Pentecost and the Ethic of the Spirit

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Pentecost - 9/6/19

Acts 2.1-21, 37-41 

Exodus 19.1-6, 16-20

Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/pentecost-and-the-ethic-of-the-spirit

Today is one of those days when I get to preach on one of our stained glass windows.

            Have you ever looked at them carefully?

We used to have some postcards of them for sale in the foyer,

            but I guess they sold out…

The windows are of four New Testament preachers,

            and apart from anything else they tell us a lot

            about what this building was built for.

Imagine the old Victorian raised pulpit that used to be behind me,

            with an elevated preacher standing six feet above contradiction,

            flanked on either side by biblical preachers.

Then imagine the building full to overflowing:

            apparently in 1851 the evening service was attended by 1,711 people.

The pews were different back in those days,

            and there was an extra upper gallery,

            and they hadn’t heard of fire regulations.

But just imagine…

The only place where a preacher can stand

            to be both seen and heard is just up there:

all the sight lines point to just there,

            and if you ever fancy an experiment come back when the building is empty

            and wander around the upper platform behind me whilst speaking.

                        You’ll find that there is a perfect acoustic sweet spot, front dead centre,

                        where you could whisper and be heard throughout the auditorium.

This building is built as a preaching box.

            It is designed for the proclamation of the word.

And then when you’re up there, look over your shoulders.

Behind you we have John the Baptist preaching, and Jesus preaching,

            and Paul preaching in Athens,

and then just over my shoulder here,

            we have Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost.

The quote beneath him is from our reading for this morning, from Acts 2.14,

            ‘Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them’.

The crowd he spoke to was far in excess

            of anything this building could ever hold.

We’re told that at the end of the sermon,

            3,000 people welcomed his message and were baptised, which would seem to imply a crowd of rather more than this… In the Bloomsbury window, I counted twenty people, so I can only assume the other few thousand are standing just out of shot.

The largest crowd I’ve spoken to is about 2,000,

            down at St George’s Catholic Cathedral in Waterloo,

for the London Citizens event with Sadiq Khan which I chaired last year.

It had the benefit of being inside, with a good acoustic, and a great PA system,

            and I do find myself wondering how people could project

            to crowds of several thousand in the way described here.

But anyway, this was no ordinary sermon, it turned out,

            because there was something strange going on.

The great crowd were not all Jerusalem Jews,

            they were from the far corners of the known world.

Diaspora Jews, who had made their home in other countries,

            had returned to Jerusalem for the great feast of Pentecost,

and they heard the disciples speaking clearly in their own native languages.

Much ink has been spilled over the years

            on whether this is a miracle of hearing or a miracle of speaking.

If you have a background in the Pentecostal or Charismatic traditions of Christianity,

            you will probably have been told that the miracle at Pentecost

is an extension of a phenomena spoken of elsewhere in the New Testament,

            often known as speaking in new kinds of tongues.

Just to help us understand some of the background

            to interpreting our passage from Acts this morning,

it’s worth hearing these other biblical references…

• Mark. 16.17-18 And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; ¹⁸ they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover."
• Acts 10.45-46 The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, ⁴⁶ for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. 
• Acts 19.6 When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied
• 1 Cor. 12.10 to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
• 1 Cor. 12.30 Do all speak in tongues?
• 1 Cor. 13.1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
• 1 Cor. 13.8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease
• 1 Cor. 14.5  Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy.
• 1 Cor. 14.18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you;
• 1 Cor. 14.22-24 Tongues, then, are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is not for unbelievers but for believers. ²³ If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind? ²⁴ But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all.
• 1 Cor. 14.39-40 So, my friends, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; ⁴⁰ but all things should be done decently and in order.

The question, however, is whether what happens at Pentecost

            is the same thing as ‘speaking in tongues’,

and I’m not at all sure that it is.

Speaking in tongues seems to be primarily a devotional practice,

            probably similar to meditative chanting,

which allows the person doing it to enter into an ecstatic spiritual state

            where they feel particularly close to God.

Certainly in my experience of this,

            it has been for me a way of releasing my mind

            from the very word-bound thought patterns that tend to dominate,

allowing me to speak with God ‘spirit-to-Spirit’.

In my youth, when I was hanging out around more charismatic churches,

            people would often try and work out what earthly language

                        they were miraculously speaking

            - did it sound like Italian? or Arabic? or Hebrew? or whatever…

And there were various stories circulating

            of people suddenly and miraculously speaking

            in a language they had never learned.

