Good Morning. It feels like fall: a beautiful day with mild temperatures and moderate humidity. So far!
One of today’s readings is about the coming of the Holy Spirit into the church. There are at least two things about the way we traditionally celebrate this day that are at best inaccurate and at worst just plain annoying.
Acts 2 opens like this: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place." “When the day of Pentecost had come….” Pentecost is a Jewish holiday that comes fifty days after the celebration of Passover. It celebrates the event on Mount Sinai when God gave Moses the commandments. To some that constitutes the foundation day of the Jewish faith. This is the first thing that we often overlook. Pentecost wasn’t named after the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit came on Pentecost!
Acts tells us that the apostles were gathered together in a house and the Holy Spirit came upon them. The scene described is pretty vivid: a violent rushing wind; tongues of fire, etc. The text says that, “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m getting old. As the saying goes, my knees were the first thing to go. I’ll also admit that back in the day I probably listened to too much very loud music. So, the second thing to go has been my hearing. It’s not terrible, yet. I do suffer from a problem that involves multiple noises or multiple voices. I can’t pick out the one sound or voice that I want to hear. More and more frequently I have a problem when more than one person is speaking, and in a place with a great many voices filling the air it all becomes muffled in my ears. It’s almost as if the multiplicity of voices creates a white noise in my hearing and ends up actually blocking individual sounds.
Which brings me to my second issue. I’ve been in a lot of churches who celebrate Pentecost by creating a cacophony of noises and voices. I’ve seen as many as a dozen people start reading the scriptures aloud in a dozen languages. That might be a good demonstration of what happened at the Tower of Babel, but I don’t think that it’s a good demonstration of what happened on the first Christian Pentecost.
Because of the ongoing Jewish celebration from Passover to Pentecost, the city of Jerusalem was still packed with Jewish pilgrims from all over the world. In Acts it says, “And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” “Each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” They each HEARD the proclamation of the Gospel. Each person – regardless of their native language – clearly heard (i.e., understood) “about God’s deeds of power.”
I don’t think that this describes the kind of scene that occurred at Babel. I do think that some of the presentations I’ve seen in churches are precisely what Babel was like. There weren’t all that many apostles in the crowd. They didn’t have the numbers to go one-on-one with all of the people in the crowd. Yet the people in the crowd each heard the message.
It wasn’t about talking. It was about listening.
We’d rather talk than listen. The Lord is trying to speak to each of us, and if we could just take the time to listen we would hear wondrous things. If you went to a financial advisor with a question about how to best use your financial resources, you’d talk for a little bit and then listen to their advice. When we go to God in prayer we talk – maybe a little, maybe a lot – but we don’t hang around very long to hear what God’s advice is for us. As soon as we stop talking, we move on. One of the reasons that we need to practice and nurture the discipline of prayer (including the discipline of focused silence) is so that we learn to recognize God’s voice. For just as God’s message was heard by all those people who spoke so many different languages on the first Christian Pentecost, we too can learn to hear the message loud and clear.
The Holy Spirit made the message clear on that day, and the Holy Spirit is still talking to you today. Listen!
Prayer: Patient Lord, open our hearts that we might hear the message of Your faithfulness, Your love and Your forgiveness loudly and clearly. Fill us with the Spirit so that we may wait for Your word in silence and build our lives around Your will. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Today’s readings are Judges 5:1-18; Acts 2:1-21; Matthew 28:1-10; Psalm 69:1-38 & Psalm 73.
Blessings.
Pastor Jim
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