5/19/24 Sermon

So, here’s the funny thing:  I grew up going to church, I did all the fancy education thingies where they teach you the big words etc and I learned the Greek and Hebrew and passed all the tests and you know what?  Never once until the other day did I ever ask myself what the word Pentecost means.  I always figured it had to mean something like “speaking in tongues” or “tongues of fire” and that’s why Pentecostals are called Pentecostals.  Or it meant something like “birthday of the church” or “beginning of the church” because this is when people believe it happened and the church actually began.  The truth is that the thought never even occurred to me to look it up.  So I looked it up.  You know what Pentecost means?  Ready to have your mind blown?

Pentecost is Greek for “50th”

Kind of takes the mystique out of the “Pentecostals”, doesn’t it? They’re the 50th-als.  Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.  And so then after I answered the question of what it means, my next question was why in the world is Pentecost called Pentecost?  And that’s for the very practical reason that Pentecost used to be exactly 50 days after Easter.  Now, it’s 7 weeks after Easter which is actually only 49 days and I looked the Greek word for 49th and it’s way harder to pronounce.

There’s another assumption about Pentecost that I never bothered to look in to as well. I always just figured it was an exclusively Christian Holiday like Christmas or Easter. And it was always about this story in Acts where the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples and the crowds and everyone was speaking in different languages and it was just this crazy thing.  But because I had realized that I had made assumptions about the word Pentecost itself, I decided to go through this scripture with a fine-tooth comb and I learned some interesting things.  Like that my assumptions were usually wrong.  So, let’s look at some of this.

Acts chapter 2 starts with verse 1.  That shouldn’t come as a surprise but look what it says.  It says “When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place.” Now, I never put much thought into that.  But when I read it and paid attention, I realized it could be saying one of two things. It could be saying that when the 50th day arrived, but why would they translate everything else into English besides 50th?  Or Pentecost was a title for an already established holiday and they were using the title.  And guess what?  There’s a Jewish Pentecost! Except Jewish people don’t necessarily call it by a Greek name.

They call it by it’s Hebrew name “Shavout” or Festival of Weeks.  It gets called Pentecost when they translated the Old Testament into Greek because “Shavout” falls on the 50th day from Passover. So, it got the nickname “Pentecost.”  And Shavout is a celebration of a few different things.  Firstly, it’s a harvest festival.

It’s the time when they would harvest the wheat. As an interesting side-note, Passover is when they would harvest barley.  Now, I just want to pause here for a second.  And we’ll get back to this point a little bit later.  But let this sink in… It’s a wheat harvest festival.  It’s the time where they literally separate the wheat from the chaff… Sound familiar?

Shavout is also the time where the Jewish people celebrate Moses coming down from Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments and giving the Jewish people the Torah or “the Law” So Pentecost was the time where Jewish people received the law.  Again, hold on to that.  We’re going to come back to that.

It was also another Pilgrimage festival which means good and devout Jews from all throughout the world would be coming to Jerusalem to celebrate this holiday.

So it makes sense that you would have aaalll these different people gathered together in Jerusalem when the disciples start speaking in tongues.  People would be coming from all over the known world to celebrate Pentecost or Shavout in the city.  It isn’t a small or minor holiday in their faith and it isn’t something exclusively Christian, except something exclusively Christian happens during it this time.

Now, here’s something interesting that baffles me about this story and I can’t quite figure it out because there are two ways of reading what happens again.  First, regardless of how we read it, if we pay attention, we notice that the Holy Spirit only descends on the Disciples.  There aren’t tongues of flames on everyone. I used to think that there were which is why I bring it up.  But there isn’t.  It only happens to the disciples.  But for the life of me I can’t figure out if the disciples were all talking in different languages or if people were only HEARING them in their own native tongues.  Is it the disciples were all speaking these specific languages or is it more like the UN where the German Ambassador speaks German and everyone has a little translator in their ear?

Verse 4 seems to suggest the former.  “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.”  Each of the Disciples were speaking a different language. BUT… The way the crowd responds. And the fact that Peter stands up and addresses the whole crowd and they all hear him in their own language seems to suggest the latter. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. Does it really matter?  Nope.  I’m just curious about how it happened.

Here’s what’s more important, I think.  Luke here in Acts is marking a dramatic shift in how faith and religion and ultimately “church” are going to be done and how they’re to be understood and lived out in a post-resurrection world - in a world that’s supposed to have dramatically changed with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Luke, this dramatic shift happens when the Holy Spirit is kind of thrust upon the community here at Pentecost.  That’s when everything changes and this split or separation happens where Christianity takes on a new and separate identity than a Jewish one.  Christianity becomes its own thing here for Luke. There’s a new vision that comes with receiving the Holy Spirit. And this Holy Spirit encounter isn’t taking place on this 50th day or on Pentecost by accident.  It’s a very intentional move.

