5/24/26 Sermon

I may have told you this before, but I’m just so fascinated by this. There are some things in our faith that I just take for granted that I know what they mean when I really have no clue. Like, I grew up going to church, did all the fancy seminary stuff where they teach you the Greek and Hebrew, passed all the tests, and you know what? Until a few years ago, I had never once asked myself what the word Pentecost actually means. I always figured it had to mean something like "tongues of fire" — that's why Pentecostals are Pentecostals. Or maybe "birthday of the church." The thought of looking it up just never occurred to me.

So I looked it up. You know what Pentecost means? Ready to have your mind blown?

Pentecost is Greek for "fiftieth."

That's it. Kind of takes the mystique out of the Pentecostals, doesn't it? They're the Fiftieth-als. Doesn't have quite the same ring.

And once I had the answer to what it means, my next question was — why? Why the fiftieth? And that's for the very practical reason that Pentecost used to fall exactly fifty days after Easter. It's now seven weeks after Easter, which is actually only forty-nine days, and I looked up the Greek word for forty-ninth and it's way harder to pronounce.

But here's the other assumption I'd been carrying around. I always figured Pentecost was an exclusively Christian holiday, like Christmas or Easter. It was always about this story in Acts where the Holy Spirit shows up and people are speaking different languages and the whole thing is just chaos. But once I realized I'd been making assumptions about the word itself, I decided to go back through this scripture with a fine-tooth comb. And it turns out my assumptions were mostly wrong.

Acts chapter 2 starts off: "When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place." And I'd always read right past that. But when I actually paid attention, I noticed — the word Pentecost is being used like a title. Like a name for an already-existing holiday. And it turns out there is one. There's a Jewish Pentecost. Jewish people don't call it by a Greek name — they call it Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks — and it got the nickname Pentecost when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, because Shavuot lands on the fiftieth day after Passover.

Shavuot is a celebration of a couple of things. First, it's a harvest festival. It's when the wheat comes in. And I want you to sit with that for a second. Wheat harvest. The time when you literally separate the wheat from the chaff. Sound familiar? Hold on to that.

Shavuot is also when Jewish people celebrate Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. It's when the Torah was given. The Law. So Pentecost was, originally, the day the people of God received the Law. Hold on to that too.

And it's a pilgrimage festival, which means devout Jews from all over the known world would be in Jerusalem for it. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia and Egypt and Rome. That's not a coincidence — that's a packed city. Everybody who could get there, gets there.

Now here's something I have to admit. I can't quite figure out what's actually happening with the languages in this story. The Holy Spirit shows up — and I want to say, it only shows up on the disciples. The tongues of fire are only on them. Not on the whole crowd. But what I can't tell is whether the disciples are speaking different languages, or whether the crowd is hearing them in their own native tongue. Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's both. Maybe it doesn't matter.

What matters, I think, is what Luke is doing here. Because Luke is making a move.

Remember — Pentecost was already the harvest festival. The day you separate the wheat from the chaff. Jesus uses that language all over the gospels to talk about a coming gathering. John the Baptist says the Messiah is coming with fire to burn away the chaff. And here on Pentecost, what shows up? Fire. Right on the heads of the disciples.

And remember — Pentecost was already the day the Law was given. The day God's people received what would bind them together as a community. And on this Pentecost, what shows up? The Spirit. Doing for this new community what the Law did for the old one — making a people out of a crowd.

And then there's this detail that floors me when you notice it. Peter preaches, and Luke tells us three thousand people are baptized that day. Three thousand. Where else in the Bible do we hear about three thousand people? Mount Sinai. The day the Law was given. Three thousand people died at Sinai because they were worshipping the golden calf while Moses was up on the mountain.

So at the first Pentecost — three thousand lost. At this Pentecost — three thousand baptized. Luke is not being subtle. He's drawing a line straight from one to the other.

And once you see that, the whole question of what this day means starts to look different. Because we tend to read all this language about wheat and chaff, about gathering, about the Spirit being poured out — we tend to read it as something that's going to happen. Some future day. Some end-of-the-world scenario. And I want to suggest, just for a minute, that Luke doesn't think that at all. Luke thinks it already happened. Right here. On Pentecost.

The harvest has already been brought in. The Spirit has already been poured out. The kingdom isn't drawing near — it's arrived.