I’m afraid that my experience of speaking in tongues

            has led me to rather doubt these stories

                        - they always seemed to me more like an urban legend.

            You know the kind of thing,

                        ‘It happened to a friend of a friend… so it must be true.’

My suspicion is that these stories arise

            from a conflation of the devotional practice of speaking in tongues,

                        which Paul says is a sign for believers,

            with the events of Pentecost, which is clearly a sign for unbelievers.

For my money, the miracle of Pentecost in the book of Acts is a miracle of hearing.

The disciples may have been engaging in speaking in tongues

            as they were all together in one place,

            ecstatically responding to the Spirit’s presence with them.

But the ability of people from all over the known world

            to hear them in their own languages

doesn’t mean that the believers were actually speaking

            all those different languages.

I mean, apart from anything else,

            there would have been this huge logistical problem

of making sure that the Parthians were close to the disciple speaking Parthian,

            and that the Medes could hear the Mede-speaking disciple,

            and so on, and so on.

No, this is a miracle of hearing, of understanding,

            and it is making a very clear point, as biblical miracles usually do:

which is that in the new community that the Spirit is calling into being,

            people are enabled to hear and understand each other in new ways.

The barriers of division symbolised by language and geography are broken down.

            As Peter says in his sermon on the book of Joel,

            ‘God declares, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh’.

This is the beginning of the mission

            to take the good news of Jesus to the whole world,

and the disciples will need to learn again and again

            that God is calling them to cross boundaries;

                        of language, culture, religion,

                                    purity, class, gender,

                        ethnicity, and geography.

The message of Pentecostal miracle

            is that God will not be contained in our meetings,

                        or in our communities;

            God will not be constrained by our boundaries

                        or our norms of behaviour.

            God is bigger than any attempt we might make to contain or understand.

And the biggest hurdle that these newly baptised believers

            were going to have to get to grips with pretty quickly

                        was that of ethics:

            The key question of what behaviour is acceptable, and what isn’t?

These three thousand Pentecostal converts,

            whilst they came from all over the known world, were still all Jewish.

They would all have accepted the laws of Moses

            as the basis for their behaviour,

            based on the ten commandments.

That, after all, was why there were all there in Jerusalem in the first place.

            They had come to the capital city of their culture and their religion,

                        to celebrate the great Jewish feast of Pentecost.

            Perhaps more properly known as the Festival of Weeks,

                        and these days still celebrated within Judaism as the feast of Shavuot.

The Festival of Weeks has its origins in the Old Testament,

            as the festival of the grain harvest.

It was when Jews would make an offering of the first fruits to God,

            as a symbol of the fact that whole harvest belonged to God.

• Exodus 34.22 You shall observe the festival of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest
• Deuteronomy 16.10 Then you shall keep the festival of weeks for the LORD your God, contributing a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the LORD your God.

This symbolism of the first fruits and the great harvest

            adds a layer of understanding to what is going on

                        in the Pentecost story in Acts,

            because the invitation is to understand

                        the three thousand converts in Jerusalem,

            as the first fruits of a much greater harvest of salvation

                        that would encompass all the nations of the earth.

The outward-looking nature of the events of Pentecost

            are in this way reinforced

            by their association with harvest festival of Weeks.

The Spirit will be poured out, as Peter quotes from Joel,

            on ‘all flesh’, not just on Jews in Jerusalem.

This idea of using the image of first fruits and great harvest

            to symbolise the mission of Christianity

            is certainly not unique to Acts chapter two.

You find it in Paul’s writings (Rom. 8.23, 11.16; 1 Cor. 15.20, 23; 2 Thess 2.13),

            and also, as we shall see in a few weeks, in the book of Revelation (Rev. 14.4),

                        where the believers are merely the first fruits

                        of a much greater harvest that will follow.

But there is yet another layer of meaning to be unearthed here,

            from the placing of these events at the feast of Pentecost,

            the Jewish harvest festival of weeks.

If you ask a Jewish person today

            what the feast of weeks, or Shavuot, means to them,

            they will tell you that it means two things.

Firstly, it is the thanksgiving for gift of the harvest;

            and secondly that it is the thanksgiving

            for the gift of the law of Moses.

Graphics for Shavuot online typically have

            both wheat sheaves and the two tablets of the ten commandments.

This association of Pentecost with the giving of the law

            seems to have come about during the period

                        we call ‘the intertestamental period’;

            that is the time between the end of the Old Testament and the time of Jesus.

