Every year it is a challenge for whomever is assigned the New Testament reading on the Day of Pentecost, all those place names from the ancient world. The story is from Acts 2. The disciples of Jesus, still in hiding after his death, and still processing the experience of his resurrection and ascension, receive the Holy Spirit in the form of fiery tongues, enabling them to speak and be understood by people of many languages. The reaction of bystanders who hear them is: “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 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—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”
In his book on Pentecostalism, theologian Harvey Cox talks about William Seymour, the Black preacher who began the ministry on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where the global Pentecostal movement began in 1906. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing segment of Christianity, with around 400m adherents. (To put this in context, there are currently about 75m Reformed Christians in the world.) The original mission was wildly and, at the time offensively, multi-racial, including whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Seymour himself saw this diversity as a confirmation of the Holy Spirit’s Presence, in the raucous diversity of that tongue-twisting list in Acts 2.
The phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” technically “glossolalia,” became a fundamental element of Pentecostal practice and identity. We know that this was something the early Church did; the Apostle Paul talks about it a length in 1 Corinthians. (That is not necessarily what the apostles were doing in the miracle of Pentecost; they were understood by people who spoke a diversity of languages. Glossolalia is a form of ecstatic speech that is not comprehendible by others.)
This being America, Seymour’s movement soon became divided by racism, with many white adherents segregating themselves from others. They focused on the “speaking in tongues” piece, separating it from the fact that what happened both to the apostles and at the Azusa Street mission was multi-racial and multi-cultural. In order to maintain the white-supremacist Jim Crow regime in America, they chose to interpret glossolalia as other-worldly, ignoring and rejecting the explicit diversity indicated by all those place names in Acts 2. This, of course, corrupts and defeats the whole point of the Christian understanding of Pentecost.
The ability to “speak in tongues” remains one of the main indicators of Pentecostalism. And, as I say all the time, “if it helps you follow Jesus, knock yourself out… or be slain in the Spirit, or whatever….” More power to you! It is certainly working by just about any measurement.
At the same time, the true indication of the Presence of the Holy Spirit is not so much a personal experience of ecstatic speech. It is the breaking down of ethnic, racial, cultural, and national boundaries. It is the emergent diversity of a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-national community of disciples of Jesus Christ. Indeed, this diversity is constitutive of the Church. It is the indicator of Christian spiritual authenticity.
One major theme of the New Testament is the dissolution of the barriers between Jew and Gentile. A group claiming superiority and imagining itself to enjoy certain privileges had to learn to become open and inclusive of others, in part by realizing its own solidarity with them in a larger system of oppression.
How we get from that to the racially segregated excuse for Christianity we have in America is a tragic and bloody tale of bigotry and slavery justified by heresy.
But we won’t know the Holy Spirit until Pentecost is more than reading a bunch of place-names and using other languages, one Sunday a year. We will know the Spirit when we bear witness to and practice a radical inclusiveness and diversity.
For us Presbyterians, this will mean giving up some of the most cherished elements of our identity, and our power. It will not be a continuation of the fruitless activity of trying to get “them” to join “us.” It will be when we figure out how to lose ourselves in solidarity with others.
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