Homily for Pentecost, or Whitsunday
Psalm 104:1-2, 13-24, 33-34, Acts 2:1-11, 1 Corinthians 12:4-13, John 14:8-17
I was born at 5:45 P.M. on Wednesday, March 5, 1947. For the past 58 years, I have commemorated that birthday with friends and family. You also celebrate your own birthdays and the birthdays of other friends and family. Those days in history are unique. As far as this world is concerned, you are only born once, no matter how many times you subsequently commemorate that event.
And, so it is with the Church. Pentecost from the earliest days of the Church has been known as the Birthday of the Church. The Church is the Body of Christ, and that Body is formed by the work of the Holy Spirit of which Paul speaks in the epistle appointed for today:
12 For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. 13 For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.
That work of the Spirit of Christ began on the Day of Pentecost, in the scene set before us in the first lesson for today, from Luke’s account of that Pentecost recorded for us in Acts. 2.
On this Birthday of the Church I want to spend some moments on the remarkable details in Luke’s account, some of the well known to you, others perhaps not so well-known. Luke begins by telling us that “they were all assembled in one place with one accord.” These persons are identified in the first chapter of Acts where Luke records the names of the eleven disciples, and he also adds that they were with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers. This, then, is the setting for the Day of Pentecost:
The next thing that Luke records would have resonated with those who had heard familiar passages read in the synagogue all their lives. Luke says that “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Early Jewish Christians reading these words would have likely thought of something we do not usually think of. “The House” is a common Jewish term for the Temple, because it is the dwelling place of the Lord on Earth. Jesus referred to the Temple in this way, he was driving out the money changers and telling them, “My father’s house is a house of prayer.”
But, more than calling to mind the Temple, Jewish Christians would have remembered a similar event at the dedication of Solomon’s Temple. When the Ark was carried into the Holy of Holies, we read in Chronicles that: [2 Chron. 2:13] …the house, the house of the LORD, was filled with a cloud, 14 so that the priests could not continue ministering because of the cloud; for the glory of the LORD filled the house of God.”
Here, then, on the Day of Pentecost, the Lord was returning to his Temple, but it is not a Temple made of stones, but a Temple composed of what Peter would later refer to as living stones. The Church is the Temple of the Lord, and God’s Spirit took up his abode in that Temple on the Day of Pentecost following Jesus’ ascension into heaven.
Imagery from the Temple is what we need to think of when we ponder these details of the first Pentecost. Take the tongues of flame, for example. People often link this with the prophecy of John the Baptist, when he said that one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. For sure, it is the Holy Spirit here, but the tongues of fire on that day have nothing to do with the fire that John the Baptist spoke about. In John’s prophecy, fire refers to the fires of judgment, as he clearly explained. John the Baptist, on that occasion, said [Matt 3:12] 12 His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
No, the fire we see in Luke 2 doesn’t have the fires of judgment in view. Rather, it has the tongues of fire that were standard sources of light in the Temple, from the lampstand.
This is what those gathered together would have understood, for two reasons. First of all, the golden lampstand that had burned in Solomon’s temple was taken away to Babylon and never returned. According to Midrash Rabbah [Numbers 15:10 and 2 Baruch 6:7–9] five things from the first temple were absent in the second temple but would be restored in the messianic age; these are the sacred fire, the ark, the menorah or lampstand, the Spirit, and the cherubim. Against that background, therefore, the details Luke supplies from that first Day of Pentecost take on added significance. The tongues of flame over everyone’s head is a sign that the light of the old temple, the light that was carried away, has now returned to the New Temple. In fact, the ark is also present in the person of the Virgin Mary.
The notion that Mary is an ark of the New Covenant goes back to Luke’s account of Mary encountering Elizabeth before Jesus was born. Mary was acknowledged as the New Ark when John the Baptist, in Elizabeth’s womb, danced before her. When Luke writes that the baby Baptist leaped in Elizabeth’s womb, he uses a word for leap that means to jump about in a dance. “To dance a jig” would be a bit too casual a rendering, but it would grab the sense.
What’s significant in that this word is the one in the Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Old Testament – that is used to describe King David as he was dancing before the Ark as it was carried into Jerusalem. David did a leaping dance before the old Ark. John the Baptist does a leaping dance before the New Ark, the Virgin Mary. The Old Ark carried the Old Covenant. Mary carries within her the living New Covenant.
And, so, again, on the Day of Pentecost we have the New Ark present, the Spirit filling the house with the sound of a mighty rushing wind, and the light of the lampstand returning to God’s new temple, the Church.
But, there’s more. You remember that Pentecost is one of the three annual feasts which the Law of Moses required the men of Israel to observe, by bringing their tithes and gifts to the Temple three times a year. So, on this Pentecost, the city of Jerusalem was filled with pious Jews from all around the Mediterranean Basin. In fact, Luke provides for us a list of places from which the crowd had come by naming the languages in which the Jesus’ disciples were speaking: “And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born? 9 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.”
