Pentecost - What Would This Wish to Be?
Acts 2: 1 - 21
When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. 4 They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.
5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. 7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? 8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” 12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” 13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!”
14 Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! 15 These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning! 16 Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
Your young will see visions.
Your elders will dream dreams.
18 Even upon my servants, men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
19 I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and a cloud of smoke.
20 The sun will be changed into darkness,
and the moon will be changed into blood,
before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes.
21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
When it comes to matters of faith that are difficult to explain with science, or rational thinking, I’m generally comfortable with the concept of mystery. God is bigger than we are, wilder than we are, wiser, braver, and more generous than we are. God is powerful in ways we cannot understand, and chooses to love us for reasons we cannot grasp. And that’s all fine with me. When someone wants to know if I believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ, or the virgin birth, when those things are scientifically impossible, I say yes. I rely on science all the time, but I don’t have any trouble believing that God can bring life when there is no life.
God is unnervingly knowable and unknowable at the same time, and I really enjoy that. Most of the time.
About a year after we were married, I learned something scandalous about Andy. We had dated for 16 months, and been engaged for 6 months after that, we’d been married a year already, and that’s when I learned, by accident, that my beloved spouse does not like coconut. It wasn’t a secret that he had been keeping from me, it just didn’t come up in the two and a half years that we had been together. This was astonishing to me, not so much because two of my favorite desserts are my mom’s icebox coconut cake and my grandmother’s french coconut pie, but because I didn’t know something about the man I had vowed to spend my life with. It really seemed like I should have known everything before I took those vows.
So I had a moment of anxiety where I said to him, “If I didn’t know this, what else don’t I know?” Have you robbed any banks? Do you have any children I don’t know about? Are you deathly allergic to anything?” He stopped me. “Well, actually... “ He said… “I am allergic to sulfa…” and I lost my mind for a minute, thinking about what might have happened if he’d had been sick and gone to the hospital and the nurse had asked me, “is he allergic to any medications?” and I had said “no nothing,” simply because I didn’t have that information.
There are things you don’t know, and you don’t really need to know, like how God made the world, or how Jesus was raised from dead. That’s where faith comes in, and those mysteries shape us whether we like them and enjoy them or not.
But there are things we don’t know, and the not-knowing of them is deeply disorienting, we’ve always had these kinds of questions, like who will take care of my kids if something happens to me, or can I change jobs without risking my livelihood, or how will my body respond to my next round of chemotherapy. But now we all have an extra layer of things we don’t know. When will there be a vaccine for Covid-19, what will school look like for my kids in the fall, and when can I go back to work. The not-knowing of these things creates anxiety, fear, and panic. And our deep desire to answer these questions can lead us to do what some of the bystanders did in our reading today. Faced with utterly bizarre circumstances there were those who watched the weirdness unfold and made up an explanation.
The most generous interpretation of what these witnesses did, is to say that they made an assumption. This is something that human brains do all the time. When we don’t have all of the information we need to understand what is happening, we fill in the gaps based on what we do know. They saw people acting weird and they thought… What makes people act weird? Day drinking. These guys are drunk. That’s an assumption, and it’s one way to read what happened, but I’m not sure it’s the right one.
Those who were gathered in Jerusalem that morning who observed this extraordinary event were probably celebrating the Jewish festival of Pentecost, a celebration of God’s giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. That’s not just fun Bible trivia, it’s a way to understand the context of the crowd. These are not people who are unfamiliar with God and what God can do. They are attending a festival celebrating an act of God. The crowd said, “We hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” They know these stories. What they heard was not gibberish, or nonsense. It was as if you or I heard someone who did not know English, telling us the story of Noah and the Ark, or Jesus feeding the 5000, and we somehow heard and understood every word. Which is why these folks from all over the world are astonished and confused to hear fishermen and regular guys from Galilee telling them their own faith stories in their own native language.
I don’t think they made a random assumption. I think they made a choice to disregard something they didn’t understand. Maybe, like I was with Andy when I realized I didn’t know everything about him, they felt confused and scared. How could their God be doing something new? How could this God that is so rock solid and trustworthy, be doing something so wild and confusing? It’s difficult, in any relationship, to recognize that you’ll never know everything. And even if you did, life will change you, and there will always, always, be new things to learn about each other. It’s not unlike life with our knowable-unknowable God. What the witnesses experienced was weird. Holy things often are, but they chose to dismiss it. By claiming that the disciples were drunk, that made something holy into something ordinary, something that would allow them to walk away unchanged.
I can relate. I’m tired of changing. We’ve all had to change so much to adapt to a life of social distancing, and sometimes I feel like I just can’t learn anything new, and I can’t adapt any more. Over the last two months of assisting my kids with remote learning, I’ve made plenty of guesses and assumptions. I’ve never been more aware of the gaps in my knowledge of math and history. And at least once a week I put my head in my hands, and told my precious children, “I just can’t with this any more.” Fortunately, it’s second and fourth grade. Our teachers this year were champs, and all the other kids and parents are in the same situation. We just did the best we could with a messy combination of actual knowledge, research, guessing, assumptions, and yes, giving up.
We got through it, but if I’d been given the choice between the normal school year that I was expecting, and adapting and changing to fit what experts in health and education said was necessary, I probably would have chosen not to change.
But we have not been given that choice. Not really. Sometimes a good guess, or an assumption, is the best we’ve got. Sometimes we don’t know for sure what’s right. Sometimes we cause harm by accident because we don’t realize what we’re doing could hurt someone. But that’s not really what’s happening right now. We know, don’t we? We have scientists, doctors, and public health professionals telling us what is right, and what is true. Yes, there are gaps in what we know about Covid 19, but we know a lot. If we choose to disregard the truth that is in front of us, because it requires us to change, or we just don’t like what is true, we come awfully close to lying.
So when I read the story of Pentecost at this unique moment in time, with the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, I hope that I am brave enough to allow that which I do not understand to be a part of what I know. I pray that I will choose the other path.
That other path, when we don’t know what’s happening and we don’t have all the information, is to ask a question. “What does this mean?” other translations say, “What can this mean?” but my favorite translation of their question is an old one, the Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible which says, “What would this wish to be?”
What would this wish to be? Peter seems to know his audience, and hoping to win over both those who would dismiss the experience as ordinary, and those open to questions, responds with one of the funnier lines in the New Testament “Listen carefully to my words! These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning.”
I love him for saying that. So now that he has the crowd’s attention, he has a chance to answer the question of those who chose to ask it, “What does this mean?” So he begins:
This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
Your young will see visions.
Your elders will dream dreams.
Even upon my servants, men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and a cloud of smoke.
The sun will be changed into darkness,
and the moon will be changed into blood,
before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes.
And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
And I have to imagine those blessed saints who didn’t rush to assumptions, or dismiss what they did not understand, those brave souls who encountered mystery with curiosity, heard Peter’s passionate response, and said “Ok, but what does it mean?” Because Peter’s answer is only sort of an answer.
This weirdness means that God is here. God is doing things, whether you are ready for them or not. God will surprise you, and God will use you to surprise others, and in recognizing God at work you will find salvation. If you were looking for anything clearer, like a sign that you should go this way instead of that way, or plant this crop instead of that crop, or worship in one place or another, that’s not what’s happening now. God is here. That’s what it means.
Just beyond this passage, Peter goes on to tell the crowd the story of Jesus, using plenty of Hebrew Bible references to help them connect the dots. But in the end, he doesn’t give them any more clarity. God has been here, God is here now, God is doing what God does - incessantly calling us into God’s work of love and mercy, and in answering that call we will be saved.
I hope to be one of the ones who asks a question, who responds to a lack of understanding, with curiosity. And I like the question, “What would this wish to be?” because it takes the person asking it out of the center of the universe. “What does this mean” implies “What does this mean for me?” And as followers of Christ that’s not our first concern, is it? We believe that God is at work in the world, and we believe that God can use anything, and everything, that nothing is wasted with God. And so instead of asking, What do I need to know about this? Or what can this mean for me? We can ask, What is God up to? How is God at work? What would this wish to be?
“What does this mean” also suggests that an interpretation is required in order to understand it, or that there’s an actual answer to the question.
But as Peter demonstrates, interpreting the Holy Spirit is a mixed bag.
Genesis tells us that the Spirit moved over the waters at creation, we know that she blessed Jesus at his baptism, and gave the gift of speaking and understanding at Pentecost.
But she moves in mysterious ways.
She is the wave. She turns the tide.
She is the indelible mark of the divine on the universe, and on each of us. She is the lump in our throat, and tears that we cry.
She is the blood in our veins, and the air in our lungs.
She is our compass.
She is the song of praise in our hearts,
when by all accounts we should have nothing to sing about.
She is transformation by grace.
The love that will not let us go, and will not let us stay.
There is nothing to understand.
You don’t interpret the Holy Spirit. She interprets you.
Ok, but what does it mean?
It means that God is here.
God has always been here. You have never once been alone.
You will not have all the information you need.
There will be gaps in what you know,
and you’ll have to decide whether it’s a matter of fact, or a matter of faith, and sometimes it’s both.
When you don’t know, or you don’t understand, you’ll have to decide
whether to guess, whether to lie, or whether to ask a question.
You’ll get tired of not knowing, that’s ok.
God is at work right now, right this very minute, what would this wish to be?
