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 2021
My childhood home, that I was raised in from about age five onward, sits on what Buzz from the movie Home Alone would call “the most boring street in the most boring city in the whole United States of America, where nothing even remotely dangerous will ever happen.”
Boring though it was to teenaged me, it is also unforgettable—literally, I will never forget its façade, its layout, its location because that was home to me for so long, and for so much of my formative years. None of those things about it have changed.
But just about everything else about it has. In the thirty-one years my parents have owned the home, it has had new paint, a new roof, new landscaping, renovations to the kitchen and bathrooms, new carpeting in the basement, and probably more updates that I am forgetting.
And that is to say nothing of the surrounding neighborhood. The homes are all still there, and my (and coach Ted Lasso’s!) alma mater, Brookridge Elementary School, is still educating children. But so many places I went to as a kid—the 103rd Street Winstead’s, the endearingly old-timey Glenwood Theater, and Border’s Bookstore have all long since gone to the great shopping center in the sky.
Homes change. They get renovated, updated, and sometimes torn down.
The hometowns around them change. Neighbors relocate while new neighbors move in, businesses come and go, and neighborhoods change and gentrify.
Amid that constantly changing landscape, the church occupies a dual identity, of being scions of Christian tradition but also tasked with reaching people and speaking their language of their time and place—which may or may not correspond with the tradition of yesteryear.
It is a delicate dance, one that churches can easily take far in one direction or the other. Concern ourselves only with being relevant and we risk throwing out the lessons learned by generations past. Concern ourselves only with the tradition of the past and we risk becoming a time capsule that does not reflect our wider community.
It is a dance we find ourselves in as we return from a uniquely twenty-first century way of worshiping entirely online these past fourteen months to what is still a uniquely twenty-first way of worshiping—still in-person, but continuing to run live on Zoom.
And it is a dance I think this first generation of disciples found themselves in, just days after Christ’s ascension into heaven, on Pentecost. Jesus has just exited stage straight up, and the apostles have belatedly filled the late, not-so-great Judas Iscariot’s position with Matthias to keep their number at a solid twelve when Pentecost rolls around.
Now, much like during Passover, there were Jews both within and outside the Jesus movement (because at that point, the church as we would think of it was not a thing) in Jerusalem, and Luke rattles off their provenances—Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, and so on.
In the Roman Empire then, by dint of the Greek influence that began under Alexander the Great over three hundred years prior, Greek was the lingua franca of the day, sort of how English functions today. It was not everyone’s first language, but it was often someone’s second language if it was not their first.
What made Pentecost remarkable, then, is that the Holy Spirit enabled each nationality to understand the first language of one another—not the common Greek tongue, but the languages and dialects they would have been speaking from birth.
What is in a language? Vocabulary, yes, words and their meanings. Each of which changes over time. Language is not static, it is and has always been a dynamic, moving, living thing that reacts to reality as we do. When reality presents us with something we do not have the language for, language is found, discovered, and disseminated.
Think of the past year alone and all the new language you have picked up. Terms like “social distancing” and “mask up” had more to do with introverts and Batman villains respectively, if they had any relevant meaning for you at all. The physical proximity of a person to you may not have carried as much weight as it does now. Even the act of wearing a mask has been made to carry certain connotations when what it should represent is a concern for your and other peoples’ health.
So language adapts over time, but part of the miracle of Pentecost was that the Holy Spirit caused it to adapt in an instant, so that all the believers assembled, no matter their national origin, could understand one another.
Because of this, Pentecost represents the next phase of the story. To borrow from the origins-evolution framing we used for our post-Easter sermon series for Valley’s 70th anniversary, if the Gospels are the origin story, then Acts is the start of the evolution phase—a phase that has remained ongoing ever since.
For once we go beyond the basic definition of the church as people following Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, we cannot tell ourselves that there is only one thing the church can be. It has changed countless times over its history and its geography. Worship in a Renaissance-era church would look and sound very different than our worship today, and worship in a church halfway around the world would look and sound very different than this worship we participate in.
Therein lies the source of the church’s true strength—that because the Gospel belongs not to us, never us, but to God, it can translate across time, across space, to be what Christ proclaims it to be—good news to the poor and broken-hearted, liberation to the oppressed, freedom to the ones held captive, and a source of sight to all those of us who have ever feared we could never see God.
From that origin story of the Gospels, of what Christ teaches us and envisions us to be, emerges our ongoing evolution. The believers at Pentecost looked all around themselves and marveled at how they understood one another—the Holy Spirit had already put in motion this next phase of evolution so that the Jesus Movement might more fully reflect the wider world.
The Jesus Movement had already cut across wide swaths of ancient Israelite society. Tax collectors and Zealots, sex workers and fishermen, carpenters and Pharisees alike sought Jesus and called him Teacher. Pentecost represents the next ripple outward, the next ring on the tree stump of life, in which those who have come from all over, from Egypt and Cyrene and Rome, the Cretans and Arabs, Medes and Elamites, Phrygians and Pamphylians experienced the power of the Holy Spirit.
Like the believers of Pentecost, we have come from all over the area. We have come from Birmingham and Homewood, Irondale and Mountain Brook, Hoover and Vestavia, Fultondale and Springville, Leeds and Bessemer, Hueytown and McCalla, and from even further still, from Florida and Kansas City, all gathered in this one place, unified in a common language which proclaims, “Blessed be the one true God of heaven and earth, and long may that God reign!”
Christ was not finished with His church when He ascended, and Christ is not finished with His church now. We gathered back together as the apostles of old did, intact as a faith community after fourteen long months, once we knew that doing so could keep us intact and relatively safe from sickness. We chose this long wait, and while it was a trial, we chose it so that at this moment, here, we would not have anybody lost when we regathered, because it is who we gather with in the Holy Spirit’s presence that helps make this place a sanctuary. Spirit and sanctuary—one makes the other.
And maybe regathering in this house filled you with a sense of familiarity. Or maybe you noticed all the things that have changed, like an adult in their childhood home or hometown. The challenge we rise to meet is how we change in response, to better meet the community of humankind where it is at, even if that is maybe not where we were at, or where the era of the church we most fondly remember was at. For once the Holy Spirit has arrived, as it has today, the agenda is not really ours. We are not here to make ourselves happy, we are here to glorify God, and the way the believers did that on Pentecost was by seeing one another and understanding one another, where they were at.
Those changes to meet others where they are is how new life is breathed into the spaces we inherit, like restoring the old wineskins to hold the new wine. That is okay, good even! It is what is supposed to happen to the church over time. We grow and mature, shift and morph, all in the service of perfecting ourselves, or getting as close as we can in this lifetime, because we serve a perfect God.
And that part, the part about the perfect God we serve, who loves us infinitely and whom we love back, that is the part that will never, can never, should never change.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
May 23, 2021