The image that looms large in our minds of Pentecost is likely a chaotic one—people standing up, blades of fire on their foreheads, speaking in unintelligible kinds of sounds, so strange and uncoordinated that folks in Jerusalem thought the disciples had gotten drunk on cheap wine (Acts 2:13). What’s happening in this image, and what does it tell us about the Holy Spirit’s place in our life?

            Acts’ image is only one of a whole host of moments in the Scriptures where God’s spirit is poured out. John’s is another sort of “Pentecost” that we heard in worship just a week after Easter (John 20:19-23). In that scene, the Resurrected Jesus appears suddenly behind closed doors and gets right up close to them, and breathes on them. For John, Pentecost is primarily about creation. In the Spirit, we are like Adam being created again; we are like Ezekiel’s dry bones that God says will be given real flesh once again. So, to have the Holy Spirit is to be more than battery-powered mannequins. We’re real, living beings who live and breathe in the Spirit of God.

If the central image of the Holy Spirit for John is our breathing, the central image for the Holy Spirit in Acts is our speaking.But it’s not just any speech, and it’s not even the kind of strange, almost alien-sounding speech we’re used to thinking about. What speech the Holy Spirit gives the disciples is human, intimate speech, suddenly knowing another’s language down to the tiniest little pocket of phrasing. Acts says that they began to speak in different tongues, which is Greek’s way of saying different languages. People from all over Jerusalem listened in and were shocked to hear “the great acts of God” (2:11) spoken in their own native language. The disciples were suddenly able to speak not only in Greek or Hebrew or Latin (languages of their people or languages of the empire), but languages of some small pockets of speech. Imagine a Galilean suddenly speaking with a Southern accent or knowing what a “Herby Curby” is by power of the Holy Spirit.

So, speech, people, and place are all connected. When Katie and I first started dating, I used the phrase “might-could” in a conversation. A foreign expression for anyone outside of South Carolina. It didn’t even phase me but it struck Katie right away as awkward. There’s a kind of language we use that’s just ours, found only in the places where we’re from. It’s a language that would never be taught in any textbook, or any high school class, and includes repertoire of phrases you can’t learn without living in the place where they’re spoken. Might-could is in that repertoire, I learned. So, Katie has now moved to the place where might-could is spoken, and when we were on vacation with her parents, it slipped out: she was talking with her parents and said, “Yeah actually, we might could do that!” Only me and her parents noticed it. And it sounded strange to her parents, but it sounded very near to home to me.

 When Acts says that the disciples began speaking in different tongues, this is the depth of speech they receive—the speech of people and places, not of textbooks and classes. By the Spirit, God has opened the lines of deep communication, not for human enterprises (the goal of Babel), but for the purposes of speaking the truth of Christ with as much creativity as uniqueness as each languages could manage. There was to be nowhere the name of Christ could not be spoken, nowhere the power of God could not be made known. So, for us, to live in the wake of the gift of the Holy Spirit is not only to be made alive like a new Adam, but is also to be given the gift of discovering God at work in other people too. The Spirit even drives us to learn another’s language. When we speak about Christ, we don’t just sit back and wait until someone has learned our authoritative way of speaking about God, we wait until we have learned their language, and when the Spirit has taught us a new tongue (or a new idiom!), then we fashion every detail of that language to tell what God has done in Christ. We learn to speak then as if with someone else’s tongue. That power of the Spirit is one which, through patience and hope, binds us together in love so that, as Paul says in Philippians, “every tongue would confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:11). Pentecost is the beginning of that confession.

Learn more about other important updates in the latest church newsletter: The Epistle – June 6, 2024