The Day of Pentecost ends the Great Season of Easter. In Acts 1, St Luke tells us that before the resurrected Jesus was taken into heaven, he told the disciples about the Father's promised gift of the Holy Spirit to wait in Jerusalem until the promise was fulfilled. A few days later, on the Day of Pentecost, the promise was fulfilled when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, empowering them to witness Jesus to the ends of the earth. This is the church's birth day; hence, the Day of Pentecost is the church's birthday.
The Feast of Pentecost is a thanks offering of first fruits in the tradition of the Israelites. It is also known as the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Harvest, celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover. It is a joyous time to give thanks and present offerings for the new grain of the summer wheat harvest in Israel. The name "Feast of Weeks" was given because God commanded the Jews to count seven full weeks (or 49 days) beginning on the second day of Passover and then present offerings of new grain to the Lord as a lasting ordinance (Leviticus 23:15-16) The term Pentecost comes from the Greek word meaning "fifty."
Since the second century, the Day of Pentecost has been a time to baptise catechumens (those who had received instructions in the faith) who could not be baptised on Easter Day. In northern Europe and England, the feast was called White Sunday (Whitsunday) because of the special white garments worn by the newly baptized.
The Message
It would have been a wonderful experience for the twelve Apostles, the Mother of Jesus, Jesus’ brothers, and other women to experience the gift of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. As Luke reports, it had been a dramatic event. While they were together, the event started with a sudden sound from Heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind. It filled all the house where they were sitting, and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.
As Luke reports in Acts 1:15, there were about 120 people at the beginning. Then, many people were attracted to the place by the sound and heard the Apostles speaking their respective languages. Peter then gave the main address to the crowd. At the end of his sermon, about three thousand were baptised, and the church was born.
How did it all come to be? Jesus promised the Holy Spirit, and that was expected to happen. But how did the average disciple who only spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, the common language of Judea in Jesus’ day, speak in foreign languages? The brief bios of the disciples in the Gospels tell us that they only had primary education. Apart from the Aramaic they knew, they may have been able to hold a basic conversation in Greek.
St Luke says that the foreigners to Jerusalem heard the disciples speaking in other languages because the Spirit made it possible. What does that mean?
Today, I want to draw our focus on the topic of disciples speaking in foreign languages.
Besides the main event of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciples, the disciples speaking in many languages has been the most important feature of the Pentecost story for me. Why? The foreigners hearing the disciples speak eloquently in their native tongues brought them to the faith. By this, did I mean the Arabs and Egyptians heard the disciples speaking in Arabic and Egyptian? Not necessarily.
I thank God for an experience I had in Sharjah, a small emirate of the UAE. It was the 5th of April 2015. The day was a Sunday on which an Ethiopian congregation that I had assisted in establishing was celebrating their third anniversary. This three-hundred-strong congregation was founded and led by a godly husband-and-wife team, Pastors Sebhat and Konjit.
All the congregation members were migrant labourers: housemaids, cleaners, drivers, construction workers, and the like. The two pastors, too, were labourers (driver and housemaid). They worked for a wealthy Emirati who, for some reason, had given Sebhat and Konjit better terms of employment and good living conditions.
Over the six years of their life in Sharjah, the couple earned a Certificate of Theology (from the Gilgal Theological School in Sharjah). The congregation was formed through the dedicated ministry of Sebhat and Konjit among the migrant workers during their spare time. The ministry mainly involved praying with frequently mistreated, underpaid, and often physically or sexually abused female labourers.
Since I helped them to establish their congregation and provided a hall for worship at the Anglican Church premises in Sharjah, I was the chief guest at the third-anniversary celebration service.
Today, I can admit that I was not physically or emotionally fit to attend the service on that day. Physically, I was exhausted. Emotionally, I was disturbed because I was facing an exceedingly difficult time in the chaplaincy. There were visible and invisible forces within the chaplaincy that were working to destabilise the church's work. The situation was so unsettling that I had almost decided to conclude my ministry there and return home to Melbourne. However, I did not know how to resolve the issues satisfactorily and draw my ministry to a conclusion.
However, I agreed to attend the service because I wanted to recognise and affirm the ministry of these two remarkable servants of God. I knew well that, according to their custom, the service would go on for at least three solid hours. I also knew that the whole service would be conducted in Amharic, a dialect spoken by Ethiopians, and I would not understand anything they said.
Following a warm welcome to me through an interpreter, my five-minute congratulatory remarks, and an opening prayer, the service started with singing songs of praise one after another. This practice of continuously singing songs of praise. This praise and worship lasted for about an hour, with a loud band playing in the background. Then three long Bible readings followed and a long pre-sermon prayer by the pastor’s wife, Konjit. I remember that this prayer went on for about 15 minutes. All of this is in their language, Amharic.
Then, Pastor Sebhat started his sermon, and I settled in for the next two hours of the service. Despite Pastor Sebhat’s illustrative and energetic delivery, I did not know what he was saying. Then, as soon as he delved into the less energetic second part of the sermon, something remarkable happened.
Suddenly, I heard him starting a sentence of his sermon in Sinhalese, my mother tongue. I jolted in my seat, wondering whether I had dosed off to sleep and had gone into a dream state. Embarrassedly, I gently scanned the congregation I was facing to see whether anyone had seen me asleep with my head down. Surprisingly, I noticed that the sermon captured everybody and was not looking at me at all. Then, I realised I had not fallen off to sleep.
