Gathering at Pentecost—Acts 2:1-13
Every year at Pentecost we read these names of
strange places and peoples, Phrygia, Cretans, Elamites, Cappadocia, and there
is always some tripping over pronunciations. These are people from a wide swath
of the Roman Empire and beyond—some of the names arguably dated even at the
time the book was written. Peoples all gathered in Jerusalem for the
festivities, gathered and the Spirit allows them to hear what the Spirit is up
to in the world, in the vernacular, the languages of the people gathered. Hear
the Gospel without the awkward mispronunciations and stilted tentative speech.
Imagine
that, to be gathered and everyone hears. Gathered and experiencing the Spirit
announce the event of the Gospel to all of them. Imagine, peoples
gathered for the sake of the message about Jesus Christ crucified and risen
bringing about a new day!
It is a
reversal of Babel, yes, and no. It isn’t as if they all now speak Hebrew, or
Koine Greek, or Aramaic or what have you. No, there is a remaining diversity
even within the unity of the Gospel’s message. The new thing God is doing, the
portent of the New Age of Christ, is people from all over gathered together
around the works of the Spirit, revealing a new world, even as it navigates and
respects the realities of the old one. It is a work of translation, this new
community.
Perhaps, in its own way, that
overworn phrase, “The medium is the message,” still rings true here.
Translation so all people are included when gathered around the good news about
Jesus, is not a small part of the good news about Jesus, or at least the Gospel’s
outworking by the Holy Spirit.
The Gospel experienced by Galilean
fishermen in in the 30’s, experienced by this diverse set of folk in Jerusalem,
translated to the persecutor Saul on the way to Damascus, written in ways
relevant to communities in what is present day Greece and Turkey, inclusive of
Augustine’s anxious flock in North Africa, expressed as “All Shall Be Well” in
Julian’s England, re-igniting the faith in Luther’s Germany, the Gospel as a
righteous shield for the enslaved in North America gathered to worship at night
in hush harbors and to “untouchables” in India, ringing out for repentance and
justice in South Africa and El Salvador.
Gathering because the Gospel has
been translated by the Spirit as compelling to the needs of the moment, as
relevant, experienced as for you, as what we need, and who we can be.
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