It began with a strong wind. Then something like tongues of fire began to divide and rest on each person gathered. I can’t tell you if they were afraid, if their eyes widened and hearts raced. If they thought to hide, be it from the fire or from one another. But I can tell you that in mystery and all at once, people in the room began to utter tongues unknown to them. An utterance that went out to the multitude, people from every nation, as the sacred sound drew them toward one another.
They heard themselves in the sound—not the language of their oppressors or people who believed themselves to be closer to the divine than others. They each heard their own language and understood. What words were spoken remain as mysterious as the tongues that bore them. But together, even in the presence of doubt, people from all nations remembered their ancestors. Those who had an imagination for a miracle such as this. The image of God, a sacred multitude, gathered in the midst of a cosmic power shift.
... Could it be that Pentecost is paradise remembered on earth? What does it mean that in the story we are not told precisely what they communicated about the miracle or the divine? We know only that it was understood—that no tribe or tongue was excluded nor made a singular spectacle, but that a collective was born.
Two thousand years after the Tower of Babel falls and fifty days after Christ rises from the dead, we find the story of Pentecost. The Spirit descends upon a sacred diverse gathering, and language is made portal to the divine. A path to God, to one another, and to shared imagination. Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit of God rejects assimilation under the guise of “unity.” This tale is not just about diversity; it’s not mere tokenism; it’s language as liberation. It’s the sound of excluded voices making something whole again.
• • •
From Diana Butler Bass:
The people who gathered in Jerusalem that morning were not free. They were not there with protections of religious liberty. They made this journey in the shadow of crucifixion, where one of their own people, a popular yet controversial rabbi, had been executed by the overlords. And the rumors swirled — of a missing body, of strange appearances. They’d made a difficult journey from long distances in dangerous times to be at this festival.
If we understand who was there and why, the real miracle of Pentecost comes into focus. All these victims, those demeaned, enslaved, and brutalized by Rome, stopped being afraid. Those diverse peoples, who had been at war for centuries, whose ancestors had tried to destroy one another, suddenly realized they weren’t enemies at all.
They finally heard one another — the spirit broke through — and they rediscovered their own story of a world destined to be shaken by the justice of God.
However, there was an enemy: Caesar, the imperial force that had, for generations, inflicted trauma upon them and their historic homelands through their military might, political manipulation, ethnic superiority, and economic control.
And there was an Advocate for them: the Holy Spirit. The spirit was unleashed — “poured out on all flesh.” Even — maybe especially — their colonized flesh, their owned bodies. Men and women alike, and despite enslavement: these were God’s dreamers and prophets of “the great and glorious day.”
If you insist on celebrating Pentecost as the birthday of the church, please remember the uprising of 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. They remind us that the thing we Christians call “church” was born in the fire of anti-imperialism and the burning faith of the colonized to be a community of resistance against militarism, ethnic superiority, and economic injustice. This is the new body of Jesus, the embodiment of solidarity, freedom, and equality in this world.
No comments:
Post a Comment