Sermon Tone Analysis

Hebrew Scripture Reading

Gospel Reading

Acts 2:

Babble

My friend Julie scared the daylights out of me yesterday morning.

We were at the gym in the middle of a partner workout.

Julie was, as she often is, my partner for the workout.

We were taking turns on the rower to accumulate a certain number of meters.

In between sets of rowing, we were doing olympic weightlifting, then back to rowing, always sharing the work evenly between the two of us.

It was every bit as exhausting as it sounds.

About halfway through the very last set of rowing, I was focused on keeping up my pace and getting it done.

I was in the zone.

I was just trying to get through what I knew was the worst part of the workout and then I would be done.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Julie, with her thick Glasgow accent at the top of her lungs, shouted in my ear, “Come on, Charissa!

You’re almost done!”

I had no idea she was even behind me, let alone inches from my ear.

I nearly fell off the rower.

Many of the holidays we observe in the Christian tradition are ones that we made up to celebrate things that happened in Scripture.

So you’ll never see the words “Christmas” or “Easter” in Scripture.

But, interestingly, we do see the word for today’s celebration in scripture.

We see it a great deal, actually.

Pentecost.

Winds of the Spirit!

It would seem that those who experienced the first Pentecost were acutely aware of the winds of the Spirit (Acts 2:2).

Scholars remind us that Pentecost is the most ancient religious festival we celebrate.

In the early Jewish calendar, Pentecost, or the Feast of Weeks, was dedicated to gratitude, acknowledging God’s gift in Noah, the covenant, and the regularity of physical seasons that produced seedtime and harvest.

Later, Pentecost was associated with the giving of the law to Moses at Mount Sinai.

While most Jewish festivals were provincial, centering on a given cause and community, Pentecost paid a great deal of attention to others.

The stranger, those of other faiths, or those who happened to be in the community or in one’s home at the time of the festival, were included.

In Jewish tradition, Pentecost - also known as the Feast of Weeks - was a festival of thanksgiving, specifically for the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Instead of renaming the holiday, the Christian tradition kept the name Pentecost, but it took on a new meaning.

Interesting, then that we are given the Spirit on that same day.

On the very day of remembrance of the law, the Guiding Spirit is given to us.

This also explains why there were so many people from so many places hanging out in Jerusalem at the time this happened.

God’s timing is not coincidence.

Not only is there deep theological implication to the Spirit coming on a day of celebrating the law, but it’s very convenient for the spread of the Gospel that there just happen to be people from all over the place in Jerusalem that day.

The biggest problem with there being people from all over is the language barrier.

But for the God who created every single language in the world, this was no real problem.

In a reversal of the confusion of language at Babel (), everyone was suddenly able to hear God’s word in their own language, even though it was still the same old Galilean disciples of Jesus speaking it.

If you’ve been to the Lincoln Memorial, or the Grand Canyon, or the Lourve, or the ruins of Ephasus, or the Church of the Holy Sepulcre, or any other place like that, you know what it’s like to be surrounded by other languages.

Sure, it’s a little intimidating to not know what the people around you are saying, but I also think it’s incredibly beautiful.

What a demonstration of God’s creativity and the diversity of humanity.

Any big tourist site is a great example of what this might have felt like.

If you’ve been to the Lincoln Memorial, or the Grand Canyon, or the Lourve, or the ruins of Ephasus, or the Church of the Holy Sepulcre, or any other place like that, you know what it’s like to be surrounded by other languages.

Sure, it’s a little intimidating to not know what the people around you are saying, but I also think it’s incredibly beautiful.

What a demonstration of God’s creativity and the diversity of humanity.

Every language is shaped by the people who speak it and it also shapes the people who speak it.

German is very precise and you say every letter you see.

It sounds tidy.

Turkish is a quirky blend of European sounds with Asian(ish) grammar and who knows what alphabet they got all their characters from.

