Pentecost: God, Justice, and Movement

[A reading of Acts 2:1–21 and John 2:13–16]

This is the story of Pentecost, the story of the Holy Spirit descending on the disciples and something miraculous occurring. This is not the expectation of the disciples. Like the previous post, much of this is rooted in the commentary by theologian Willie Jennings, professor of theology and Pastor in the black church tradition.

So what happened at Pentecost? When the Spirit descended on the disciples, they began to speak and understand languages foreign to them. Observers said they were drunk on new wine. That statement alone should be the nail in the coffin for those that think Jesus' turning water into wine was grape juice and not real wine. You can’t get drunk off of grape Juice.

This speaking of different languages is not merely a sign from God, or of the Spirit’s presence, it is so much more than that. Jennings says this:

The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space-of voice, memory, sound, body, and land. It is language that runs through all of these matters.

The implications of this are far greater than a sign of the miraculous or a moment of communion between the individual and God. Here we had the disciples, all of whom were from Galilee, a region of what is now Modern Day Israel and Palestine. While they were all Galilean, the people in Jerusalem were from many parts of the world and spoke many different languages. Houston Texas is not the most diverse city in the US. Imagine if the disciples were all from New Meadows Idaho, but living in Houston and were suddenly able to communicate with the many settlers, people from Vietnam, Burma, India, Ukraine, Somalia, Mexico, and beyond. This was a miracle of intimacy and connection. While it can be debated whether or not it makes more sense as a country for everyone to speak the same language, as a church, this is not where God is leading us. When the Spirit descended upon the people, it could have descended upon all of Jerusalem allowing all of the people to speak Aramaic, traditional Hebrew, or Greek, but that is not what happened.

What happened was the disciples, all of the same region and language, were now speaking in everyone else’s language. They were linguistically washing the feet of all these other people. They were preaching the Gospel to them by living the Gospel, meaning by serving outwardly, rather than expecting others to accommodate their language, culture, and understandings. This is why the idea that the mass should be in Latin to be legitimate is a great sin. Jennings says this:

This bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. . . But this will require bodies that reach across massive and real boundaries, cultural, religious, and ethnic. . . devotion to peoples unknown and undesired.

This is not just speaking another language. This is about submitting oneself to the needs of others. It’s not just learning and understanding words, but customs, beliefs, and lifestyles. The implications of this are enormous. As Jennings points out in this chapter, this takes learned adults, fluent in their language and culture, and puts them in the place of children, learning for the first time. This is again, the great role reversal that is God’s kingdom. Humility. Lifting up the last and lowering the first. It’s always easiest when the first lower themselves willingly, but when we don’t God will, and it’s not always pretty.

There are things to note about this chapter. This is solely God’s work. Not only did the disciples not concoct this idea on their own, but it’s counter-intuitive. This is not what the disciples imagined when the Holy Spirit would come down. As mentioned last week and before, they likely would have thought this would enable the reestablishing of Israel as a dominant power to rule for God’s peace, but this was the exact opposite. This was bottom-up, enabling them to be servants of other nations instead. This chapter is using language as the display of God’s power. This chapter is about grace that replaces our desire for power over others with God’s desire for people. As just mentioned, God, through this, humbles adults and lifts children. God is drawing in disciples to a new level of intimacy with one another. In other words: COMMUNITY!

After this happens, Peter explains to the Israelites that this is not being drunk on new wine, but rather the work of God. He preaches the Gospel to them. What needs to be understood here is that Peter is an Israelite speaking to Israelites. This is, as Jennings notes, “insider talk.” This isn’t a white person telling the black community what they need to fix. This isn’t someone from California telling Idaho everything that is wrong. This is an insider conversation and he was able to speak with the kind of bluntness the situation properly allows. One cannot have an insider conversation with someone until they submit to that person or people group and their ways. That level of intimacy has to be earned, and that is exactly what the spirit initiated here.

As Jennings stated in the earlier quote, this is about devotion to people unknown and undesired. These are the people we must continue to seek out. God’s kingdom has no room for cliques. Who makes us uncomfortable? We must go there.

Now, when it comes to language, Christianity has an interesting relationship with it. While there have been some examples of missionaries submitting to the people they serve, becoming an insider, and truly serving them, far too often, Christianity teamed up with empire to force language changes. The fact that the Americas speak English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese as the primary languages, was often co-opted by the church. Our ancestors felt God was better served by “civilizing” the native people to our standards when in reality, it had nothing to do with God and everything to do with a nationalist dream. If it were about God, we in the inner-mountain northwest would be speaking Nez Perce, Umatilla, Crow, and Sioux. We would be learning from them and equally exchanging ideas. Colonialism is the antithesis of what took place in Acts 2. The disciples did not conquer Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and so forth. That came later when we Christians sought the comfort of Rome.

So now, let’s bring this home to what is happening right now. There has been a lot happening in the past week. Aside from the growing pandemic, there were riots in Minneapolis and Louisville this past week. Since I have written this, it has significantly grown. Saturday night, City Hall and the courthouse in Nashville has been burned to the ground. While on one side of the coin, this has been dubbed the largest civil rights demonstration the country has ever witnessed, on the other side, there is wide-scale violence.

Both Louisville and Minneapolis involve, once again, black people wrongfully killed by the police. One was in her own home, the other killing was caught on camera. For the entire history of this country, even before it was officially established, black people have been crying out for justice. There have been some strides, like the Emancipation Proclamation through the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, but each has come with its out unjust response. After the Civil War, we had Jim Crow. Lynchings often took place at churches. Think about that, a place that represents the God of Acts 2, that led the disciples to submit to others through language and custom to dominate a race through lynching in the name of God.

Black people have been denied generation wealth through property ownership via redlining, and this has happened since the Civil Rights Movement. Black people, men in particular, are still more likely to be killed in the name of the law, whether justified or not. While this has never not been in the minds of black people, my white friends either with black children or a black spouse have recently been sharing how scared they are for their husband, wife, or children, that if they say the wrong thing or glance in the wrong way, might be killed.

Now, let’s look at a famous response by Jesus to injustice:

The response I often hear, and I have often said, is rioting is not the answer. Looting is not the answer. Yet, we in America praise the people in Boston in the 1700s for their rioting against tax laws during the Boston Tea Party as patriots. We don’t bat an eye at the fact that billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. Is that not looting? When Jesus was angered by the injustice taking place in the temple, he made a whip, which is a violent weapon, and dramatically drove out the money changers. He threw over the tables. He made a scene and a mess. He destroyed property.

Now, I’m not saying I agree with the riots, but I empathize. I have zero sympathies for opportunists. Reports have shown that far-right, white supremacist groups and far-left extremists are infiltrating the uprisings to co-opt them and turn them violent. But I’m not talking about these opportunists. I’m talking about the black community at large. These people have marched. They’ve taken a knee. They’ve used the arts. They’ve written books. All were resisted, complained about, etc. What will it take?

Martin Luther King said this:

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Acts 2 is asking us as Christ-followers to allow the Spirit to guide us to submit to others. To submit to the unknown. To submit to the undesired. Maybe in this time, rather than speaking our language from our places of comfort, we should be willing to let the Spirit guide us, as in acts, to understand this language of frustration. This language of anger toward continuous injustice.

Whether it be the rioting in Minneapolis and Louisville or the Trump rally, we are to submit to the unknown and the undesired. Maybe the fact I have seen friends who ordinarily would be condemning these riots saying they see why now, maybe that is an example of the Spirit, in the tradition of Acts 2 helping us understand this as King states, the language of the unheard.

Source for this post:

Willie Jennings — Acts; Belief, A Theological Commentary on the Bible