Pentecost: A Royal Preview Of What's To Come

How many languages, how many ethnicities, are found in most of our churches?

"When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks, and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.

"There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound, they came on the run. Then when they heard, one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were thunderstruck. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans? How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues?

Parthians, Medes, and Elamites;

Visitors from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia,

    Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,

    Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene;

Immigrants from Rome, both Jews and proselytes;

Even Cretans and Arabs!

They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!”  

(Acts 2:1-8, the Message)

"After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

(Revelation 7:9a, NIV)

In today's celebration of the birthday of the Christian movement, I'm impressed by how God's Spirit brings into deep oneness diverse people from all over the world. To the extent that today's churches, by contrast, are made up of mostly of people of the same race, language and national origin, we are falling short of reflecting God's original and ultimate intent.

If we believe God is all about bringing people together in an eternal reunion, we need to begin living into that reality now. It's certainly clear that at the annual Pentecost harvest festival described above, God is birthing a new community with this end in mind, a rainbow of people of all colors and with all kinds of differences. We need to get with the program.

In the Acts 2 account we see urban Romans at fellowship with desert dwellers in Arabia. unsophisticated Cretans with strait-laced Jews, thousands of men and women, young and old, representing three continents and speaking multiple languages. It's hard to imagine any more unlikely candidates for becoming a united family of faith. 

And yet it happened, a divine sign of the coming age.

We've lost sight of that. We tend to operate in ways that wedge us further apart, and along the same fissure lines that are so dividing and subdividing the world in every more polarized ways. Sadly, the church has become as worldly as the world around it in this respect, and appears to be far from becoming the diverse but unified colony of heaven God meant it to be.

Today we need to re-envison a kind of future that is all about that grand, eternal reunion, while we celebrate the grand birth of a movement that is a 'pre-union', a living and loving sign of God's future world.

Rachel Stoltzfus, 1925-2017

Meanwhile, last Sunday marks a year since the death of Rachel Stoltzfus, for many years a beloved and faithful member of our house church. She and her late husband always had a least one international student sharing their home, and for a decade after his passing, she continued to be a living expression of God's hospitality toward students from all over the world.

She never got to travel abroad, and never even saw the ocean until just a few years before she died, but God brought the world to her door, and moved by the Spirit of Pentecost, she just invited everyone in.

May we all learn to do the same.

These were among the people whose lives Rachel touched.