Acts 2, verses 1 through 21.

Acts 2:1–21

Let's listen for God's word to us this morning.

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.

And 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 of these who are speaking Galileans?

And how is it that we hear each of us in our own native language?

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia and 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 the crowd, saying, Fellow Judeans and all who are living 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 in 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.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

Do you know anyone who's a really good gift giver?

Someone who's just like really good at picking out the perfect maybe Christmas present or birthday present.

See some hands.

We love a good gift giver.

My sister-in-law has this gift, and I don't know how.

She has this way of finding something that feels just like you, but that you wouldn't have gotten for yourself.

It hits the sweet spot between a need and a want.

You won't have thought to get it for yourself, but you'll also think, this is perfect.

I needed one of these.

Personally, I admire that gift so much.

I am not a very good gift giver.

I wish I was.

I could definitely get you something that I liked.

For sure.

I'd be really good at that.

Um, and maybe you would like it too.

You would remember me when you saw it sitting on your shelf and be like, oh, Chad got me that.

But you probably wouldn't feel like this item was made for me.

There's a sort of translation that a good gift giver can do.

They can know you just well enough and put themselves in your shoes sturdily enough that when they present you with their offering, you can feel seen and cared for and surprised.

Not often you get both.

It's a sensitivity and a skill that I would truly love to continue developing.

I try to translate someone else's uniqueness into a celebration of them and a communication of my gratitude for them.

I've been thinking about the giving of gifts all week, maybe primarily because Lauren's birthday was Friday, but also because today is when we remember God's gift to the church, the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And on that day it says they were all together.

When Jesus' promised gift arrived, they were all together, and that's where we need to start because that detail matters more than people realize.

All of the Jesus people, not just the eleven, not just Peter, not just the ones whose names got written down and memorialized, all of them, the women who had followed him from Galilee, Mary, his mother, the ones who had stood at the foot of the cross when others ran, they were all there, all 120 or so of them in the house, the same house, likely, where Jesus had broken bread and poured wine and commanded us to love.

And then the wind came.

They didn't have any other clearer words for it.

A sound like a violent rushing wind, except it wasn't outside the home, it was in the house, it was in the room, it was in the people.

The air changed, something shifted in the atmosphere like right before the rain comes.

But it wasn't rain that came.

It was something like fire, tongues of fire split among them and resting on each and every one of them.

Not just Peter, not just the ones with titles or seniority or proximity.

It rested on the woman by the door who had gotten the water that morning.

And it rested on her daughter, too, who had been following Jesus since before she understood what following meant.

And it landed on all of them like a gift being given without apology, without evaluation, without checking credentials at the door.

They were there because they had followed Jesus.

And they opened their mouths, and words came out that they didn't know before.

Beautiful rolling words, whole sentences in languages that they hadn't spoken.

I wonder what that felt like.

I can't imagine waking up one morning and being able to speak clearly to someone who's fluent in a different language than me.

I imagine their tongues reaching for unfamiliar consonants and vowels that created an intonation that felt borrowed, like wearing someone else's coat.

And outside, a crowd was gathering.

And they could hear the confusion rising like its own kind of wind.

Galileans, they said, they're just Galileans.

This is code that not all of us modern people get, but Galilee was the backwoods.

It was the hills.

These were hicks.

They didn't know multiple languages, they didn't go to the fancy schools.

That word was meant to be dismissive, and they weren't wrong.

These were Galileans.

And Galilee was not where important educated people came from.

It was where the day laborers roamed.

And so some outside laughed at them.

Drunk, they said, which honestly, if you'd been there, you might understand the confusion.

They probably did seem like they'd lost their minds a little.

Elation can look like that from the outside.

But then Peter stood up.

Peter, dear, loud, impulsive Peter, stood up and opened his mouth, and the first thing he did was quote from the prophet Joel.

Your sons.

Who's he talking to?

The crowd outside.

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

Young and old, slave and free.

He said it standing in the street, standing in those first few moments of whatever this new thing was.

And he said it like it was simply and obviously true.

Like the daughters and the elderly and the slaves, their inclusion in that text centuries earlier was not a footnote or a caveat, it was the whole point.

My spirit upon all flesh, not some.

This was the promise.

The promise that had been there all along.

And surely this is what they had been waiting for, the thing that sent them back to that upper room after the resurrection, bewildered but hoping, and still somehow, somehow not stopping, gathering in the name of this Jesus guy.

And now here it was.

Not an idea, not a theology, or a set of presuppositions, but a wind and a fire, and the sound of a hundred and twenty voices all at once.

And a crowd of strangers hearing their own names called in their own tongue.

In a way that lost nothing in translation.

What does it mean?

The crowds asked.

Friends, it means the walls are coming down.

