Do We Know It's Pentecost?

Last Sunday was the birthday of the Church.  Not Holy Trinity Binegar (Christian worship site since before 1066, parts of current building go back to circa 1400), where I happened to be at the time, or the Anglican Church, but the community of believers dating back to when a group of people had a bizarre, life-changing spiritual experience one Shavuot in the early 1st century AD.

Although the Bible describes Shavuot as a harvest festival, a time to thank God for His gifts of grain, it has come to be celebrated as the day on which God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses.  Christian tradition, on the other hand, celebrates Pentecost (the Greek name for Shavuot) for God’s gift of something even greater than food or rules to live by.  It is the day on which, according to Acts Chapter 2, God sent His Holy Spirit upon Jesus’s followers.

But what does that actually mean?

A penpal of mine, a convict in Louisiana, is a devout Christian who is currently working on a series of mini-sermons on the fruit of the Holy Spirit.  We keep in touch by an email system, Jpay, which allows us to send each other virtual greetings cards from a small selection, as his prison does not allow physical greetings cards.  The range on offer varies according to the season, and generally includes current religious festivals; for example, in winter, there was a choice of holiday cards to mark Christmas, Hanukkah, western New Year, Kwanzaa, and one wishing people a happy Chinese New Year for the Year of the Rat (when in fact it was about to be the Year of the Rabbit).

So maybe in late spring there would be one for Pentecost (either the Jewish festival or the Christian one that doesn’t necessarily fall on the same day)?  Nope.  Seasonal cards were for spring, summer, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or Cinco de Mayo.

Perhaps it isn’t that surprising that Christians don’t make as much fuss about Pentecost as about Christmas or Easter – and that most non-religious people have barely heard of it – as it is hard to explain.  Why do we celebrate Christmas?  To celebrate the birth of Jesus.  Why do we celebrate Easter?  Because we believe that after being killed, Jesus was miraculously raised from the dead.

Why do we (or should we) celebrate Pentecost?  Well – Jesus had promised his disciples that he was going to send the Holy Spirit to them.  So he rose up into the sky until they couldn’t see him for clouds, and then, about ten days after that, when huge numbers of pilgrims from many countries were visiting Jerusalem for Shavuot, there was a sound like a violent wind, and a sight which looked like tongues of flame resting on the heads of the disciples, and suddenly they were miraculously able to speak the languages of the many foreigners visiting – which sounded amazing to the pilgrims, but to the local people in Judaea just sounded like drunks babbling incoherently.

So Peter, the most prominent of Jesus’s disciples, preached the first ever Christian sermon.  He didn’t announce that Jesus was God incarnate, or that he had been born of a virgin.  Neither did he give a summary of Jesus’s moral teachings.  Instead, he proclaimed that the man Jesus, God’s faithful servant who had been unjustly put to death, had been raised to life by God and was now raised to God’s right hand, had received the Holy Spirit from God, and was pouring out the Holy Spirit on his people, so that everyone might know that Jesus was the Messiah, God’s chosen leader.

Arguably, this could be seen as a greater proof of God’s power than the flame-like lighting effects or the mass outbreak of foreign languages.  Peter, who a few weeks earlier had been so terrified of being arrested and put to death that he pretended he was nothing to do with Jesus, was confidently speaking out and urging everyone to repent, be baptised in the name of Jesus the Messiah, and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit themselves.  Whatever he had experienced, both in encountering the risen Jesus and in being filled with the Holy Spirit, had profoundly changed him.

Yes, but – what does that mean for us?  The story of Pentecost is more problematic than Christmas or Easter, because those were one-off miraculous events.  Most Christians don’t worry, ‘If I didn’t get pregnant before having sex, I’m not as holy as Mary,’ or, ‘If God didn’t raise my grandfather to life after he died, maybe God didn’t love my grandfather as much as He loves Jesus,’ because we accept that Jesus’s role in saving us was unique. 

But the Book of Acts has numerous accounts of groups of people receiving the Holy Spirit.  There was no one pattern as to how this happened.  Sometimes people were filled with the Holy Spirit when they first heard the news of Jesus being preached, and then they were baptised; sometimes people came to believe in Jesus and were baptised and then the disciples laid hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes the disciples only realised that people had received the Holy Spirit because they could hear these people speaking in strange languages and prophesying.

If you went just by this book, you might get the impression that all real Christians have dramatic, unambiguous supernatural experiences.  But other early Christian writings, especially the writings of Paul, make it clear that not all Christians do ‘speak in tongues’.  Also, the ‘speaking in tongues’ that Paul was familiar with mostly involved people speaking unfamiliar languages that no-one understood unless someone else was miraculously granted the gift to interpret them, very unlike the Pentecost story of people miraculously being able to speak to foreigners whose languages they have never learned.  As PDB11’s post on the Holy Spirit says, it sounds as if two different phenomena are being described.

One of my friends believes that you cannot grow spiritually unless you speak in tongues.  I’m glad it works for him.  Whether what he is doing is actually a gift from the Holy Spirit, or just him making nonsense syllables and telling himself that he is praying in tongues, I expect that God can use it to talk to him at a subconscious level while bypassing his conscious mind.  But even so, I am fairly sure that Paul’s line ‘Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?’ which my friend quotes as if it’s a checklist was actually intended as a rhetorical question to which the answer was obviously, ‘No.’

The only thing I am sure of from the Bible’s description of ‘the gift of tongues’ is that it is a gift, which God can give to people or not, as He chooses.  It isn’t like teaching yourself a human language by learning to say a few phrases, practising them, and gradually extending your vocabulary.

Still, if we don’t experience miraculous changes when we come to believe in Jesus, or when we are baptised or confirmed, how do we know if the Holy Spirit is in us?  It seems to be something we just have to trust is true.

But what does the Holy Spirit being in us even mean?  One idea I like is that the Godhead is not restricted to the Three Persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but rather that God’s Spirit in us draws us up into the Godhead, making us God’s children as much as Jesus is.  In his inspirational book The Divine Dance,   Richard Rohr suggests that Andrei Rublev’s famous painting of the Trinity originally included a mirror, so that the viewer could see himself/herself invited to dine with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

But does that mean I’m claiming that Christians are God?  We certainly aren’t always right, or always good people.  What evidence do we have that we are spiritually different from non-Christians?  Well, perhaps we’re not.  Perhaps what happened at Pentecost went far beyond God pouring out His spirit on those who happened to live in a place and time where they happened to have the chance to hear about Jesus.

Paul wrote ‘The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” ’

So does that mean we are adopted as God’s children when we receive the Holy Spirit?  If so, does it mean that Jesus’s disciples became God’s children at Pentecost in a different sense from the one Jesus meant when, before his death and resurrection, he encouraged them to pray to God as their Father? 

Does it mean that Jesus himself, when the Holy Spirit descended on him when he was baptised, became God’s Son in a way that he had not been before?  Yet Christian doctrine teaches that God has always been plural, not a single entity who decided to impregnate a virgin so that He could have a Son, but a Father and Son and Spirit who have been together, loving each other, before time itself began.

I don’t know the answers to any of this.

I sent my penpal a card with a quote from Andrew Murray on prayer, from the ‘Religion’ section of the images on offer.  It seemed about the most appropriate for the season that I could find: