5/28/2023
Rev. Cn. Richard Hogue Jr.
Happy Pentecost, everyone! I’ve always liked Pentecost for its vibrant display of the diversity in the earliest moments of Christ’s church in both languages and gifts that we as disciples get to share out in the world in our daily lives. There’s a richness we get to revel in on this day, helping us to understand the sheer scope of our continuing mission as Christ’s body.
I also love it for the firmer sense we get of the Holy Spirit, descending in the vision of the disciples and other followers of Jesus as tongues of flame, giving them the ability to be understood by everyone around them in their native tongues. This swirling, confusing, and bewildering scene is to me one of the purest images of who and what the Holy Spirit is. It is both seemingly chaotic and beautiful, like God’s very acts of creation. The work of the church is still characterized by these hallmarks of chaos and beauty, ask anyone who’s been around it for a while.
Pentecost is born out of the absence of Jesus after his ascension into heaven, and the fear that the disciples still had of the religious and Roman imperial authorities who put Jesus to death. Little did those powers and principalities know, that much like that quiet first Easter, Pentecost would bestow a new texture to life for Jesus’ followers. ‘When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. … All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”’
While I know Pentecost to be a joyous occasion, I do wonder what it felt like for those present and consumed by the fiery tongues that day. Was it joyful or perplexing, perhaps both? Either way, the writer of Acts doesn’t focus on their reaction as much as that of the crowd around them, witnessing this extraordinary event. What would it have been like to receive a tongue of flame, and then to seemingly babble without knowing precisely what language you were speaking?
This whole idea set off the Pentecostal movement, which started in Los Angeles on Azusa St., here in Southern California, where people would claim to receive the gift of “glossolalia”. For those who’ve never heard the term, it means the speaking of an imperceptible language. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians of varying denominations have a practice of speaking in glossolalia, some even lean into that, saying it’s a secret language from God. I grew up as an Episcopalian, where we generally don’t engage in such liturgical improvisation, but I did see it up close in my freshman year of high school.
While my family was always faithful to the Episcopal Church, particularly for Sunday worship, my younger sister and I attended a very small, Biblically fundamentalist school for almost the entirety of our grade school years. In late spring of 2002, my high school class took a trip to Haiti, where we spent a week helping to build an orphanage in Port-au-Prince and going from church-to-church in the city and the surrounding mountains.
I will never forget a visit to one church in the mountains, it was a smaller church building, modest in most ways, but packed from front to back. It was also a typical nondenominational service, but what sticks in my memory was when we were in prayer, as the music was building, there was a palpable sense of sheer euphoria that everyone felt. As we got closer together, holding each other shoulder to shoulder, we all felt moved. There came a point where everyone was in tears, but they were tears of joy. We all felt so held, so wrapped in God’s love, that no one could help but be filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and we lingered in it. Some people began speaking in tongues, but none that were recognizable to me, anyway.
And that really didn’t matter to me then or now, because while I didn’t participate in that specific way, I understood the urge to simply be in that moment, to let the Holy Spirit’s love and joy fill me and that room so completely that I still feel it when I think about that moment. Black, white, Haitian, or American, Creole, or English speaking, Pentecostal, Baptist, or Episcopalian, we all were enfolded in the tangible power of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, a manifestation of the fabric of God’s grace in our very bodies. It was a moment of direct contact with the divine it reminds me that God gives us the Holy Spirit in bewildering and beautiful ways.
It may not have been split tongues of flame that appeared to us, but I feel it did give us a window into how the disciples felt at Pentecost, utterly surrendered to the overwhelming love of God, confident in the surety of God’s grace, and joyful to the bone. The fire that we can feel in moments such as that are not ones of destruction but of healing, purifying a sense of direct relationship with the chaotic and beautiful Holy Spirit. Like the disciples, I cannot forget that feeling, and I feel compelled to tell others, like all us here, about it. Perhaps you have your own experience of God’s love, perhaps in a very different way.
But that brings me to another point: that once we feel and know the presence of God’s love and the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives, what is our response to that grace? The disciples could not help but tell the whole world around them about the love they experienced with Jesus and that everyone else could experience with them. Stranger yet, the Holy Spirit made sure everyone heard them. From that moment on they embodied Jesus as his hands, his feet, the body of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. They became the very fabric of God’s grace alive and present in the world.
And here we are today, continents and millennia away, still present to the same Holy Spirit, still alive as Christ’s witnesses in the world, the physical manifestation of a divine reality: God loves us and we are God’s love. That is a flame that will never die. The question for each of us is, what does God give us a fire for in our lives, and how do we bear witness to the Holy Spirit? God is lighting something in each of us to be a beacon of hope in a weary world. How we speak about that flame will be how the story of Jesus’ is told in our time. We may never see how that touches and burns in another person, but it is precisely the way that God’s love spreads. May we all spread the warmth of Pentecost with the gifts God has given us, and may it light others with hope, joy, and knowledge of God’s love for us all.
Amen.
