God’s Deeds of Power
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Christians from every state, social location, and life circumstance under heaven living in America. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking genuinely from their own heart without the burden of projecting their own pain and perspectives on one another. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Americans from different walks of life? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in terms that actually open our hearts and minds? 9 MAGA hat wearing Trumpians, card-carrying Democrats, independents, Libertarians, moderates, conservatives and progressives, older Americans, people from the streets, young folks, those who have had caring and loving parents and those who hunger so deeply for any kind of love, people from North and the South, East Coast and West Coast, 10 black, white, Asian, Latino/a, Native American, and all between and beyond, those baptized and sanctified, life-long believers, those new to the faith, and those who find God in their own way without coming to church — in our own languages actually hear one another speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ 13But others sneered and said, ‘They are smoking something.’
14 But a prophet of the Lord, standing with other disciples, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘People of good will and all who live in America, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these people have not lost their minds, as you suppose, but are soberly speaking and listening to their deep pain and passions as they never have before. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 “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.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Fire and Wind. The marks Pentecost.
Wind. Violent wind. Looks like it has blown through Minneapolis, Atlanta, and many of our nation’s cities.
Fire. Burning fire. It fuels the rage and contempt of our hearts.
Anger that burns vehicles and buildings.
Anger that burns when it is suggested that we have privilege — white privilege, economic privilege.
Anger that burns when the wounds in our lives — personal, generational, historical
Are pressed beyond our ability to manage our own response.
Anger when it seems the enemies of our lives are at it again.
Causing harm to the things we love and care for deeply.
The violent wind is here. Divided tongues as of fire are here.
The wind and the fire are most assuredly here. Who among us has not seen it?
But it does not feel like Pentecost.
It does not feel like a celebration.
We feel the fire and the wind and the divided tongues.
But it does not feel like Pentecost.
People are indeed speaking in their many languages.
Yet the real miracle of Pentecost wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the fire. It wasn’t even in speaking different languages.
The miracle of Pentecost was the ability to hear. Hear people from far away places, who not only spoke different languages, but had different life experiences.
And in recent days, I’ve seen lots of fire and wind. Even quite a bit of speaking.
What we’re missing, what we don’t have nearly enough on this Pentecost — is the ability to hear beyond our own echo chambers. And to hear things outside of our own worldviews, requires vulnerability, it requires restraint.
It means we can’t be constructing a counter-argument when someone else is speaking.
It means we take a risk by suspending, at least for the moment, our impulse to defend our way of seeing things.
It means that we try to imagine what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes. Not simply where they are now, but over the whole arc of their life and even the preceeding generations that gave rise to their lives.
It means we let go our our incessant need to be right. To win. To have the last word. To be the one who explains, “this is how it is.”
It means simply being with someone and having your heart be open to them, wherever they are on their journey without judgment.
It means understanding that there is a time for speaking and a time for hearing and that this particular moment is a Pentecost moment; a moment for hearing.
I’ve shared with you before that in my marriage with Christy, we try to practice an active listening technique whenever we have arguments. She says her peace. I’ll repeat back to her what she has said until she’s satisfied that I’ve heard her. Then we switch. And sometimes when she is speaking from her experience, I do not like one bit the things coming our of her month, the way she has framed shared events, or the tone that is taken. I know she sometimes feels the same way.
You see, little outrages within our hearts — often big outrages. They keep us from genuinely hearing one another. Christy and I’s active listening activity will not come to an end until we’ve let go of those outrages to some extent. That doesn’t mean they are not true. But it is to say that genuine listening only happens from a place of love and empathy. And contempt and anger do a wonderful job of keeping love and empathy from doing their thing.
The truth is, it is hard enough to do this in a marriage. How much harder is it in a community with many different people. In a place like a church. Far harder still as we zoom out to an entire nation.
When Christy and I work through our disagreements, sometimes one of us is right and the other is wrong. Other times it is some of both. Still others it isn’t right and wrong, just one of those situations that hits us each differently. But to make any forward progress, we both have to be heard. Even the person who is wrong. Even God came to us and lived among us to understand what it was like to be a human.