And you have to remember, these folks didn't think about the end of the world the way we do. They couldn't conceive of the planet literally ending. For them, the end of the age was always about the world as they knew it ending and a new world beginning. Think about what we say at baptism — the old life passes away and a new life begins. That's the kind of ending they meant. Not the destruction of everything, but the transformation of everything.

Luke puts the moment all of this begins right here. On Pentecost. He starts the book of Acts with this story because the whole rest of the book is basically a manual for what it looks like to live in the new age. The kingdom is here. Now what?

I think that question of now what? — is the question this passage is asking us. And I think Luke gives us a clue in what he chooses to highlight about that morning.

Because here's the thing I keep coming back to. The miracle of Pentecost isn't only the fire. It isn't only the languages. The miracle, the thing that should stop us in our tracks, is the crowd. Look at who's there. People who on any other day would have nothing in common. People whose nations were sometimes at war with each other. People who would have crossed the street to avoid each other. All of them in one place. All of them hearing. All of them — somehow — not fighting.

And do you remember what the crowd watching this said about them? Verse 13. They said the disciples must be drunk. That was the only explanation they could come up with for what they were seeing — these people must have been into the new wine. Because what they were watching didn't make any sense. People who shouldn't be together — together. People who shouldn't be in community — in community. The only way to make sense of it was to assume somebody must have been drinking.

That's the miracle. That's what Luke wants us to see. And friends, if there's one thing I've learned in my own walk of faith, it's that the Holy Spirit really isn't in the business of making sense to us. The Spirit isn't worried about looking sensible. The Spirit is worried about love — love of God, love of neighbor — and pulling the two together until you can't tell them apart.

Have you ever tried to get a group of people to agree on something? We’re Presbyterians. Somebody told me once that if you ask seven Presbyterians about a piece of scripture, you'll get thirteen interpretations. And how many denominations do we have? How many splits, how many breakaways, how many "we can't worship with those people because"? And yet here at the very beginning of the church, Luke shows us a crowd that shouldn't be able to hold together — holding together. That's the new age. That's what it looks like.

And Jesus already told us how it happens. The language of life in this kingdom is not a language of words. Paul says in Romans that anything not done in faith is sin. Jesus says in Matthew that not everyone who says "Lord, Lord" is going to enter the kingdom — only the ones who do the will of God. The language of this kingdom is action. The language of love is action.

That's the whole point of stories like the Good Samaritan, when you really sit with it. Two religious professionals walk past a man in a ditch and ask the very reasonable question — if I stop to help, what happens to me? And the Samaritan, the outsider, the one nobody expected anything from, asks a different question. He looks at the man in the ditch and asks — if I don't stop, what happens to him? That's the kingdom question. That's the question of somebody who knows what time it is. The priest and the Levite are still living in the old age. The Samaritan is living in the new one. And his faith is not a thing he says. It's a thing he does.

So if Luke is right — if Pentecost already happened, if the kingdom is already here, if we are already the new community the Spirit pulled together out of people who shouldn't have been able to stand each other — then the question isn't when is the kingdom coming. The question is whether we're going to live like people who know it's here.

And I believe we can.

I believe in a church where Republicans and Democrats can pass the peace and mean it. Where Black folks and white folks hold the same hymnal. Where Jews and Muslims and Christians and Hindus can build something together instead of tearing each other apart. Where a mother in Israel can grieve alongside a mother in Palestine, because they have both lost children and a child is a child. I believe in a world where every kid can go to school without wondering if they'll make it through the day. I believe in a world where every child can eat the way my child eats. I believe in a world where the worth of a person isn't measured by what they look like, or who they love, or how much money they make, or what name they call God, or which party they vote for — but by the simple, scandalous fact that they were made in the image of God, and every single life is sacred.

That's the kingdom. That's what was inaugurated on Pentecost. And the world is going to tell us we're crazy for believing it. The world is going to say we've been drinking. And that's fine. Let them say it. They said it about the disciples too.

So this morning, on this Pentecost, hear me:

May the Holy Spirit rush into your life like a violent wind.

May you know that true faith is loving God.

May you live into Christ's radical notion of love.

And may you act on that love — because the language of love is action — until your part of this world is as holy, and as sacred, and as blessed, as God's kingdom is meant to be.

Amen.