Hebrew is pared back, but draws heavily on word play and knowing the speaker/writer well.

English is a delightfully playful mud puddle of everything from everywhere.

And so God honored the different people from different places and cultures and languages and they heard God’s word in their own language with all its quirks and nuances and beauty.

Language is a funny thing.

It brings people together and tears them apart.

It confuses and explains.

It’s constantly changing, morphing, becoming something new and different.

Every year as Pentecost approaches, I find myself frustrated trying to find hymns about the Holy Spirit that aren’t boring.

I own a lot of hymnals, for the record.

It’s not just the hymnal we have here – in fact this one is better than most.

Most hymnals just have a pretty sad selection of music for Pentecost.

Even the music they do have is pretty blah.

I couldn’t seem to find one piece of music that communicated the full power of this violent rushing wind. . .

this fire from heaven. . .

this something so powerful that the people of God were accused of being drunk, they were acting so strangely!!!! 

Think about the word “literally”.

The dictionary definition of the word “literally” is “In a literal sense or manner.”

It’s something that is actually happening just the way the speaker or writer said it is.

But there is a second definition that has come into common use.

I once stood on the porch with my dad watching a tornado about a quarter mile away from our house.

I know what a violent rushing wind sounds, looks, and feels like, and most of our Holy Spirit music and liturgy is more like a 20 year old box fan set to low than a violent rushing wind.

It’s like a bic lighter, not tongues of flame from heaven!

Why don’t we trust anymore that God is going to move powerfully?

How is it that this violent rushing wind has been tamed so much in our liturgy and in our theology?

Why is the Holy Spirit confined to just a few less than fantastic pages in the hymnal?

lit•er•al•ly \ˈli-tə-rə-lē, ˈli-trə-lē, ˈli-tər-lē\ adverb

1533

1: in a literal sense or manner: ACTUALLY 〈took the remark literally〉 〈was literally insane〉

2: in effect: VIRTUALLY 〈will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice—Norman Cousins〉

usage Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse.

Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.

Is it because when we walk around outside these walls, we don’t see much changing?

Perhaps it’s because we’re waiting for the world to change and come to us, we’re defining renewal in the church by our numbers of new converts who wander in from outside, but if that’s the case, we have Pentecost all backwards.

In other words, some people used it as hyperbole - a purposeful exaggeration to make a point, and that has started to change the definition of the word.

I could say, “This is literally the best congregation in the entire world!”

And we would all know that I’m not saying I have some sort of empirical evidence that you all have achieved some sort of standard above and beyond all the other churches in the world.

It’s just my over the top way of saying you’re pretty wonderful.

The word has changed.

Language is also different in difference places.

If you speak Spanish, you know that you’ll need to speak it differently in Barcelona than in Lima.

Even here in Pittsburgh, we speak English, but if you ask someone from Wisconsin to “red up dat room over der n’at” they will have not a clue what you are trying to tell them.

I do not have much of a Pittsburgh accent, having spent a large chunk of my childhood in the midwest, but I’ve been here long enough and grew up with Pittsburgh parents.

I can understand Pittsburghese just fine.

Usually.

We do see in our passage today that the Holy Spirit reached outside of the church.

The disciples speaking in many different languages would have been pointless if it were not so that they could preach to people of all different languages and backgrounds.

But the Holy Spirit came first into the house where the disciples were gathered.

What we see in Pentecost is not the Holy Spirit reforming the outside and bringing it in to renew the church, but the Holy Spirit reforming the church first to then bring renewal to those outside its walls.

We say Happy Birthday to the church today because this is remembrance of the day that the Holy Spirit came down.

The day that the Violent RUSHING WIND and TONGUES OF FIRE came down and ignited the movement that 1900 years later gave birth to Liberty Presbyterian Church!

Sure, our Western Pennsylvanian church established mere minutes ago compared to the age of Christianity as a whole looks quite a bit different than the very first church established half the world away around 2000 years ago.