Talk About Power
Acts 2:1-21
As you’re probably aware, Meals on Wheels began a new portable-meals program a few weeks ago that operates out of our basement. Seniors who register and qualify can come to the church on Tuesdays between 12:30 and 1:30 and receive a take-home bag with five frozen meals.
Word of the program is spreading. The first week not a single person showed up. The second week there were two. This past Tuesday, which was week 3, there were about fifteen people. Among them were two people who didn’t speak any English—not a word—and the registration form is not available in Spanish. Digging deep into the recesses of my brain to access those memories of high school and college Spanish class, I was able to help both people fill out much of the form.
That is, until I reached the section in which applicants self-assess their risk of malnutrition. The self-assessment is a list of ten questions asking about eating habits, like how many meals you eat per day, whether you eat alone, whether your weight has significantly increased or decreased recently. Each question is assigned a numeric value. If the answer to a question is “yes,” you circle the number. If the answer is “no,” you do nothing. The sum of all the circled numbers indicates the level of risk of malnutrition.
People filling the form out in English sometimes need help, but trying to translate each question into Spanish, not to mention explaining the concept of the self-assessment, was beyond my ability. Fortunately, one of the applicants was bilingual, and she was able to translate what I couldn’t.
If that bilingual applicant had not been there, I probably would have tried to use the translation app on my phone, which would have been time-consuming and who knows how effective. It would be that or pray for the Holy Spirit to descend on me and grant me the ability to speak fluently in a foreign tongue, as happens with the disciples in today’s reading from Acts.
Today, of course, is the Day of Pentecost, and this reading from Acts is traditionally read on this day. Pentecost commemorates the giving of the Holy Spirit to the disciples. The giving of the Spirit is the fulfillment of what Jesus had promised would occur to the disciples after he left them following his resurrection and ascension.
Pentecost marks the start of the Church. To the surprise of many, the crucifixion of Jesus does not bring an end to his movement. Quite the contrary. Even with Jesus no longer physically present to lead them, the number of his followers quickly expands beyond the eleven that he had handpicked as his disciples. Those eleven, together with Matthias, who was chosen to replace Judas, are now looked to as leaders by the growing number of Christian converts.
In that sense, you can think of Pentecost as a kind of graduation for the disciples. It’s the moment they move from being students of the rabbi Jesus to proclaimers of the risen Christ. School’s over. It’s time to get a job. And their job is to proclaim salvation and the forgiveness of sins in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
As the passage begins, the disciples are all together in one place. What that place is exactly is not specified. As there were yet no church buildings, it could be the home of a local Christian in Jerusalem. The city is fuller than usual because it is the time of a major Jewish festival for which travelers from throughout the Mediterranean region would have come to Jerusalem.
What’s more, Jerusalem is a cosmopolitan city, drawing not just pilgrims but immigrants from Asia Minor, North Africa, Mesopotamia, and of course, Rome. Jerusalem is a bit like Queens, with a different language heard on each city block.
The disciples, however, are all from Galilee, well north of Jerusalem. Galilee is a rural, agricultural region far from the action of the city. It’s an area of farmers and fishermen, not scholars and merchants who would have studied or been exposed to languages other than their own. This is what makes what happens next so ridiculously and riotously remarkable!
I’m going to just read the passage: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability.”
The descriptive skill of Luke, the author of Acts, is on full display here. He uses metaphor and simile to paint in broad and vivid brushstrokes a dramatic scene of what is basically just men talking. First, there is a sound like the rush of a violent wind, but it’s not actually a violent wind. There then appear divided tongues as of fire, but they’re not literally tongues of fire.
What actually happens is that the Holy Spirit empowers these poor, uneducated farmers and fishermen, who likely have seen little of the world beyond their local village, to speak fluently in languages that they’ve never even heard let alone learned or studied!
And mind you, these are not the tongues of angels that the apostle Paul speaks of in his First Letter to the Corinthians. The disciples are not speaking in tongues in an ecstatic sort of way. These are human languages spoken by people throughout the Empire, in Parthia, Mede, and Elam (all in modern-day Iran), in Mesopotamia (Iraq), in Judea (Israel), in Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia (all in modern-day Turkey), in Egypt, in Libya, in Crete, in Arabia, and in Rome. (I wonder if Peter, the first pope, according to the tradition of the Catholic Church, was granted the ability to speak Latin?)
All this commotion, this chorus of voices singing the same tune but in different languages, begins to draw a crowd. Jews from all over the Empire—all the places that I just mentioned—who call Jerusalem home have come to investigate what’s happening. They are, in a word, bewildered. They hear their native tongues being spoken by men who’ve never traveled further than Jerusalem.
For some, bewilderment turns to wonder, and they ask, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” Translation: These are hicks from the sticks. How is it that they can speak in our native tongues? How can a fisherman from Galilee speak the language of a Parthian, an Egyptian, or a Mesopotamian? Amazed and perplexed, they say to one another, “What does this mean?”
That is the right question to ask. What does this mean? Is it some sort of parlor trick? Have the disciples had too much to drink? Indeed, the cynics in the crowd think all this spirited talk is not due to the Holy Spirit but rather to alcoholic spirits. “They are filled with new wine,” they sneer.
I love Peter’s response. Having heard the accusation, he raises his voice and addresses the entire assembly: “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” (Nine o’clock might be too early for Peter, but not for some of my friends back in the day.)
More important than the hour of the day is what the disciples are saying. They speak of God’s deeds of power. This is not power as the pagan world understands it—then or now. This is not the power to crush one’s enemies or the power to impose one’s will upon another. That is how Rome understood power, and unfortunately, it appears to be how many leaders today in Silicon Valley and in Washington understand power—as an extension of their own egos.
But the power of God is the exact opposite. God’s power does not serve God’s ego. Through Jesus Christ God empties himself of power, taking on human flesh, taking into himself all human frailty, and taking upon himself the full weight of all human sin, so that through his death—by some mysterious and miraculous transference—his death gives us life.
We still look for power in all the wrong places…in money, in politics, in celebrity, in all the trifling ways that we try to exert control and bend the world to our will.
That is the power of God. The power to forgive sins, the power to raise the dead, the power to defeat the forces of sin and death by becoming subject to them. Yes, God’s power is revealed in the powerlessness of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross!
Let that sink in. If you were raised in the church, you may not have come to terms with just how radical a claim this is. That God’s power and our salvation would take the shape of a Roman cross is so absurd as to be laughable. It’s counterintuitive and countercultural, not only for people of the first century but even for us today. Paul says that the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles. And I don’t think that two thousand years of history have made it any easier to accept or understand. We still look for power in all the wrong places…in money, in politics, in celebrity, in all the trifling ways that we try to exert control and bend the world to our will.
But Pentecost is about the power of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is about the Spirit breathing life into a band of disciples that the world had assumed were as good as dead. And that same power is at work in your life and in the life of this church. Don’t look now, my fellow Presbyterians, but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, would like to have a word with you.