And it means the spirit goes where the spirit goes, and it doesn't wait for permission from the clergy or the moderator or the clerk.

It means everyone.

It means you.

Especially you.

The ones standing on the edges, the ones sh not sure if maybe it's just me, maybe this is somebody else's job.

The ones who don't do it for the paycheck.

The ones who know hard work and grief and hope from experience.

And they don't just receive their news from the world by whoever peddled it to them.

They've experienced it in their lives.

And it means we are just getting started.

Pentecost is a beginning.

And that day of Pentecost, the Spirit comes to all of them, and what it does is send them toward each other across every difference.

And the gift isn't uniformity.

They don't all start speaking one language again.

They make it so that the Parthians and the Egyptians can understand each other in their own languages, in their own cultures, in their own identities.

Those identities don't get erased.

But they're all together.

And they are also all one.

The gift is comprehension.

The gift is translation.

The gift is being understood and seen for who you are.

And being willing to speak someone else's language as well.

I wonder where and what are we being called to translate?

Friends, the church, over the last at least hundred years, but honestly, maybe since Constantine has neglected its duty to be a translator of God's love and grace.

We have forgotten that the first and most pivotal part of the Spirit's translation is a deep understanding of the language and culture of the person you don't know yet.

This is why the famous prayer attributed to St.

Francis asks, O divine Lord, grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand.

The gift is the gift of God's understanding of me.

And having received that gift from God, it's my calling to give that gift to others, not to demand it from them.

Does that make sense?

It is a weak and spiritually malnourished person, who I have been at times, who demands that I be understood and that others be kind to me and conform to my expectations before I seek to understand and express care and curiosity towards the other.

I was shaken this week by the shooting in that neighborhood Islamic center in San Diego.

I'm sure you were too.

It is a horrific tragedy and a failure on all of us that these young men could be peddled Islamophobia and white nationalism online and become convinced in themselves that violence was the answer to some question in their souls.

It's a failure.

One of them lived just a few blocks from this place.

These were his neighbors.

And apparently at no point in his life, while he was having his questions about his Muslim neighbors who were foreign to him, while he was having these questions, he was getting them answered by white Christian men online.

And at no point did he ever follow the spirit's tug to say, maybe if I don't understand these people who are different than me, I should get to know them.

I should make a friend who could help me translate their hopes and their values, their experiences, so that I might understand my neighbors better.

Friends, we cannot forget the good news.

We cannot take Jesus' love for us for granted.

And we can't stop sharing the good news with each other, because if we stop sharing the good news, people are going to find other news on the internet.

And the good news is this.

God met you where you were, understood you, your motivations, and saw you as loved and claimed you and named you as beloved, without anything you could or would do.

You didn't do anything to receive that grace.

You were met as you are in your own language, in your own particularity, with your own weird stuff that your parents gave you.

In your own bewildered backcountry accent, like those Galileans gathered that first day.

And this is the receiving end of the gift.

That is grace.

And grace, when it lands on you, it must change you.

We have to allow it to change us.

It sends us, it sends us out to share that grace with others.

This is this is reformed theology.

This is this is the the bottom.

God's grace to me.

Me grace to others.

The spirit didn't fall on those 120 people so that they could sit in the warmth of it forever and think that they were better than other people.

The spirit fell and then moved.

And then she took those people with her out into the street, into that crowd of people who had traveled for this festival from all over the world, out into the street, towards those very people outside calling them drunk.

And this is also our calling.

To do the costly, slow, unglamorous work of moving toward people we don't understand yet.

And not to demand that they speak our language first, or to demand that they believe all the same things I believe, or to demand that they eat the same foods that I eat, or anything like that.

It's to go toward them in love and not outsource our understanding of other people to people online who've never met them.

People who don't know your neighbors don't get to tell you who your neighbors are.

We must allow the spirit who first translated us into God's belovedness.

We must allow the spirit to translate for us into the sake of someone else, building that community.

And this is harder than it sounds.

I know it is.

I know it sounds uh naive, maybe.

Some of these distances feel impossibly wide right now.

Some of us have family members we don't talk to because we don't see the world the same way.

Uh there are gaps between us and our neighbors.

And we are using a shorthand to assume why those people believe those things we don't understand, whether it's politically, whether it's generationally, whether it's culturally, religiously.

And yet, and yet the church was born in the chaos.

Comprehension.

It was born when people who had no business understanding each other understood each other.

Not because they were especially virtuous, but because God's spirit was on the loose and would not be contained.

And God's Spirit is still on the loose, still moving and still looking for people willing to open their mouths, even when the words feel borrowed, even when the consonants are unfamiliar, and speak toward someone who needs to hear that they too are known and loved and that they belong.

Go and translate.

May it be so.

Amen.