In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
Amen.
In
Jewish tradition, Pentecost, meaning the fiftieth day, commemorates the giving
of the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, fifty days after the Exodus. There
God speaks the words of the commandments to Moses, as it says in the book
Exodus, chapter 20, “wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it
in fire…while the whole mountain shook violently. As the blast of the trumpet
grew louder and louder, Moses would speak and God would answer him in thunder.”
Fire, smoke, thunder, noise, earthquakes, are components of a very dramatic and
even terrifying manifestation of the presence and power of God. Here God is
making his will known in an overpowering way to the tribe of wandering Hebrews,
recently escaped from Egypt, on their way to they-knew-not-where. We can all
picture this scene, and we can recall movie versions of it. The terror of the
people, their fear of death, accompany this experience. Moses even says to the
people, in a somewhat contradictory statement, “Do not be afraid, for God has
come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you.” So this first
Pentecost is one of power, described here as a volcanic eruption, in which God
makes himself known as the divine lawgiver. It is worth noting, by the way,
that the lawgiving doesn’t stop with the Ten Commandments; the next several
chapters of Exodus present a very long list of laws and ceremonial regulations,
meant to govern every detail of tribal life. In Exodus, God does not restrict
himself to generalities, but announces regulations and laws about slaves,
violence, property, restitution, and much, much more, all of them concerns of
the tribal people of the Exodus.
Christian Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Easter, and it
commemorates, as we know, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles and
those with them. In the first chapter of Acts, it says that the crowd numbers
about one hundred and twenty persons. If I understand the text correctly, I
think that is the total number of people, up to that point, who are either
witnesses of the resurrected Lord, or believers in the Resurrection. And this
may be speculation on my part, but I think that the number ‘one hundred and
twenty’ is significant, since it is a multiple of ‘twelve,’ the number of the
tribes of Israel. The story of the coming of the Holy Spirit is a story of the Spirit’s
descent on the Church, the New Israel, and it is possible that the number of
believers is expressive of this new understanding, of the Church as the New
Israel.
“And
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…divided
tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each one of
them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” The wind and the fire
recall the presence of God on Mount Sinai, but in this story there are only
wind, and tongues of fire, not the thunder and lightning and earthquakes and
smoke of Sinai. And there is no terror in this story, no fear of death, but
only the “rush of a violent wind” which fills the house, but doesn’t terrify
anyone.
But
bewilder them it does. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began
to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were
devout Jews from every nation…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.” As the story says, there are Jews living throughout the
Empire and beyond, and they speak the languages of the regions where they come
from. And they hear the apostles speaking about “God’s deeds of power,” in this
case not the giving of the law from a mountain top, but God’s deeds in Jesus,
and his latest deed, the outpouring of the Spirit.
Peter, in his sermon, the beginning of which we hear in today’s reading,
quotes the prophet Joel, who says that “God…will pour out [his] Spirit on all
flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see
visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” There is no tribal restriction
here, no merely local concern; all flesh, that is, all humanity, and perhaps
even every living thing, will receive this outpouring of the Spirit. The Holy
Spirit is not given to the Hebrews alone, but to the whole earth. And that is
the mission of the Church, to make the presence of the Spirit known, and God’s
deeds of power know, to the whole world, in all times and places.
Joel,
as Peter quotes him, does remind us of the events at Mount Sinai. God says,
according to Joel, that he “will show portents in the heaven above, and signs
on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to
darkness, and the moon to blood.” Joel is talking about eclipses of the sun and
moon, universal phenomena which people around the world can see. These portents
are not local events which affect one tribe or people only, like a volcano in
the Sinai desert, but affect tribes and peoples and nations around the world,
since they are visible to all. Joel’s prophecy, in other words, is universal,
not local or merely tribal, which is why Peter quotes him, and it teaches us
that the Church, the New Israel, comprises all the tribes and peoples of the
world. The work of the Holy Spirit, in making known God’s deeds of power, makes
them known to the whole world. The Holy Spirit speaks all the languages of
earth, past, present, and future, and is present to all peoples.
There
are no distinctions of gender or status either in Joel’s prophecy. When God
decreed laws and regulations concerning slaves and property and so on, at
Sinai, he took slavery for granted. Slaves had no rights at all, and clearly
were not members of the tribe. But Joel’s prophecy, as quoted by Peter, makes
it clear that God pours out his Spirit even upon slaves, males and females
both, “and they shall prophesy,” says the Scripture. Peter’s understanding of
the generosity of God is still not fully developed from our point of view, but
it is an advance on the understanding expressed in Exodus.
The
gifts of the Spirit that Peter quotes in Acts are prophecy, visions, and
dreams. And slaves of either gender receive these gifts. But the greatest gift
of all is salvation, as Joel says, “then everyone who calls upon the name of
the Lord shall be saved.” This is what the outpouring of the Spirit makes
possible. God, in sending his Spirit, is making it possible for us to call upon
his name, to invoke it, to open up to us the way to our eternal destiny. Joel,
and Peter, have revealed that God is making it possible for the human race to
grow spiritually far beyond merely local concerns, to the universal, even
eternal, realm of the Holy Spirit.
The
Apostle Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, develops the list of
gifts that we receive from the Spirit. Paul teaches us that the same Spirit
pours out varieties of gifts “to each…for the common good,” as he says. And we
all know what they are: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, the working of
miracles, prophecy, discernment, interpretation, and more. The Spirit allocates
gifts individually, for the good of the whole community,
So we
have come a long way from the Pentecost which commemorates the giving of the
Law to the Hebrews at Mount Sinai, to the Pentecost which recalls the
outpouring of the Spirit on the Church, the New Israel, for the good of the
whole world. As the Collect for Pentecost says, “Almighty God, on this day you
opened the way to eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of
your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching
of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth.”
In
nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
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