A sound like the rush of a violent wind

A Pentecost sermon by Jamie Howison on Acts 2:1-21

It is Pentecost, and every year we tell one heck of a story.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they 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.

What might not be particularly obvious to modern readers is the way that this account from Luke connects to much more ancient stories and traditions from Judaism. To dig a bit into that material can make it all sound a bit less wild, and a whole lot more… well, a whole lot more connected.

For one thing it is important to note that Pentecost was and is a Jewish feast day. The day is observed in Judaism today under its Hebrew name Shavuot, celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai, fifty days after the escape from slavery in Egypt. It was also an agricultural festival for first-century Jews, when farmers would bring the first sheaf of wheat from a crop as an offering to God. That offering was both an act of gratitude, and also a prayer that the rest of the crop could also be safely harvested. But there is a sense that the two themes—the law and the harvest—are meant to stand together. The law in Judaism is understood as the way God has given them to be a redeemed, covenant people; this is how they express their fidelity to God’s purposes, in other words. And as faithful people, the first sheaf of grain is offered as a gesture of that faithfulness.

Now as Luke is writing about that first Christian Pentecost, he can quite safely assume that the vast majority of his original readers would make a connection between that old tradition of offering the first sheaf of wheat and the apostles’ going out onto the streets of Jerusalem to proclaim the good news. This is but the beginning—the first fruits, so to speak—of a much greater harvest yet to come.

Not only that, but there are parallels to the story of the giving of the law to Moses. This is how N.T. Wright summarizes it:

When the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, Moses went up the mountain, and then came down again with the law. Here, Jesus has gone up into heaven in the ascension, and—so Luke wants us to understand—he is now coming down again, not with a written law carved on tablets of stone, but with the dynamic energy of the law, designed to be written on human hearts.

This is all meant to be understood as a “new thing”, but one not at all disconnected from the old covenant. That’s the thing about these New Testament writers, of course. They saw themselves and their movement tightly connected to Judaism, so even Paul—the great apostle to the Gentiles and champion of embracing a new covenant for all people—understands that the “wild olive shoot” which is the Gentiles has been grafted to “share the rich root of the olive tree,” which is Israel. The new is built on the foundation of the old. That’s just biblically true.

The other thing that needs to be kept in view here is that what comes to them from the heavens—the sound like the rush of a violent wind and the experience of seeing these tongues like fire hovering over them—is most definitely not meant to make the things of earth irrelevant. Far from it! Again from N.T. Wright:

The aim is not to give people a ‘spirituality’ which will make the things of earth irrelevant. The point is to transform earth with the power of heaven, starting with those parts of ‘earth’ which consists of the bodies, minds, hearts and loves of the followers of Jesus – as a community.

Bishop Wright puts some emphasis on that word “community”, for far from being a private, pious, and detached spirituality by which the individual can, in a sense, escape the physical world, what is presented to us in Acts is a community faith that is lived out very much in the created world. Yes, the physical world currently limps along—and a good deal of that is due to human abuses—but that doesn’t make it any less God’s created world and a world in which we are called to be good stewards.

This is why those first believers immediately poured out onto the streets to proclaim the good news, rather than just sitting together in the house relishing this new spiritual experience. This is not a privatized faith in any way, but rather wildly public, a shared new expression. That’s the meaning of the experience of people all hearing in their own mother tongue; Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and so on. Old barriers are falling, and a new covenant is coming fully into view.

I think that one of the clearest signs of this is the confidence with which Simon Peter can speak. He grabs a hold of these verses from the prophet Joel, and speaks boldly, right out in the public square.

Now you know that up to this point dear old Peter has swung between being oh-so-confident and being fearful and unsteady. Recall his desire to walk on the sea, just as he’d seen Jesus do. Out onto the water he steps, and then right away he is wracked by fear and doubt, and begins to sink. Recall his boldness in Gethsemane, which he pulls out a sword to defend Jesus, and then within a minute or two is running like a scared rabbit. Recall the scene in the temple courtyard, where he had gone to see what was happening to Jesus, and then three times denies ever having even met him. He’s been shown to have a great big heart… and feet of clay

But no more. This is the moment when he can stand firmly on the ground and speak the truth that he has finally—finally—glimpsed in its fullness. Simon Peter is now standing firmly as the Rock after which he has been nicknamed by Jesus.

Now to be sure, there will be chapters in the life of the early church where the ground won’t seem quite so firm. Famously—or maybe infamously—Simon Peter has a pretty serious conflict with Paul over the matter of whether or not he should be eating in the company of Gentiles (Galatians 2.11). And how many times do we see Paul trying to sort out conflicts and issues in the little church communities he has planted around the Mediterranean? Or how about that sections from the opening chapters of Revelation, where the church in Laodicea was characterized as neither hot nor cold, but instead just lukewarm, about to spat from the mouth of God.

It can all be a bit of a mucky mess, both then and now, with different people and communities chasing their way down all manner of rabbit holes, thus getting further and further away from the core claim that have been placed on us to actually be a gospel people. And that means a gospel people in the very real world, attentive to the hurts and hungers and lostness and longings of one another, including those who wouldn’t really think of themselves as gospel people. “Who is my neighbour?” the man had asked Jesus, who then replied with his famous parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone is my neighbour, including the ones who I thought were supposed to be my sworn enemies.

For all of the wildness of the story of Pentecost, in the end what it really says is that the Spirit of God is indeed present to all who seek to follow Jesus, and that while sometimes that Spirit will work in these extraordinary ways—tongues of fire and a rushing wind—a whole lot of the time the Spirit simply takes the Simon Peter in each of us, and gives us enough courage to take a step or utter a bold word or just believe through a long, hard night.