So by the time Luke is writing the book of Acts in the first century,

            the Jews would have known that events taking place at Pentecost

                        weren’t just about the first fruits and the great harvest,

            they would have known that they were also about the giving of the law.

And once we know this,

            we can start to see elements of the way Luke tells the story

            that emphasise this parallel.

The story of Moses going up the mountain to receive the law,

            which we heard in our first reading this morning,

has thunder, lightning, a thick cloud,

            the blast of a trumpet, smoke, fire, and an earthquake.

The events of Pentecost as Luke describes

            them have a sound like the rushing of a violent wind,

                        divided tongues of fire falling on people,

            and the loud noise of people praying words

                        that come directly from the Spirit of God.

Luke is trying to draw our attention to the fact

            that the events of Pentecost find their significance

            in the giving of the law to Moses on Sinai.

And the point of this is that,

            whereas Moses had received the Jewish law from God on Mt. Sinai,

the Jews gathered in Jerusalem at Pentecost

            received a new law, a new covenant,

            given through the direct action of the Holy Spirit of God.

When God gave the law to Moses on Sinai,

            it formed the basis of the covenant between God and the people of Israel: 

• Exodus 19.5-6 ‘If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, ⁶ but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’

When God’s gave the Spirit to the believers at Pentecost,

            it inaugurated a new covenant

            between God and all the nations of the earth.

As Peter quotes Joel, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh’.

The diaspora Jews had come to Jerusalem

            for the harvest festival of weeks,

expecting to make their offering in the temple

            as a symbol that the whole offering belonged to God,

and to renew their commitment to the covenant

            established between God and Israel on Sinai.

What happened in the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit

            was not just a renewal, but a re-establishment of their faith.

They themselves became the first fruits

            of the great harvest of the world,

and the Torah Law of Moses

            became the law of the Spirit of God,

written not on tablets of stone

            but on their hearts.

The boundaries of their faith are blown wide open,

            as the central markers of their religious observance

            are re-interpreted for them by Peter’s sermon.

God is God not of one people, but of all peoples,

            and the law is no longer ten commandments

                        to be memorised and obeyed,

            but a spiritual ethic to be lived into being.

But it’s not just the law of Moses that finds its fulfilment at Pentecost,

            it is the covenant of God to Abraham.

The promise of God to Abraham

            was that through his offspring,

            all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 22.17-18),

and Peter picks up on this in his sermon

            when he echoes the promise to Abraham

            and reinterprets it for the Pentecostal generation.

  

• Genesis 22.17-18  I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore… and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves.
• Acts 2.38-39 "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him."

The call here is clear:

            The coming of the Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost

                        inaugurates and commissions them

                        for public ministry to the whole world.

            They are to be those who will take to all the nations

                        the good news that God is not just for one segment of humanity,

                        but rather is for all of humanity.

            All flesh can receive the Spirit of God.

Those who received the good news first,

            are merely the first fruits of the great harvest of all flesh.

The covenant between God and humans

            is no longer restricted to those

                        who obey the ten commandments of Moses,

            or to those who are descended from Abraham,

but rather the covenant between God and humans

            is now open to all people, in all places.

The great tragedy of Christian history

            is that for much of the last two thousand years,

            we have spent a vast amount of effort keeping God to ourselves.

Even our great missionary endeavours

            all too often dressed God up

            in cultural clothing of our own specification,

requiring those who converted

            to receive not just the teaching of Christ

            but also the trappings of Western culture.

All too often we have busied ourselves

            with the task of writing again the law of God,

defining which behaviour is acceptable and which is not,

            so we can know who is out and who is in.

We have exchanged the ethic of the Spirit

            for laws set in stone,

and in so doing have missed the fact

            that God has long gone on ahead of us,

                        out there into the world beyond us,

            drawing all kinds of people to himself,

                        and pouring out his Spirit again and again on all flesh.

We need a new Pentecost.

            We need a sudden dramatic realisation in our time

                        that the Spirit of Christ is already present in the world,

            working beyond us, drawing all things to God.

So this Pentecost I pray a blessing on all of us:

May the fire of the Holy Spirit grant us the spiritual gift

            of understanding those who are not like us.

May the voice of the Spirit speak to us of great harvest that is to come,

            of which we are merely the first fruits.

May the breath of the Spirit speak into our hearts the law of love,

            releasing us from the laws of stone

            that we have chiselled into our souls.