Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Pentecost, 8^th of June 2025

Acts 2:1-21

Scripture constantly surprises. Earlier this week, I talked with Dorothy Hansen about today being the nineteenth time I would preach at Pentecost. Could I possibly have anything new to say after eighteen Pentecost sermons, I wondered, and Dorothy very kindly sent me a Pentecost sermon by one of my favourite preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor, to offer me inspiration. The inspiration I received this week, though, was not Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful note that ‘to conspire’ means to breathe together, although that is certainly something I am glad to now know. This week’s inspiration was about the community created by the Pentecost event. I have always thought of this event as the birthday of the church. But Pentecost is the story of the renewal of Israel, and God’s faithfulness to it.

God inaugurated the church as we understand it today when God gave Peter a vision of unclean foods while Peter was lodging with Simon, a tanner, in Joppa. It was this vision that showed Peter that he should not call anyone profane or unclean. It was this vision that enabled him to enter the house of Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort living in Caesarea; inspired him to preach to Cornelius and his household; allowed him to witness the Holy Spirit falling on those hearing the word; and prompted him to have those Gentiles who had received the Spirit baptised in the name of Jesus Christ. (Acts 10) That story is the beginning of the gentile church. Today’s story is about something else.

It begins with the words, ‘When the day of Pentecost had come.’ Pentecost was a Jewish festival also known as the ‘Festival of Weeks’ because it occurred a ‘week of weeks’ (seven weeks) after Passover. It was one of the three pilgrimage festivals, when Jews were meant to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, the other two being Passover itself and the Festival of Tabernacles or Booths. Pentecost was originally a harvest festival in which the first fruits were taken to the Temple. After the Romans destroyed the Temple and the harvest could no longer be brought there, Pentecost instead became a celebration of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. We do not know whether Pentecost had already begun to be connected with the Law in Luke’s time. If it had, then Luke might be seeing the coming of the Holy Spirit as the equivalent of the giving of the Law, because in some Jewish traditions it was said that God gave the Law as a great flame from heaven that divided into seventy parts, one for each nation of the world, so that they could all hear and understand the Law in their own language. (Because this is a Jewish legend, it is unsurprising that the moral of the story was that only the Jews agreed to keep the Law, although everyone had been offered it.) Sadly, we cannot be certain that Luke knew that tradition. What we can be certain of is that Pentecost was a time when members of the Jewish Diaspora came to Jerusalem to celebrate.

For most of Judaism’s history, more Jews have lived outside Israel than in it, and this was already true in Jesus’ time. The migration of populations within the Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman empires meant that by the time of Jesus, Jews lived all over the Mediterranean. Those who could, would return to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festivals, but at the time of Christ it was possible to be part of the ‘people of Israel’ without ever setting foot on the land of Israel. Luke lists those who have been able to come to the Temple for Pentecost, but the list he gives of those who hear the disciples speaking in their own language makes no sense. ‘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.’ This just sounds to us like a random list, one that might twist our tongues if we have to read it aloud. But those who knw point out that it is not geographical; it does not include all the areas where Jews lived; it does include residents of Judea, who would have spoken the same language as the Galileans; and it includes groups like the Medes and Elamites who had not existed as separate peoples for centuries. What is Luke doing?

Maybe the point of this strange list is simply its universalism. In a world so easily divided by language, this barrier is overcome. The disciples speak, and the devout Jews and proselytes gathered in Jerusalem each hear their own native language. The gospel can be shared with people in their own tongues, in what Luke describes as the languages of ‘every nation under heaven.’ We know what it is like to be in a country in which the majority of people do not speak our native language, our mother tongue, and the way our ears prick up at the sudden sound of someone speaking our language. This is what happens to all the Jews and proselytes: ‘In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’

The multilingualism of Pentecost would have been a challenge to the Roman Empire. The Romans believed that civilisation demanded that everyone be able to speak a single language, initially Greek, then Latin, which is why for centuries the church thought God could only be worshipped in Latin. All other tongues, those spoken by the people Rome had conquered, were ‘barbarous.’ βάρβαρος is a Greek word, created because to the Greeks all non-Greek speakers sounded as though they were simply saying, ‘bar … bar.’ The disciples could have shared the good news of Jesus in Greek, and everyone in the crowd would have been able to understand them, but Pentecost tells us that the Holy Spirit does not think one human language more or less barbarous than another. God comes to each of us in the language of our heart.

