Pentecost Disruption

My Dad used to hate sitting in queuing traffic that wasn’t going anywhere. He’d do anything to avoid it. When he saw disruption ahead he’d turn off the motorway only to rejoin in a few miles along it with the disruption as unavoidable as it was two miles back! 

We hate our lives being disrupted. I’m just getting over nine days of the latest Covid strain. A headache beyond belief, an annoying cough and brain fog and fatigue. I got a negative in the test yesterday but I’m still not strong enough just yet to go out and do things. So I’ve been disrupted. Funerals of people I’ve cared for have had to be given to a colleague, meetings have had to be cancelled or rearranged, and most upsettingly, I’ve missed the centenary weekend at my chapel in Sawley which I’ve been planning with them for ages. So disruption caused by life’s boulders thrown at us like sudden illness or death or unemployment or life just not being straightforward can really get to us. 

But on Pentecost Sunday, I’d like to ask is not the call of God on us a disruptive one? Is not God calling us to sit up and be shaken out of apathy and disillusionment to experience a different story? And if we are full of God’s Spirit, aren’t we meant to disrupt what is an unpleasant and unfair world? Or do we just want to avoid these things like my Dad turning off to get out of trouble? 

I wonder what it must have been like for those disciples around Pentecost. They were continually disrupted in their heads by Jesus. Imagine it. He dies, all your plans disrupted, he rises and appears several times, then he leads you up a mountain and he disappears again this time for ever, and you are simply told to stay in the city and wait. What do you talk about between Ascension and Pentecost? Not that you know what’s about to happen at Pentecost. But maybe there are times when God simply says to us “wait - it isn’t going to stay like this. Something is about to shake things up. A bit of divine disruption!” How do you feel in the waiting?

The feast of Pentecost is a day of disruption. Think about it. People gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Harvest. But what happened there was beyond any of their comprehension. The wind blew, there were tongues of fire, people from all over the world heard good news in their own language. And those poor old disciples like my head this afternoon writing this suddenly found their brain fog had gone and they were absolutely clear what they were meant to do. A bit of disrupting in the name of Christ! If you read Acts you will see a community that is suddenly bold, strong, and fearless. A few months earlier these same people had cowered away in fear. 

Today I’m pondering a disruptive God. 

God’s call on us is disruptive. Think of the prophets. Many of them were quite content doing what they were doing. Then God’s call came taking them from comfort zones to uncertainty but with a promise that they would never be alone.

Think of the incarnation narrative. Shepherds on

a hillside disrupted by a heavenly host, Mary disrupted by birth announcements, magi compelled to follow a star, Herod disrupted by threat. Think of Jesus’ ministry. He was unpopular with the religious status quo because he said radical things and mixed with unsavoury people and he clashed with them because their ideas about God were challenged, even rubbished. So no wonder he ended up where he ended up, but even there, the disrupting God decided to disrupt a bit more, defeating even death which had never been defeated before. And then Pentecost! 

The thing that really excites me about Pentecost is that ordinary people like you and me become confident enough to share Jesus. I am sad because we spend most of our energy today trying to keep the church going and by that we mean buildings. But the church was born on those streets and it was dynamic and exciting and people wanted to engage with it… and with all those diverse people there Pentecost was a day of reconciliation and community. How we need that in today’s world where we’ve turned on each other. Do we urgently need to rediscover our call to be disruptive? And to be disruptive remember we need to be in the middle of that which needs disrupting! So we need to be involved in our community, we need to know what issues people face, we need to be involved in politics, we need to speak up where there is no justice or even common sense. We need to commend the Saviour into a climate that needs saving from itself. Isn’t that the point of Jesus? He will save the people from their sins… 

I’ve been thinking about my Sawley chapel this afternoon celebrating a centenary. They were in the very safe hands of Richard Teal former President of the Conference, but I was sad not to be with them. At the front of the chapel on the wall are some words of Psalm 100: “enter into his courts with praise.” In 1924, going to church was the norm. Now it isn’t. So to be church we need to return to our roots - our disruptive roots and be amongst people where they are. Some might “join our church” but many won’t and we need to question how institutionalised church can work long term —- but I pray on this Pentecost Sunday people might say of us as they did those spirit filled disciples of old - “those who are turning the world upside down have come here also.” Can we be so noticed and involved the disrupting Gospel might really change things? Well this is a day to dream. 

I end with the best blog I’ve read today on the change Pentecostal fire and power might bring — enjoy! 

A Reflection on Pentecost (and tongues of fire)...

by Shane Claiborne 

Today Christians around the world celebrate the birthday of the Church -- one of our holiest holidays: Pentecost.