Pastor Sebhat went on to preach, and I heard everything he said in Sinhalese. Looking at the congregation again, they were captured by what he said and followed him in Amharic.
The things he was saying in his familiar voice, which I heard in Sinhalese, were directly addressed to me and about the situation I was experiencing in the chaplaincy. I knew he did not see the problem or any issues I grappled with.
Even if he had heard about the situation, there was no way that this gentleman—who only spoke Amharic and grammatically disjointed elementary English—could speak Sinhalese. Sinhalese would be utterly foreign and unknown to him. I heard him speak Sinhalese eloquently, expressed by poets and the educated. His body language, intonation, stress on words, rhythm, pitch range, pausing, and phrasing were all perfect.
I was captivated by everything I heard through Pastor Sebhat. They were words of encouragement spoken to me in the first person, words to uplift me, words of advice on the directions I need to take, words of assurance that God would be with me through the situation, and about things to happen in the future. Everything said had Scriptures as the foundation and reference—everything in Sinhalese.
I knew he had preached for a long time, but the time I heard him preaching in Sinhalese could have been much lengthier, at least in my mind. I was entirely engrossed in every word he spoke. After I heard everything I was meant to receive, I remember hearing Pastor Sebhat’s sermon in Amharic again. Shortly, the sermon ended with a call to prayer.
I thank God for this beautiful experience. Everything conveyed in the sermon was how things unfolded in the months after I returned home. This experience transformed my understanding of what happened on the day of Pentecost.
When the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples on Pentecost, I wondered whether the foreigners had a similar experience to mine. Whether the disciples spoke in Aramaic or Greek, the miracle the Holy Spirit enabled to happen was for the many foreigners to hear what the disciples spoke in their languages. The same could be said of Peter’s address to the crowd, which led some three thousand persons on that day to offer themselves for baptism and be the first members of the church (Acts 2:14-47).
Would you think these persons would have committed their lives to the faith and asked for baptism if only they had vaguely inferred what had been preached? Would you commit your life to a new faith if you heard three or four words that resemble your mother tongue from a sermon in Konkani by a charismatic preacher, for example? (Konkani is the language of a small group of people living on the west coast of India, constituting only 00.11% of the world’s population. English is spoken by 6% of the world’s population)
This miracle on the day of Pentecost invites us to a greater understanding of:
- how Jesus continues his ministry on earth through the Holy Spirit;
- how His promises (which we learnt over the last few Sundays since Easter) are being fulfilled;
- the empowerment the Baptism the Holy Spirit gives us to live in this world joyfully as permanent citizens of Heaven;
- we will be clothed with power from on high (Luke 24:49 and Acts 2:33)
- we will be empowered to witness to Jesus in our communities and beyond (Acts 1:8; 4:31)
- we will be transformed to live new lives reflecting our Lord’s life in everything we do (Romans 8:9–11; 2 Corinthians 3:18).
- the room Jesus promised us in his Father’s House (John 14: 2&3); and,
- the deep and lasting communion Jesus established between us, him, and God (John 14:20)
All the above are aspects of the church God has established through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. We will explore all these in more detail in the weeks following Pentecost.
I have two other beautiful insights about the miracle of disciples speaking in different tongues on the day of Pentecost that I want to share with you briefly.
The first: when God wants to speak to an individual or a group of people and give a specific message to edify, direct, prophesy what is to happen, and/or fulfil a promise, God does speak to us through the least expected person.
The miracle of Pentecost and my personal experience testify that God may choose to talk to anyone faithful to God. That person may not even speak the language we speak, but through the enabling of the Holy Spirit, we will hear that person speaking to us in our mother tongue.
According to St. Paul, whoever may speak in a tongue unknown to them to bring a message of God to us speaks to God and reveals the mysteries of God (1 Corinthians 14:2).
The second is an insight I am still pondering. It is the insight that whether the Holy Spirit enables a person to speak in his or her language—which we will hear in our mother tongue—is, in fact, the language of Heaven. The Holy Spirit somehow makes the language of Heaven transcend the language in which the message is spoken and the language in which the message is heard.
So, the person speaking may not realise that the Holy Spirit has taken over the language s/he is speaking to talk to the person speaking a different language. In the meantime, the hearer will hear what is being said in the purity of his/her language. When this happens, even if the speaker may never know, the person receiving the message will surely realise that there is something extraordinary about what is being heard.
I want to reflect more on this subject and share it with you when we meet for worship in the coming weeks.
In closing, I want to share one more piece of evidence that God spoke to me through Pastor Sebhat’s church anniversary sermon.
After I returned to Melbourne in August 2015, I received a DVD of the service from Pastor Sebhat and Konjit, with a note of thanks for supporting their mission church. Excitingly, I fast-forwarded the DVD on my TV to where Pastor Sebhat started the sermon and watched it to the end. In the entire sermon, which ran for 57 minutes, he did not speak a word that would even remotely resemble Sinhalese.
On the day of Pentecost, Jesus’ promise to send us the Holy Spirit was fulfilled. Through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, God’s gift of Jesus to humanity was proclaimed to all the world. Through this proclamation, we have been called to know God’s ways so that the same Spirit could be gifted to us and our children, and we can also bear witness to Jesus through our lives in the world. Amen
