Acts 2:1-21
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.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’
In a rush of violent wind,
the Spirit interrupts a Jewish festival
and suddenly the disciples
have gifts beyond their ability.
Onlookers are beset with questions:
their paradigms challenged and
their perceptions called into question.
“Amazed and perplexed,”
they ask each other
“What does this mean?” (v. 12).
The Spirit also challenges the boundaries
between “us” and “them.”
“Amazed and astonished”
onlookers ask
“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?
And how is it that we hear,
each of us, in our own native language?”
In other words,
how can we understand
those people
who are different from us?
How are they able to speak to us
in our own language,
share things with us that we understand,
and reveal something to us more clearly than we’ve ever experienced?
--
Preaching on this text,
preaching scholar Anna Carter Florence underlines
how Galileans were seen
with particular suspicion and contempt in this context.
She likens Galileans to
“people I might dismiss
because of where they live,
or how they talk
or where they went to school
…if they went to school.”
People didn’t take Jesus seriously at first
because he was from Galilee.
In the New Testament,’ she says,
“‘Galilean’ is short hand for hick.”
The fact that these Galileans are filled with the Spirit
and that they are able to speak clearly to
the “devout Jews from every nation”
upends expectations,
subverts power dynamics,
shifts our perceptions,
and transforms whose voices and experiences are important.
-
This text challenges us
to reimagine our relationships
and to reimagine Gallileans
as potential bearers of truth,
as people who can reveal God to us,
and as potential instruments of the spirit.
Carter Florence preaches,
“if that’s what Pentecost is,
well that totally changes the whole picture for me.
That means I am going to have to go home
and rethink everything I thought I knew
…about God, and the world, and our place in it,
and everything else actually.”
--
In working for justice,
there is a temptation to think
that we are bringing justice or love or hope or care to others.
This text challenges us
to reform our understanding of “us”
bringing good to “them.”
It challenges us
to attune ourselves
to the truth and love and the work of God
in places that are unexpected.
Places that we think need our help
or our truth
may in fact be places
where we need to learn or be helped.
In approaching something
like the plight of LGBTQ people in Africa and across the globe;
this text challenges us
to rethink the notion that
“they need our help,”
“they need our prayer,”
or “we need to learn about them.”
This text challenges us
to acknowledge the way the Spirit works
and thus to engage at a deeper level,
to enter into relationship with LGBTIQ people around the world,
and to make that relationship a mutual one.
We are challenged to envision how,
if we are not ourselves African LGBTIQ people,
how we can justly learn from them,
how they may be the ones who bear truth to us,
and how the Spirit may be working through them.
We are called
to witness their lives and
to respond to the realities that they face,
but we should be suspicious
of crowning ourselves as their saviors
or seeing them only as people who need our help.
We can instead seek
to enter into honest relationship,
seeking to uplift their full human complexity,
ready to be addressed by what we never imagined,
attuned to the voices of the metaphorical Galileans in our lives,
prepared for the Spirit’s violent interruption into what we think we know.