Early Christian Jews reading Luke’s account would likely have thought of immediately of the Tower of Babel. They would have seen that the Day of Pentecost inaugurated a reversal of a mighty, world-wide judgment on humanity, when God divided all humankind by fracturing their communication into different languages. This birthday of the Church begins the undoing of Babel. Here, instead of restoring one language, God miraculously enables one truth to be spread in all languages throughout all the nations of the earth.
The commemoration of birthdays is supposed to be a joyous event, and this first Birthday of the Church was no doubt a joyous event for the disciples. But, we should not overlook an darker side to the momentous events of that day. When the disciples began speaking to the Jews of the Diaspora about the wonderful works of God, there was yet another prophecy being fulfilled, one found in the 28th Chapter of the Prophet Isaiah.
That prophecy was directed against the leadership of Israel, whom Isaiah condemns as unfit for service because of their drunkenness and their love of wine and strong drink. Isaiah wrote this:
“1 Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, …7 … they also have erred through wine, And through intoxicating drink are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through intoxicating drink, they are swallowed up by wine, they are out of the way through intoxicating drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment..”
Then Isaiah delivers this judgment from the LORD against these leaders in Isaiah 28:11: “11 For with stammering lips and another tongue He will speak to this people, 12 …Yet they would not hear.”
There is such irony in Luke’s report.
Isaiah’s prophecy is against drunkards in Israel’s leadership. And on this day when Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled, when the Jews in Jerusalem heard stammering, yammering gentile tongues, they didn’t understand what the disciples were saying. Instead, they said to one another – “these people are full of new wine!” What an irony – that the drunkards who are being judged by God are accusing God’s messengers of being drunk!
My wife one time asked me what was my favorite birthday. I couldn’t answer her because they all seemed to blur together. When it comes to the Birthday of the Church, however, Pentecost – unlike our own individual birthdays – is something we can observe, if only at a distance. As a birthday, it was unique, but certain things flow from that birthday that we ought to keep in mind. Sadly, the thing that some folks strive to hang on to are the things which the New Testament and the subsequent history of the Church shows to be of passing significance. Things like the speaking in tongues, for example.
I won’t take time today to explain why I think that particular detail has little value in itself. An entire stream of recent Christianity has thought that if only people could speak in tongues, we’d recapture the spiritual vitality of the scene in Acts chapter 2. But, subsequent Apostolic teaching by the Apostle Paul makes that idea suspect. There are indeed things that continue to flow from that first Pentecost, but the experience of speaking in tongues is not one of them. So far as I know the modern phenomenon has nothing to do with speaking the mighty acts of God in foreign languages.
What, then, does continue to flow from that first Birthday of the Church. I point to three things:
The first thing is the ongoing work of the Spirit to build up the Temple of God, that is the Church. The gifts of the Spirit Paul speaks about in the second lesson appointed for today – those gifts have that very purpose, and the Spirit gives those gifts to achieve that purpose. And what is that purpose: Paul puts it this way: “4 There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. 6 And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all. 7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all.” Writing to the Ephesians [Eph. 4], Paul said that the Spirit distributed spiritual gifts among believers “12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, 13 till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ?”
Writing to Christians near the end of his life, no doubt with a memory of Pentecost on his mind, Peter wrote [1 Pet. 2:4-5] 4 that Christians who come to Christ come “to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, 5 you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
That is one legacy – one ongoing work of the Holy Spirit which continues to this hour – the building up, generation after generation, of the Church, a Temple of the Lord. When you commemorate the Birthday of the Church, you commemorate the time when God’s Spirit began His work of creating what will one day be a finished Temple of the Lord, and you will be one of the stones in that Temple.
Another legacy that is ongoing relates to those tongues of fire – rightly understood as the light of truth, Christians being the new lampstands in the Temple, doing the work of the Spirit to bring light to the world and to shed light within the Body of Christ. And, so Paul says,
[Phil. 2] “14 Do all things without complaining and disputing, 15 that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.” Or again, to the Thessalonians Paul wrote [1 Thess. 5] 4 But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this Day should overtake you as a thief. 5 You are all sons of light and sons of the day.” Or as Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “[Eph. 5] 8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light… 11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.”
Think of the upcoming meeting on the Da Vinci Code next Friday. That’s a specific example of Christians acting as light, shining the light of truth into the murky, dark world Dan Brown invites his readers to enter. That event next Friday is linked directly to the Day of Pentecost, when God’s Spirit began to do his work of shedding the light of Christ through the Church, which Paul in another place, the pillar and ground of the truth.
And, finally, the goal of all the Spirit’s work in the Church begins on that Day of Pentecost, with the first harvest of souls from the nations. That day, it was Jews from the nations who heard the mighty works of God in their own languages. Later, it was the Gentiles in those same nations. And, at the end of the age we find a scene such as John records in the seventh chapter of his Apocalypse:
9 After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
On this birthday of the Church, may God grant us grace to behold the power, might, and purpose of His Spirit as he continues in our day what He began on that Pentecost. And, may we fasten our hopes upon that self-same work of Christ’s spirit, to the end that we join the host of saints before us, as living stones in the Temple of God, as lights that shine in a dark world, until the day when we are gathered before the Lamb on His throne to join that throng in singing his praises.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
