The Spirit of Pentecost is a Spirit of Unity

Sermon for Sunday, May 31

Acts 2:1-8

The ministry of Jesus was like a plough. The plough cuts into the earth, revealing what is underneath and allowing the soil to breathe. Jesus revealed the divisions present in the world of his day. He was what was needed to cut through the top of the soil, which had hardened from years of being on top. The religious and political leaders of Israel were resistant to his message and many people followed those leaders. The story told by the gospels is how Jesus, with the sharp plough of Truth, broke up the hard, dead soil on top to get to the rich soil below, which was ready for growth. We, the religious of today, need to always be aware that Jesus comes to break us up, to let us breathe, to allow our society to spring forth with new life.

The death and resurrection of Jesus are the time of planting and sprouting. Hear the word of Jesus: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Having finished his work, Jesus gave up his life that His Church would bear much fruit.

Pentecost in Judaism is the festival that marks the beginning of the harvest. At Pentecost, the Jews celebrated the first ears of wheat by bringing those forward to be sacrificed. It was a festival for marking the time of year. So on Pentecost, we find the church ready to burst forth from the ground. They are only ready because they waited on the Lord. They didn’t emerge, each on their own, to be blown away, battered by the wind and the rain and the hail. They emerged together. They were ready to grow and ready to spread. But they were only ready because they had waited on the Lord.

Today, I think we need to hear two words from this Pentecost story. We need to hear about the disciples being together, waiting, growing in one place, with one heart. And we need to hear about the miracle of Pentecost, which is a miracle of understanding.

The story begins with all the apostles and the infant community of faith in one place... waiting.

The waiting community got on the same page. Though we often like to ignore it, most of the time represented by the Bible is time spent waiting. The events described in the Bible are periods of swift movement of the Spirit, but in between them are long periods of waiting. In Bible study we have been dealing with Noah, who spent 365 days in the ark waiting for the flood to subside. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness because they weren’t ready to enter the Promised Land. We have stories from that 40 years, about the people of God establishing their systems and learning to trust in God. Later, the leaders of the people spend decades in Exile, as God rewires the soul of a nation. And they have to wait another 500 years for Jesus. So it shouldn’t surprise us to find the church waiting, 50 days after the Resurrection. This is how God works.

At Cameron Park in Waco, Texas, there are tall shoots of bamboo as tall as the surrounding trees. The bamboo has spread out from the zoo inside the park, spilling onto hiking trails and into the woods. It’s amazing to see bamboo, slender and vertical, pointing toward the sky. I was even more amazed to learn that bamboo spends the first five years of its life barely visible above the surface of the ground. During that time, it builds its roots, developing the network beneath the soil that it needs to draw nourishment and water from the soil below. If all you can see is what’s happening on the surface, you might think those five years were wasted time. But without those five years, the plant doesn’t stand a chance. There are seasons where we all must wait for the Holy Spirit, but during those times, we should work with God on building our roots: the systems that will sustain our future growth.

This is why I’ve been telling you, for a long time, that it’s important that we spend time in prayer. Our so-called private prayer life is more important than our public ministry. Without the first, the second will die. But if we do spend time in prayer and studying the Bible, especially in times like now when circumstances limit other activities, we will find our ministry ready to break out when the Holy Spirit fills this house like the rush of a violent wind. And we, like the first believers, will find ourselves capable of speaking in ways we previously would have never understood.

The Spirit doesn’t lead others to understand the believers. It leads the believers to speak in ways that they can be understood. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” And the crowds ask “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” Notice, the crowds don’t suddenly speak Aramaic. The Galilean disciples suddenly speak Greek, Latin, Persian, and Arabic. God has this amazing track record of bringing the gospel to new and different people, not the other way around.

The Spirit of Pentecost empowers us to speak so others can hear. It does not empower others to hear us no matter what we say. Our experience of reality is shaped by our language. If we don’t have words for something, it is difficult to process what we are seeing, hearing, or experiencing. To learn a language is to discover a new way to see the world. When the Holy Spirit enables the apostles to speak in new languages, with that comes a way to understand experiences different from their own. On Pentecost, it is a miracle; the rest of the book of Acts, and the letters that follow, show us the story of their struggle to put into practice this new revelation that the Gospel is for everyone.  So Philip comes to an African Eunuch and finds him asking, “can I be saved too?” Peter comes to the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, and finds that the Holy Spirit has already beaten him there; all Peter has to do is tell them the story, and listen to the movement of the Spirit of Truth in their midst. 

My brothers and my sisters—my beloved siblings in Christ—if we are going to speak so we can be heard, we have to listen. We have to understand. We have to spend some time with the language of people who are different from us. We live in a country where we are so, so divided. Republicans and Democrats use different language, and it makes it hard to listen to each other. We are white folks gathered here this morning. We experience the world in radically different ways than our black brothers and sisters. We can settle for the points of connection we do have, but wouldn’t it be more excellent if we white folks learned the language and stories of black folks? 

The stories they tell of a world we never see. A world where you have to wonder, every time someone looks at you sideways— is there something I did wrong? Or does this person just not like black people? The black experience in America is well-accustomed to oppression. Dragged here as slaves beginning in 1619, they remained slaves here until 1865. My grandfather’s grandfather owned them. The first half of the twentieth century they lived in terror of unjust executions. And just this month we’ve seen citizens arrested for killing Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man on a jog because he didn’t want to stop so he could answer their questions. And just this week we’ve seen police officers fired, and one arrested, because their violence in arresting a black man named George Floyd resulted in his death. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in Georgia. In 2020 George Floyd died while being subjected to police tactics that were supposed to have been abandoned in the 1970s. That is not an experience I have to reckon with. So I’m learning to listen.

This week I’m going to try to share some black voices on my personal Facebook feed. If you use that website go, check it out. If you don’t, I’ll be collecting the things I share, and I’d be happy to email you those videos and articles. Listen to them, and ask God to show you how to pray for your neighbors. How to talk to your neighbors. How to listen to your neighbors.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel for everybody. It is a gospel for black people and for white people. It is a gospel for Republicans and Democrats. We ought to be concerned that people can hear it, that our language limitations don’t get in the way. We need to listen to the language that people use to describe the world, and then tell them how Jesus makes that world better. But in order to that we have to wait, and we have to listen, and we have to love. Just as Jesus loves you. Just as Jesus loves me.