We know that Pentecost originally was the Wheat Harvest festival where earlier we mentioned they literally separated the wheat from the chaff.  Jesus uses this language all throughout the gospels to talk about a time when God would gather in the faithful and separate them from the unfaithful.  John the Baptist even predicts that this is what Jesus is coming to do.  John says that Messiah will burn away the chaff with fire.  Now, it may be a bit of a stretch, but even John shortly before he’s executed admits that he gets some things wrong about the nature of the Messiah and comes to understand that maybe Jesus is a very different, albeit better, messiah than he thought. So, maybe John misunderstood what exactly the fire was and what it would do?

For us as Christians, we call Pentecost the beginning of the church for a few reasons. One of the reasons is that this is really the first time outside of Jesus when the proclamation of the gospel happens, Peter gives a rousing sermon like the one you’re hearing right now, the sacrament of Baptism is celebrated, and right after this, we see the first distinctly Christian community being formed.  One could say that this begins the separation between the Jewish and Christian faiths.    Could it be that these Gospel references to a time where wheat and chaff are separated aren’t an end of times prediction of what WILL come, but foreshadowing of what’s ALREADY happened in Pentecost?

Now, of course that has some rather offensive implications about Judaism. But what if all of this talk isn’t necessarily about Heaven and Hell per-se but about something else?  In the Bible, fire is often a symbol of purification.  Could it be that what Luke feels is happening at Pentecost and this wheat and chaff language is more about his views that the Christian faith and church is a purification of religion where the law is no longer the main emphasis, but rather the Spirit is the main emphasis?

After all, Originally Pentecost was a celebration of receiving the law and here the emphasis really shifts to the new community of faith receiving the Spirit.

First, we have the disciples receiving the spirit through tongues of fire and then we’re told after Peter preaches, 3,000 people are baptized and receive the Spirit.

Peter says in verses 38-39: “Change your hearts and lives. Each of you must be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This promise is for you, your children, and for all who are far away—as many as the Lord our God invites.”  So, Pentecost here moves from a celebration of when we receive the law to a celebration of when the faith community is brought together through the spirit…

And it’s interesting here that exactly 3,000 people were baptized because there were 3,000 people who died at Mount Sinai when the law was received because they were worshipping an idol. They were worshipping the Golden Calf. And the Law was given to keep people on the right track and practicing the right faith or the pure faith.  Luke is drawing a very clear comparison and parallel between these two events.  You see that?

Maybe what Luke is trying to say or convey to us above and beyond everything else is that in his mind, this whole Jesus movement is an attempt to return faith or religion back to it’s purest form.  And that the End of times, the apocalypse which literally means lifting of the veil,  isn’t something that’s GOING to happen but it’s something that’s ALREADY happened.

That the kingdom isn’t something that’s just drawn near or something that’s going to come, but that it already exists here and now in the Christian community.  Jesus has ALREADY come and collected the wheat.  The harvest has already been plowed.  And Luke starts Acts off with this story because the rest of the book is basically a manual of what it looks like and means to be the church and live into the reality of this new kingdom. Is Luke trying to tell us that the End of Ages already has come and we now are living in the new age? That the world as they knew it ended and a new age began?  And Luke puts the moment that this new age begins here, at Pentecost.

You see, they didn’t really understand the end of times or the end of ages like we do.  They couldn’t conceive of the actual possibility of the world literally ending.  Not like we do.  Not in the sense that someone could push a button and it’s all over.  For them, it was always about the world as they knew it, life as it was in the present moment becoming dramatically different - an end of the world AS THEY KNEW IT where the old existence ends and a new existence begins - not an actual end to the world and existence itself. Think about what we say at Baptism - the old life passes away and a new life begins.    That’s also why John in Revelation has God’s holy city descending here and God saying, “See, I make my home among mortals.” To mark the end of the apocalypse.  It isn’t a total destruction of the planet.  It’s a total destruction and reconstruction of life as we know it where we’re closer to God.

And I could totally be wrong and have totally missed the mark - and I honestly wish we could have a Q&A or a discussion right now about all of this - but I can’t get it out of my head that maybe what Luke is telling us is that we aren’t supposed to be waiting for this new age or the return of Jesus or some explosive “Left Behind” scenario to happen because he feels it already happened here in Pentecost and really what its all about is that it’s up to us to live into that reality and make sure this kingdom exists.   But, like I said, after you sitting through 20 minutes of this, I could be totally wrong about all of this.  So, what I think I’d like to do now is shut up and let us say together what it is we hope and believe.  So please join me in our affirmation of faith as printed in the bulletin this morning…