The multiplicity of languages is not the only way in which Pentecost is an inclusive event. The Holy Spirit comes to all the disciples, Luke tells us. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and all of them began to speak in other languages. This includes the eleven that remain of the twelve apostles; Matthias, chosen by lot to replace Judas; Mary, the mother of Jesus; Jesus’ brothers; certain women; and all the rest of the one hundred and twenty gathered together. Peter quotes Joel prophesying that the Spirit will be poured out on all flesh: sons and daughters; young men and old; slaves, men and women. The Spirit makes no distinction. We know that this is the way of God, because we have already seen this in the life and ministry of Jesus. We will see this taken further when Peter realises that Gentiles can be welcomed into the people of God. Pentecost tells us that no one is excluded. No one is to be left out. As Paul writes to the gentile Christians of Rome, ‘all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.’

‘All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God’ is also the message that Peter gives the Jews and proselytes around him. ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,’ he tells them. I said that Pentecost is the story of the renewal of Israel, and God’s faithfulness to it. Peter is speaking to people who handed Jesus over and had him ‘crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law’ (Acts 2:23) and yet he tells them that God is still with them, that ‘the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him’. (Acts 2:39) The Messiah has come, and Israel is being restored just as God had promised; in the Jesus event, God was not turning away from these devout Jews, but towards them.

Thinking of Pentecost as an event that happened not to gentile Christians but to first-century Jews may explain why Medes and Elamites are in Luke’s geographic list. The Medes and Elamites had been enemies of Israel. In the prophecies of Joel, from which Peter quotes, the only role of nations like them was to be judged by God ‘on account of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations.’ (Joel 3:2) But Peter rewrites and recontextualises Joel’s words. No longer is the Spirit to be poured out when God ‘restore[s] the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem’ (Joel 3:1), but “in the last days,” which for Peter means in this eschatological moment, after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Messiah. Joel had prophesied that ‘Jerusalem shall be holy, and strangers shall never again pass through it,’ (Joel 3:17) but now Jerusalem is filled with strangers, ‘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,’ and rather than being excluded they are all being welcomed into the new Israel in their mother tongues. When Peter receives his vision and Paul is sent to the Gentiles, the church becomes an international, multicultural, multilingual community. Pentecost tells us that even before Gentiles were involved, the Jesus movement understood Judaism to be an international, multicultural, multilingual community. Two of the commentators I read this week describe the ‘transnational character of Judaism at the time’ and ask, ‘If the incarnation had happened during the time of Solomon, would it have had the same impact?’[1] The Messiah came at a time when the ‘God of Israel’ was known not to be tied to the land called Israel, and the ‘people of Israel’ were multiethnic and multilingual.

What does this mean for us? Forty years ago, the Uniting Church declared itself to be a multicultural church, and today in the Uniting Church we worship in thirty languages other than English (not including Indigenous languages), and we have more than 195 groups who worship in a language other than English. Pentecost tells us that the Uniting Church looking and sounding different now than it did in 1977 is something to be celebrated, not mourned. Beyond the church, Pentecost reminds us that multicultural, multilingual, and multifaith communities are not new, and that modern political leaders who promote or promise ‘one nation, one language, one faith’ are not to be trusted. Most importantly, Pentecost reminds us that God’s love is always bigger, more expansive, more inclusive than we can imagine. If in our daily lives we choose inclusion over exclusion, welcome over rejection, and love over hate, we are unlikely to go wrong. Amen.

[1] Catherine Gunsalus Gonzalez and Justo L. Gonzalex, ‘Preaching Pentecost in Today’s Changing World’.