When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. 4 They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.
5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 When
they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because
everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. 7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? 8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia
and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and
visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” 12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” 13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!” (Common English Bible)
Pentecost Sunday 2020
I still remember the off-duty pilot’s voice asking me the question. “Have you been baptized by fire?”
I look down at my brown-ish arms and hands.
“I don’t know…maybe I got a little crispy on the way out?”
“Have you ever spoken in tongues?” the pilot asked me next.
“I, uh, I took French in high school.”
And with that, the pilot concluded, I must not have ever received the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Oh well. Another one-star Yelp review to have to live with.
I was in seminary at the time, much younger, inexperienced, and poorly-versed in how to discuss my Christian faith with aggressively interrogatory strangers—in this case, an off-duty pilot sitting next to me on an airplane who had spotted me reading my Bible and needed to sniff out what ‘brand’ of Christian I am.
But I clearly did not speak this man’s theological language.
Not that there was anything inherently wrong with his—other than using it as a
litmus test to determine whether or not I was a Real Christian ™. Nor, I would
hope, is there anything inherently wrong with mine. But in many ways it was a
scenario tailor-made out of one of the very earliest stories in the Bible, of
the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
Humanity in the story of Babel has one common language, and the story serves as both an explanation for the multitude of languages and dialects we have as well as an object lesson for trying to play God. By building a tower to reach the heavens, humanity is symbolically promoting itself to godhood, and God reminds us that we are God’s creations, not the other way around, by inspiring the array of languages spoken by humankind.
Luke’s Pentecost story in Acts 2 serves as a parallel tale to
the saga in Genesis, only this time, God inspires not difference in language,
but understanding amid the difference. God does not erase our linguistic and
geographical differences by sending down the Holy Spirit so much as God creates
shared understanding which bridge those differences. And that is a key detail
to the Pentecost narrative, especially if we are to understand it as Babel’s
New Testament parallel. God is not trying to undo Babel by returning us to one
common language; God is creating another experience that draws from Babel in
response to our own faith. Instead of us building a tower up to God, God—in the
form of the Holy Spirit—comes down to us, and grants us understanding of one
another.
So even as we celebrate Pentecost as the origin story of the church, we can—and should—also see in it the echoes of the Babel saga, of a humanity that has never stopped hoping for connection with God, and whose attempts at such connection run the gamut from holy and sacred to genuinely ill-advised.
That is an important distinction for us to always remember
for Pentecost—that we may strive to be the church of Pentecost, the church that
is led by the Holy Spirit and encompassing of people of a multitude of
ethnicities and languages, but that the church of Pentecost is also an ideal,
the likes of which we often do not live up to or into.
Because the nature of language, and theological language especially, is such that it is inextricably tied up in everything else in our identities, of who we are and our life experiences. If words do not exist to reflect those realities, we work to create those words. Words and terms we may take for granted today, like ‘email’ or ‘social media’ did not exist so long ago, because the concepts behind them did not exist either. Other words and terms have taken on whole new meanings, or widespread meanings. It is a solid bet that four months ago, few of us knew what ‘social distancing’ meant, but now we all do.
It should be expected, then, that our theological language
changes with our faith, and vice versa. Sometimes we experience something, or
feel something, and do not have the words for it—Paul writes about this very
experience in Romans 8, that when we do not know what words to use when we
pray, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And
it is only much later when we learn that there was a word for that feeling, or
it is only much later when a word is coined to describe that experience.
The trouble comes when we use language as a tool for domination, as a way to impress our will upon those who are vulnerable, those who are hurting, those who are in pain. I was not necessarily hurting or in pain on that flight—at least, no more so than a 6’3” brown-adjacent, bearded man usually is when having to fly in twenty-first century America—but I was vulnerable in a spatial sense in that there was nowhere I could go to get away from my seatmate…a pressurized metal tube with wings and engines has only a finite amount of space, after all.
The off-duty pilot, consciously or unconsciously, took that vulnerability and used it to subject me to his own checklist of faith, and to deem me unworthy of it because even though we were both Christians, we spoke very different theological languages. We were much closer to Babel than to Pentecost, even as the items he was listing off are often associated with what we know today as Pentecostal Christianity. Thinking back on that story, I always found that particular bit ironic.
Who we let in, who we don’t, we consciously or unconsciously
communicate welcome to and who we consciously or unconsciously choose to shun,
all of that is Pentecostal in the sense that Pentecost ought to be able to
teach us in those moments. We can choose to throw up walls and barriers on the
basis of language and ethnic identity. We can choose to try to assert dominance
and superiority over others, to make them check our boxes or defer to our ways.
And with alarming frequency, we have.
Or we can remember that part of the Holy Spirit’s gift on Pentecost was a leveling of the spiritual playing field, of equity of access to God for the Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians, Judeans and Cappadocians, Phrygians and Pamphylians, Egyptians and Libyans, Cyrenes and Romans, Cretans and Arabs, and Pontic and Asian peoples. The Holy Spirit spoke in each their languages because the Holy Spirit is no respecter of our hierarchies and bigotries, our prejudices and our phobias. The Holy Spirit is not, and has never been, interested in our quests for domination and our pursuits of cultural hegemony and homogeneity. The Good News of the Pentecost story is that when we finally, at long last, set aside such self-centered preferences, the Holy Spirit will be revealed to us in ways that confound, yes, and that inspire, elevate, and endure.
For the past nearly two years, First Presbyterian, you have let me in to your faith group, including your native theological dialect, which has some overlap with me (after all we Disciples spun off from all y’all), but which diverges at many points as well. For me to learn some of your language—and hopefully you have learned a bit of mine—is, I think, a very early form of Pentecostal Christianity. It is not that either of us have let our language of the divine be dominated by the other, but that even as we speak different faith dialects, we have learned to understand one another.
You have let me speak my language to you—as a Disciples of
Christ pastor in a Presbyterian congregation, as a fourth-generation Armenian
congregationalist amid a proudly Scots-influenced Reformed tradition, and as a
fledgling author amid a congregation with a rich love of book studies.
More than anything else, I want to encourage you to cultivate that habit of hearing others when they speak a different faith language or Christian dialect than you. Your new associate pastor, whomever they are, will surely bring bits of newness and breaths of fresh air, and their voice may sound a bit different to your ears at first. Lean into that. Appreciate it. Hear, as the believers did on Pentecost, what the Holy Spirit is saying through that different speech.
To open yourselves up to that is a gift to give, and for nearly two years, you have given that gift to me. We told each other our stories, we spoke of God in spirit and in truth, and we gave one another words with which to pray, bless, and worship.
Sometimes, our languages were nearly identical. Other times,
you could hear the difference in our faith dialects.
But the conversation continued.
The ministry we did together was real.
And with ears to listen, we heard the voice of God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Vancouver, Washington
May 31, 2020