Pentecost is a weird feast day. If you don’t remember the story, it’s from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter two. Jesus has been crucified and resurrected; for forty days (according to the first chapter of Acts) he spends time with his followers, showing them his wounds, giving them additional teachings, and preparing them for the next step. Forty days after his resurrection, he is bodily raised into the clouds, or in fancy churchy language, He Ascendeth Into Heaven.
Then, ten days later, is the Jewish festival of Shavuot. This is the celebration of the wheat harvest and of the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Shavuot means “Weeks” or “A Week of Weeks,” and is celebrated seven weeks after the second day of Passover; in the Greek that many Jewish people of the first century would have known and used, it was called Pentecost, or “fifty,” for fifty days after the first day of Passover. (Christians do some fun slight-of-hand with the math here, and land our celebration of Pentecost forty-nine days after Easter, so that it lands on a Sunday too.)
During this festival, the followers of Jesus are all together; he commanded them to stay in Jerusalem and wait to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit,” a power he had promised to them before his death as the way to keep them in truth and community. Suddenly, they hear a powerful wind (wind and spirit share a root word in Greek) that has no clear source. The sound of the wind fills the house (probably two or three rooms total in size) where they are gathered. Amidst this sound with no accompanying wind are flames, appearing randomly throughout the crowd, and then a “tongue of fire” (like a single flame) lands on each person there. (It’s usually depicted as resting somewhere in front of the forehead or directly above the head.) These followers of Jesus then gain, from this invisible rushing wind and flames that do not burn, the ability to speak in other languages, so that every devout Jewish person in Jerusalem can understand them. “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!”
Like I said, it’s a weird feast day.
Pentecost is supposed to be The Birth Of The Church, on par with Christmas and Easter as far as importance in the liturgical calendar and the life of faith. But even if you haven’t been to Target recently you probably know that there isn’t a seasonal setup the way we regularly see light-up Santas and plastic eggs. I’m not even sure what a commercialized Pentecost would look like: little flame headbands for everyone to wear? Does a grown-up dress in a giant bird costume and make fake hurricane noises? Why isn’t the Duolingo owl sending me eighteen reminders today to learn how to say “No, we’re not drunk, it’s 9am”?
Pentecost is a weird feast day, because it’s supposed to be as important as Christmas and Easter, and—well, it’s not, and yet it is. Some of us are cloaked in liturgical practice, and we know the secrets of Pentecost like where the red altar banners are stored and how to say “Phrygia and Pamphylia.” But a good number of Christians, and my wild guess of 96% of non-Christians, have no idea when or why Pentecost is. (I’m assuming Jewish people might have a passing understanding that it’s a Christianization of Shavuot.) Pentecost could be as full of symbolism as Christmas but probably has as much weight for people in the pews as Proper 22—as in, you have no idea what or when that is, not much of a clue about how to find out, and little idea why it might make any difference to anything at all.
Sometimes, in trying to crack open Scripture, I let the story breathe. I read it over and over, poking at the edges, trying to find the places where it might contract or expand. It’s been a few years since I’ve asked our Sunday reader to slog through Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, because too often the proper pronunciation of faraway cities becomes the focus of the story, and we can miss what God was up to in wondering if the reader really should have said Cretans. So the story contracts, from a beautiful and representative and ancient and intimidating list, into “every corner of the earth.” Or the story expands, and we add Italians and Norwegians and Germans, the native peoples of Mexico and the enslaved people stolen from Senegal, all of us hear God’s deeds of power in the same language our mothers sang us to sleep. Or I let my mind wander down the path of what are God’s deeds of power, really, in a society so beholden to who has power and how we can keep it, and so uninterested in holding the abuser to account? What would stop a whole city of every nation in its tracks, to say:
“These people are complete strangers
and yet what they say, we can understand.
This isn't insider language.
This isn't setting up walls and demanding we change if we want to belong.
This is something that sounds real.
This isn't a judgement handed down from on high.
These aren't ancient stories from other people long dead.
These people are talking about divine action right here and now.
Can that be true?
Does the same power that created the universe care about me?
Look at all the mess we can make, all the hurt we can cause each other.
Look at how flawed I feel, how forgotten and alone.
Can God really be this interested in us when we can be so broken,
so lost to each other and ourselves?
It seems like all the barriers between us and God are suddenly falling away.
Can that be possible?”
In the story of Pentecost, of the descending of the Holy Spirit into the world, a whole city of faithful people can hear something new. They come running, and beg for explanations (though some of them laugh and say it must just be drunken babbling.) Peter, the Rock, the one who sank like a stone and the one who denied Jesus before the rooster crowed in the morning, Peter who has known what it’s like to be so close to being right and still get it wrong, proclaims to them the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, and lays his death at their feet. This isn’t a “Jesus died because you sinned” kind of lecture; Peter is likely speaking to at least a few people who were part of the crowds who shouted for Jesus’ crucifixion. They are “cut to the heart” (the writer of Luke-Acts has a way with language, don’t they!) and say: Now what? And Peter tells them “Repent and be baptized.”
“Repent” is a record-scratch noise for me, and I’m not the only queer person who shudders at it. It follows me to Pride on the signs protesters proudly bear; it’s in my ears more than once, by men who find my writings impossible to bear without the clearly necessary response of monotonously reading 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 into my church voicemail. Repent! they shout at me for daring to believe God’s promises are wide enough for my marriage vows. And so, when Peter cries out “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation!” I feel the protective eyeroll rise in me, the straight-arming to keep the violence and hate at bay. So I sit with it. I wait for the story to breathe. Where does it expand, where does it contract? What did Peter know about repentance, and what does it mean for my heart that too often hates itself?
"I know how easy it is to miss the mark.
We live under the oppressive regime of Rome;
some of us want to go along to get along,
and some of us want to rise up in violent revolt,
but neither have set us free.
To survive, sometimes we numb ourselves
with however we can bury our feelings,
or lash out at those around us,
or tum our anger inward towards ourselves.
Most of us are living day to day, paycheck to paycheck;
we fear we will lose the little we have,
and we can be resentful any time it is threatened.
All of us have felt the crush of another’s anger,
another’s numbness, another’s inward focus.
We are here to declare to you:
we believe God believes
in another way for us.
In the person of Jesus of Nazareth,
we witnessed how God's focus
is on the margins of the world.
Those who have been pushed to the edges—
the women, the children,
the sick, the supposed unclean,
the sex workers, the hungry—
that's where God wants to be.
All the walls we'd carefully built—
God in skin was in the business of knocking them down.
God in skin acted like righteousness was reconciliation.
And no matter what mess we've made,
no matter how we'd been complicit or complacent,
we believe in God's accounting that all the records were thrown out.
None of our past mistakes,
now acknowledged and repented and amended,
would be held against us going forward.
And today we are here to say:
this promise is for you too.
No matter where you come from or where you cannot return to,
God wants you welcomed now.
No matter what words you need it proclaimed in,
God is speaking your belovedness.
If you want in on this new way of life we've received,
come on in - the water's fine.”
May the weirdness be a breath of life for you, beloveds.