It’s Pentecost. Among many other things this day marks the beginning of the church. And what a wild beginning it is. This year I have referred twice now to a Christianity Article titled, “Make Christianity weird again” and well it does not get much weirder than this. Violent winds. Tongues of fire. People suddenly speaking language they haven’t spoken before. Accusations of drunkenness. Of all the sacred days – Christmas, Easter, Pentecost – Pentecost might win the prize for being the weirdest.
But while this story marks a beginning, it also marks an ending. From Advent, through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and the season of Easter the church year takes us through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Pentecost marks the end of that journey. Next week we again enter so called ordinary time.
Being here again (and yes it seems to come around faster and faster every year) had me reflecting on time.
As someone shaped by so called western culture my understanding of time is linear, chronological, today is today, yesterday was yesterday, and tomorrow will be tomorrow.
But the church year invites me to see time as more circular, more eternal.
This is of course more in tune with earth and seasons. Which is more in tune with the Aboriginal view of time, where the past, present and future are all bound up into the eternal now of the Dreaming.
Throughout the bible as well history is a concept that moves across past, present and future. There are also dual threads of chronological time and eternal time. God continually calls on his people to see past just the day-to-day passing of time to eternity.
While I cannot say I have fully let go of linear notions of time (nor would I want to, it has its place). This yearly liturgical practise is slowly opening me to a more circular and eternal relationship with time.
And this story we read from Acts 2 on this day each year winds in past, present and future.
The passage tells us that there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven in Jerusalem. Many were there to celebrate the Festival of Weeks (what the Greeks called Pentecost), this festival remembers God giving the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
And Peter stands up, drawing on the prophet Joel and proclaims,
‘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.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy.
These last days that Peter is referring to hold the time when God first spoke these words to his people at the time of the prophet Joel. The people have been struck by a locust plague that has ravaged the crops and left famine and destruction across the land. Joel calls the people to see this disaster as an opportunity to revive their faith, to turn from their sin and reorient their hearts to God. For this ravaged and half hearted people the Spirit’s coming promises new life. A time when they will once again dare to dream and to hope.
It holds the moment when the spirit was poured out on Jesus followers – men and women, young and old, slave and free – in Jerusalem and they began to speak about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus , to prophecy in languages other than their own.
It holds this present moment, as the Spirit speaks these words afresh to us. Calling us in our ravaged times, to dream, to speak words of hope in our time and place, to be an inclusive church that values and celebrates diversity, that treats all people equally, that is willing to take risks, say hard things and chooses trust over cynicism.
It holds the future, the new heavens and the new earth when the Spirit will finally and fully poured out.
In this story we have sacred-past-in-the-present and sacred present in the future.
As I was writing this, I received news Walter Brueggemann had died. Regulars here will know that I am a great fan of Walter Brueggemann. His thought has deeply shaped my thinking, and I am so grateful for his life and his numerous work.
I probably shouldn’t have as I was already trying to write this amongst a number of other things going on but I allowed this news to distract me and I started reading the endless tributes to Brueggemann.
One article said this, “Brueggemann wrote as someone who had wrestled with the text in all its complexity and had come out the other side still listening for the voice of God. His prose was academic and lyrical, unsettling and pastoral. Through him, I learned that Scripture could be both historically situated and spiritually alive. He reintroduced me to a Bible that could once again speak to my heart, my mind and to my public witness.
Brueggemann painted the prophetic task not as angry denunciation or mere moral exhortation, but as the deeply pastoral, deeply disruptive calling to nurture grief and kindle hope. He showed that prophets break the silence to sing out another world.”
I loved that. And this is certainly true of the prophet Joel and then Peter drawing on his words. And this is what the Spirit can still do in all of us – sing out another world.
I found an article that Brueggemann wrote in 2020 about the death of George Floyd, called the God of the second wind. As an Old Testament scholar he reflects on the word ruah – translated as breath or Spirit – in the Old Testament. In the biblical witness it is this ruah that gives life. This ruah that calls forth praise, hope, wisdom and creativity. And in the midst of despair this ruah that comes and gives second wind – as in to Ezekial’s dry bones and to Jesus followers at Pentecost.
Brueggemann describes it like this, “The people of God are a people of the “second wind,” the recovery of breath after the loss of breath. The God who gave the first breath in Genesis is the God who gives a second wind to those who are willing and able to inhale the goodness of God that yields courage, stamina, and steadfastness.”
The Old Testament reading for Pentecost of course is Genesis 11, “The Tower of Babel” and Christians sometimes speak of Pentecost as the reversal of Babel, when God divided and scattered human communities by multiplying their languages. But in fact, Pentecost didn’t reverse Babel; it blessed it. When the Holy Spirit came, she didn’t restore humanity to a common language; she declared all languages holy and equally worthy of God’s stories. She wove diversity and inclusiveness into the very fabric of the Church and called the people of God to be at once the One and the Many.
God’s Church, from its very inception, was called to honor the boundless variety and creativity of human voices, not because multiculturalism is progressive and fashionable, or because the Church is a “politically correct” institution but because God’s deeds themselves demand such diverse tellings. It seems there is no single language on earth that can capture the deeds of God?
Anyway, I am going to finish with a poem by Orlando Ricardo Menes, a Cuban poet who now lives in the US. This poem is about language and like Pentecost celebrates different languages.
Praise be to God for confounding tongues and scattering us into exile like chaff in a stray wind
Confusion is sweetest chirimoya on a dry tongue.
Hymns of disorder bring bountiful harvests in times of drought,
And perhaps only cross-eyes can see in chaos serene mandalas.
I shout from the top of Babel’s tower
Blessed are the dialects, the pidgins, the mongrel grammars; the ghost words; those hallowed languages gone dead or worse extinct because of genocide or conquest or just time’s erosion,
yet how we must mourn each one in our bones, hearts, spleens;
then join hands by the sea at dawn to chant their names in flames
O so many to remember:
With these memories I glide and cleave the tidal waves of history.
With these memories I take root in the quicksands of diaspora.
