Relationship and Love in the Holy Spirit
Pentecost | Acts 2:1-21, John 7:37-39
One of the favorite things churches do on Pentecost is read the Acts passage in multiple languages. Sometimes even at the same time! The confusion and cacophony can create the most entertaining and emotionally destabilizing church experience! And for so many of us, it is a novel experience to hear scripture read in another language, which, for the majority, invites us to experience what non-native speakers experience all of the time.
As entertaining and enlightening as this practice is, it can also pull us away from digging into the event itself. This is a story of the masses all hearing a message in their language. It is about everyone hearing naturally.
N.T. Wright describes the prevalence of Greek in first century Jerusalem as similar to English in the modern world. It was dominant and the language others picked up as a second or third language to do simple tasks wherever they go. So a Holy Spirit event, a great showing to the people, could easily get its point across in Greek. Most everybody there would have gotten the point.
This isn’t about the languages, but it is about language.
Expectations and Power
Hearing the Spirit in our own language is intimate. When a person speaks to us as we are, it is like being seen. This is why we give such authority to people who know our names, who look us in the eye, who reveal that they are listening.
And unlike a show that destabilizes us, putting us in mind of our vast difference, Pentecost was an event that drew the different people together to feel alike.
What was destabilizing, at least for the apostles, was just how much they still had something else in mind.
In chapter one of Acts, the last question the disciples ask Jesus as he begins ascending is “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Which seems like an innocuous question now, as the church tends to rearticulate the reign of Christ and the Kingdom of God as a spiritual rule from a metaphysical plain, but I’m sure they’re being serious. Like, OK, is this when we get the power to rule the world? Which, at this moment, has the whiff of Hebrew Nationalism.
I want to make this as plain as possible. The disciples thought they were following Jesus into Jerusalem to destroy the Roman Empire. Even as Jesus told them that wasn’t their work, they all did that elbow knock and the sly wink, saying “sure boss, they’ll ‘lift you up’ alright.” And even after it was over and they faced the tomb and saw the resurrected Jesus and he said, this is a love thing, they ware still winking and saying “sure boss, I get you.”
The power the apostles expected to receive was guns to fire. What they got was tongues of fire and a momentary ability to speak languages they didn’t know.
Obvious Misunderstanding
For modern Christians, this is the most important detail. That the apostles didn’t study other languages. This wasn’t research. It wasn’t even them. They just started talking and the Spirit did the work.
How often we think the effort is the point. That we must learn the right words, to say the right words, to attract the right people. What an awful, exhausting way to live that has nothing to do with Scripture and everything to do with serving our own interests. To accumulate power.
Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit! It is about the beautiful openness of the Dream of God. Tactic and spectacle isn’t the point when we fail to grasp the theme.
We see this dynamic in action in the gospel passage, too.
The people are gathered at the Temple in Jerusalem for the Festival of Booths, which is a big celebration with big, festive liturgy, when everything they do once gets done seven times. It is a big deal. It is like the Christmas Eve service for us, I suppose, if we did the service downtown and the whole city just sort of wanders in and out. And while everybody is singing and the priests are carrying the water of Siloam around the altar seven times, Jesus yells, like just shouts out that anyone who is thirsty, anyone who wants the good stuff, the real living water, should come his way.
Yeah. This is a spectacle Jesus is creating. And some people are furious that he is messing with the liturgy. He seems to be making it about himself, saying Look at me! I’m the truth! Everything they say about Jesus seems to be right. I mean, in this moment, Jesus seems like a raging narcissist.
Introducing the Holy Spirit
But here, Jesus doesn’t seek to draw attention to himself. He’s trying to introduce them to the Holy Spirit like Andrew introduced Peter to Jesus. He’s trying to tell the people that the living water doesn’t flow from the dancing around the altar, it flows from our relationship to the Holy Spirit.
It would be awesome if everybody got that. Just like it would be awesome if everybody got the power of the Holy Spirit isn’t something to wield like a sword, to empower a nation like an army, or to enrich a politician like insider trading. The apostles were wrong about the form of power, its nature, how it would work for them. And not because Jesus misled them. It was just so hard to hear that in their own language. A language built of oppression and vengeance.
Pentecost, like the Resurrection, reveals the nature of divine power is a fundamental rejection of coercive, violent authority. It is the opposite of their (and our) expectations, because it is material, but not violent; spiritual, but not merely therapeutic; emotional, but not manipulative; metaphorical, but entirely tangible; personal, but completely relational and inescapably communal.
We continue to mistake the nature of divine power because of how our peers constantly frame it in binary, exclusive terms which entrench violence and abuse as inevitable, hope and caring as aspirational, and joy and despair as optional — because we just don’t work hard enough.
In Pentecost, like Jesus in the Temple, the Spirit’s great reveal makes liars out of the powerful and brings hope to people who wouldn’t dare seek it out.
Our True Nature
So friends, we gather with this same Spirit today. The one who comes to reveal the true nature of God is love, is relationship, is joy. And she comes in the rushing wind and chatter of morning doves nesting outside the front door, in our gathering for worship and for service and activism in the community. She is with us as Jesus was with the disciples and as the God of Hope and Wonder was with the Hebrews in their four decades’ wandering in the desert.
The miracle is presence, is relationship, is being. And this isn’t just ontological and metaphorical — it isn’t just the way to write up our understanding of the cosmology of God within Godself — it’s about our everything. It’s our family and church, our neighborhood and community. It’s about voting and protesting and communing and studying and graduating and moving to new communities. We’re talking about the way we care for loved ones and reorganize our lives after a medical event or adapt to new ways of seeing our spouses, our children, our aging parents.
Pentecost is about the way we order our lives together. Weeks of relationship talk in the gospels sets us up for this. That the Triune God is relationship like we all are, our entire existence is, like the way we choose and hope to be in this world is. And we are given enough grace to join in this wild recreation of the cosmos by loving the people around us and living like that is true.
Today, let us go forth rejoicing that this world and these people are made for joy, common joy, to embody joy with the true power of the Spirit: love.