There are many important things trending in the conversations happening across America right now. Racial injustice, policing methods, political speech online and in the streets, methods of participating in governance and elections, the safeguards needed or not to mitigate the Coronavirus, the proper balancing of saving lives from COVID-19 and the unintended consequences of a quarantined society. And many other things too.
It is easy to broadcast our perspectives on each one of these things. With the advent of modern media and especially social media, this has never been easier. I can share exactly what I think quickly and with as many people as are willing to look at it. I can do it with fire and violent wind to help everyone know how intensely I feel it.
It is almost as if we think the Pentecost miracle goes like this. If I speak my perspective, my language, my way of seeing the world just right — that person over there from a different walk of life, will see things differently, be awakened to the truth, get religion, get woke.
In our house, most of us like pretty different television programming. Carter and I overlap somewhat on the shows we like to watch, but mostly we all have different favorite shows. The following is not an uncommon occurrance. Lincoln will be watching a cartoon on the main television. I am interested in watching something else, but another family member has stolen my headphones, so I turn the volume up on my phone. It makes it harder for Lincoln to hear his television show, so he asks to turn his show louder. So I do. But then I can’t hear mine as well as I like, so I turn it up just a bit. You can see where this is going. Everybody speaking and then just turning up the volume because they cannot hear what they want is not Pentecost, it is a cacophany. Pentecost wasn’t a jumbled mess of languages.
It was a moment when people turned down their own personal broadcast machines to listen with genuine curiosity and love what people different from them had to say about — checks Bible — what does the Scripture say — “God’s deeds of power.”
You see, before Pentecost was a Christian holy day, it was a Jewish one.
The word Pentecost is the Greek name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks. What is a feast of weeks you might be wondering? A feast of weeks — I know it sounds pretty awesome. Basically, this was a special festival or feast day that marked 50 days after the Passover. On the Christian calendar, we celebrate Pentecost 50 days after Easter. Let’s read some of the ancient instructions for this Festival of Weeks. From Deuteronomy 16, verses 9–12:
9 You shall count seven weeks; begin to count the seven weeks from the time the sickle is first put to the standing grain. 10 Then you shall keep the festival of weeks to the Lord your God, contributing a freewill-offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the Lord your God. 11 Rejoice before the Lord your God — you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female slaves, the Levites resident in your towns, as well as the strangers, the orphans, and the widows who are among you — at the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. 12 Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and diligently observe these statutes.
So you count 7 weeks — 49 days, then the following day is the Festival of Weeks. And you can see here that it was an agricultural celebration. In fact, if you read the 23rd chapter of Leviticus, you’ll see all of the major Jewish festival and feast days outlined and organized according the agricultural cycle — a cycle of planting and harvesting. Especially around the cycle for wheat. And in and around that agricultural cycle, are celebrations that have to do with other important parts of Israel’s story — chief among them is Passover. A celebration who’s purpose it was to remember God’s deeds of power in delivering them from slavery in Egypt. The important things of their own cultural history are woven together with the realities of daily life — the agricultural cycle. Fifty days after planting comes the harvest — Pentecost. And here too, the Jews remember that seminal event in their history — deliverance from slavery. And so this wasn’t just a celebration for me and mine, but they were to invite slaves, male and female, strangers, orphans widows among us. How could we leave out those on the margins, if what we’re doing is connected to what God did for us as slaves in Egypt? If we are remembering God’s deeds of power. Deeds that continue to this day.
And we can see this in our Scripture from Acts today. These people were gathered, not because they were starting a new Christian holiday called Pentecost that would be the birthday of the church, though that happens. They were gathered because they were good Jews celebrating the Festival of Weeks, or Pentecost. Devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem.
