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The Rev. Christopher Brdlik
May 27, 2007 --- DAY OF PENTECOST

One theme about Pentecost we all remember: It is regarded as the birthday of the Church. So let me begin this morning by wishing you the greetings of the day: “Happy birthday, dear Christians, happy birthday to you!” Like all birthdays Pentecost has an exchange of presents. Most of these gifts come from God to the Church. But in one case the Church presents a gift to the world. Let me explain by tracking down some of the interesting details of the story of Pentecost recorded by St. Luke in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. 

This reading is known for its details, all seeming to happen at once. The drama of the scene is that it’s a cacophony of noise and action. There is the rush of a mighty wind, symbolizing the gift of the Holy Spirit. The gift of tongues arrives, first as fiery and divided, then morphing into the gift of spoken languages, a wide variety of them. Visitors are gifted with understanding, recognizing their native tongues at least enough to be perplexed and surprised by what the Christians were doing. Then Peter is gifted with a theological voice, given the power to interpret the day based on an ancient prophecy. And the prophecy is of one more gift: “Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” All of these gifts are presented at Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. 

And yet the birth of the Church was not a single-day event so much as an unfolding, an evolving vision for the future of Christianity. Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, the only book of Church history in the New Testament, is one of the better authors in Christian scripture. By listing these gifts at the beginning of his book, only the second chapter, he is foreshadowing what’s to come in the rest of the story. For all these gifts are things God knows the Church will need, and Luke shows how God provides them. 

First of all, the Holy Spirit, the mighty wind. Hebrew and Greek traditions are uniform in explaining Spirit as a kind of wind. The word for wind and spirit is the same in both languages. This is true in other cultures as well. Native American traditions, especially the tribes of the Great Plains such as the Sioux, equate wind with spirit. In this sense it’s something more than symbolism — wind is spirit, always present with us, always felt, always noticed, whether gentle or strong, yet always invisible and unseen. The Church needed the Holy Spirit to blow away the grief and desolation of the loss of Jesus. And remember, the first Christians suffered the loss of their Lord not once but twice: First at the Crucifixion, for three days until Easter, then again at the Ascension, forty days later. The last time was permanent. After the Ascension the Risen Lord would no longer lead them in person. Now they had to move forward on their own, empowered by the Holy Spirit. Luke shows us here the evolution, the morphing, of a band of dependent followers into an empowered group of independent operators. Something like entrepreneurs, perhaps. They used the gift of the Holy Spirit to blow them to the four corners of the world, where God wanted them to be. 

But the gift of the Holy Spirit is a baptism of fire, just as John the Baptist had predicted. Fiery tongues may be evident in any enthusiastic religious context. Praying in tongues, or glossolalia, is a spiritual phenomenon well documented in the history of religion. The charismatic revival of the 1970’s manifested it. So did the Pentecostal Holiness movement of a century before. The early Church prayed in tongues. But St. Paul, who had the gift, nevertheless downplayed it, because it can be controversial, and because it often does not enlighten. So the gift of tongues in Luke’s story morphs into glossolalia in actual human language. Clearly it’s going to be important for the apostles to speak in languages other than their own. As they spread the gospel around the world, linguistic ability will be a significant gift. (They’ll have to learn them all through study and effort.) What happened on the Day of Pentecost might have been no more than Christians being able to express the first simple Christian creed — Alleluia. Christ is risen! — well enough for the visitors to Jerusalem to understand it. For any foreigner devout enough to pay a pilgrimage to Jerusalem likely would have heard of Jesus. It is not a stretch to believe that by a gift of God, Christians could proclaim, “Jesus is Lord!” and pious persons could understand what they meant. 

Now there are skeptics in every bunch. Those who I call sneercastic just can’t believe what is going on. They jump to another conclusion: “Those folk are full of new wine!” The truth is, the gifts of God are out there all the time, ready for us to receive them. The Spirit is present with us like the wind — we only have to acknowledge it. Yet there will always be those who don’t accept the gift. Most of the people who heard Jesus in person, for that matter, didn’t accept the message he presented, either. Just think about that: The vast majority of the audiences Jesus Christ preached to did not become his followers. Overcoming sneericism is a gift from God requiring trust and personal openness, a gift that allows God to penetrate our defenses of sophistication and worldliness and our veneer of doubt. Some people just won’t accept the gift, because they aren’t open to it. 

Finally in today’s story Luke shows us the emergence of Jesus’ best friend, Peter, as the new leader of the group. Only after the Ascension does Peter come into his own. His earlier impulsiveness matures into leadership. His initial impetuousness evolves into theological depth. Nowhere in the gospels had we seen signs that he could preach. In the Book of Acts, however, Luke reveals that Peter could preach, and do it effectively. That, too, was a gift, an emerging one soon to be present in all the Apostles. For if you take a map of the Biblical world, and plot out all the place names listed in today’s reading — Parthia, Media, Pamphylia, and so forth — you see what Luke is telling us the Apostles are going to do. They have the greater gift of spreading the gospel from East to West, from North to South. Peter himself will wind up in Rome, the Imperial Capital. Paul will join him there, too. Others went elsewhere, all the places Luke listed, plus even more. They spread the gospel of Christ a greater distance and with greater effectiveness than Jesus could have done alone. In the Church, Luke tells us, the greater work of Jesus Christ continues to be accomplished. 

Last June I had a personal epiphany while on my trip to Turkey. In Cappadocia, central Anatolia, standing in the valley where thousands of Christian monks hollowed out caves for monasteries and churches, where for centuries holy men and women wrote Christian theology and practiced their faith, I realized this was where Christianity as we know it was born or at least grew up. For very soon after the Day of Pentecost, when they were all together in one place, the first Christians left Jerusalem, and moved to places like Cappadocia. Within a generation the Church had moved on. They were no longer all together in one place. Christianity is intended as a universal religion. It cannot be tied to Jerusalem — it was meant for the whole world. It cannot be owned by one tribe or a single language. It must be shared. It cannot be co-opted by a single culture. It must transcend borders.  

This is the greater work taken on by the Church, enabled by gifts from God, supported by Christ in heaven. This is the Spirit of Pentecost: That the celebration continues, and the gifts keep coming, and the work becomes greater. This is the gift of the Church to the world. Let us prophesy … dream dreams … see visions. Then everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

© copyright 2007, Christopher Brdlik

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