I know I adapted our Scripture this morning to place it clearly into our context, but let me read it again as it was written.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’
This is what happened at the Jewish Pentecost, the Festival of Weeks. They continued to listen for God’s deeds of power — just like happened in Egypt — so too was it happening today. All over the known world. And special care was given for it not to be just for the power and privileged, but as we see from Deuteronomy from those on the underside of history. People experiencing injustice and oppression.
This was done at harvest time for a reason. Often those on the underside did not have enough to eat. The instructions for the Festival of Weeks in Leviticus end this way, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” It was all part of God’s deeds of power — a nudge towards the way God wants the world to look. Movement towards the kingdom of God.
In our Scripture this morning, Peter too speaks powerfully about a vision for what God wants the world to look like. It was an ancient prophetic vision of the prophet Joel. And we Christians hear these same words as a powerful vision of the direction God wants to take the world. This is what things will look like when the work of the church has been completed.
Pentecost actually goes even further back. In framing all the major holy days of the Jewish faith, the book of Leviticus first frames them by going back even further — to the rhythm of a week — a week of rest and creation. The chapter on holy days in Leviticus begins this way:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: These are the appointed festivals of the Lord that you shall proclaim as holy convocations, my appointed festivals.
For six days shall work be done; but the seventh day is a sabbath of complete rest, a holy convocation; you shall do no work: it is a sabbath to the Lord throughout your settlements.
Underneath these holy days was another of God’s deeds of power. When and where fire was born and the winds hovered over the deep and gave birth to life itself.
And in this foundational week — there are no privileged to invite the have-nots to the table. For everything we were given on this week was a gift. The breath of life, water, light, beauty, shelter, food, and love. Companionship and communion with one another and with God.
And so Pentecost is a day of remembering God’s deeds of power and not our own. To do that we must listen genuinely and deeply as did those who gathered and experienced the Holy Spirit giving them the ability to hear about how God’s deeds of power was happening in every nation under heaven. Deeds of power delivering from places of pain — places like Egypt and Babylon. Places like our own addictions and sin. Places Minneapolis and Huntsville.
Perhaps this all sounds helplessly naive to you. It just isn’t the way the world works. Everybody isn’t just going to sit down, hold hands and sing Kumbaya. There were those who sneered at that first Pentecost of the church too. But friends — hear the Good News — when we give ourselves over to this Pentecost miracle — and listen to the power of God at work in people very different from us — something happens. No longer is our own ego in control, but the very spirit of God comes to live within us. Indeed Jesus was right — he did not leave us orphaned.
When the world seems its darkest that is when God shows up. As the prophet said, it was when the portents showed themselves in heaven and in signs on the earth below. Blood, fire, and smoky mist. The sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. It is at that moment that God shows up and pours out God’s spirit upon all flesh. We can all experience this Pentecost miracle.
I don’t know how, or when, or why, nor do I pretend to ignore the very real pain being felt in so many different ways right now. But I do believe in this. I believe in the free gift God gave all of us with the breath of life and all that sustains it. I believe God can and will deliver you, me, and all people from situations of sin, oppression, and every from of pain and suffering, if not now, then in the fullness of time. I believe God willingly stepped into the worst of our sin, pain, and oppression on the cross. And it killed him. But new life sprung up. The resurrection happened and that agricultural cycle continued. I believe God’s kingdom is coming on earth as it is in heaven, as we pray each week. And I believe that God’s deeds of power can transform police brutality, racism, egocentrism, vandalism, greed, disease, pandemic, loneliness, anxiety, and every other form of brokenness that we beautiful creatures of God can experience. I don’t know what the next chapters of our lives, of our nation holds. But I believe in God’s deeds of power. And for a moment — it was there, on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, 2000 years ago — a foretaste of glory divine as the hymn goes — to the extent that we will let the Holy Spirit into our lives, we can begin to taste it too. And in the fullness of time, God’s deeds are too powerful to fail. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
May we give our hearts and our ears to God that they not be guided by our own egos, but by the Spirit of the Resurrected Christ, alive within us, animated the body of the church. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