Pentecost, meaning “50 days,” is celebrated seven weeks after Easter (hence the 50), and marks the birthday of the Church when the Holy Spirit is said to have fallen on the early Christian community like fire from the heavens (for this reason lots of Christians wear red and decorate in pyro-colors, and it’s also where the fiery Pentecostal movement draws its name).

What does a religious event a couple of thousand years old have to offer the contemporary pluralistic, post-Christian world we live in? I’d say, a whole lot. Here’s why.

Let me start by confessing my bias. Not only am I a Christian, I am a Christian who likes fire. I went to circus school and became a fire-swallowing, fire-breathing, torch-juggling-pyro-maniac. So naturally, I like Pentecost.

But what happened at Pentecost runs much deeper than fire and wasn’t just about speaking in a charismatic “tongues-of-fire” prayer language, as beautiful as both of these may be.

One of the things that happened at Pentecost was a really diverse group of people understood each other, as the Spirit of God fell upon them. It was a divine moment of reconciliation among people from many different tribes and nations and languages — a reconciliation moment I would say the world is desperately in need of today.

To understand what happened at Pentecost, we need to look back to the legendary story of the Tower of Babel, as it sort of paints the backdrop. After all, Babel is where we derived our 6000+ spoken languages, according to the Bible. You may remember the old Babel story from Sunday school, or you may have some Bob Marley tunes ringing in your ears about the fall of Babylon, the region around where the tower fell. Here’s a brief synopsis: The story begins by saying, “the whole earth spoke one language” (Gen 11:1). The young human species seemed quite impressed with itself and its limitless power, so the people set out to build a tower to heaven. It doesn’t seem so terrible in itself, but the Scripture speaks of the tower as an idol of human ingenuity, which they built “to make a name for themselves.”

God was not impressed. As the story goes, God topples the tower and scatters the people, humbling them, bringing them back down to earth. And here’s an important detail: as they were scattered across the earth, God confuses them by having them speak many languages rather than one (it’s also said this is where we get the word “babble”). This story becomes a central commentary about power. In fact, the Bible ends with the “fall of Babylon,” the quintessential symbol of imperial power and the counterfeit splendor of the world.

But here’s why Babel is an important backdrop for what happens at Pentecost. Pentecost is the anti-thesis of the Babel project. According to the Book of Acts (chapter 2), during that original Pentecost some 2,000 years ago, there were people from “every nation under heaven” gathered together. The author even goes on to specifically name more than a dozen geographical places, large and small, Jewish and non-Jewish, rural and urban, from which people came. They represented the whole earth.

Then the Spirit comes upon them.

And here’s what happens next: Even though they all spoke different languages, they understood each other. The text says that the folks doing most of the speaking were “Galileans” but everyone heard what the Galileans said in their “own language,” their native tongues (Acts 2:6).

I heard some scholars point out that “Galilean” was shorthand for backwoods folks from the hills — they had a strange accent and spoke in a really distinct dialect. As a Tennessee hillbilly, I sort of like that the preachers that first Pentecost were country folk (not that God has a southern accent...) But Galileans were frowned upon by many and seen as unsophisticated, uneducated, uncivilized — and for this reason folks were stunned that Jesus came from Galilee where folks thought “nothing good could come” (John 1:46).

But regardless of whether the preachers spoke with a country twang or British flair (or Swahili or Bengali or Arabic or Japanese), the point is: They all understood what was being said as if it was being spoken in their own language.

They are the opposite of the one-language, tower-building Babel project. At Babel, God scattered the pretentious human race. And at Pentecost, God reunites the scattered people into a new beloved community — made one not by their own hands or by a shared single language, but by the Spirit of God.

They are the new sign of God’s Spirit — a community that is as diverse as creation itself, as unique as the fingerprints we leave and the DNA we’re made of. But it is a community that understands each other amid our diversity, each as children of God.

I heard a rabbi say that it is the nature of the empire to create sameness, like coins and buildings and houses that all look just the same. But if uniformity is the imperial brand, diversity is the mark of God’s creation.

Certainly, the contemporary Church still has much work to do when it comes to reconciliation.

At Pentecost we are reminded that we can be diverse but still be of “one heart and mind” through the Spirit of God. And unity does not mean uniformity. To harmonize does not mean we homogenize. In fact, any good harmony has lots of different voices, just like that early Church.

What’s just as important as Pentecost is what happened after Pentecost. The early Christians started sharing everything they had. Former enemies became friends. Folks laid down their swords and picked up a cross. The Book of Acts goes on to say, “There were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34), for whenever they carried the burdens of one another and shared their possessions with open hands. One of the signs of the birthday of the Church was they ended poverty through a radical community of selfless love and reckless abandonment of possessions. They were a community of reconciliation where “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” but all are made one in and through Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

They were a new Family, with a big F.

In a world riddled with violence and racism and hatred, the Pentecostal vision seems to invite us not to settle for the world as it is but to dream of the world as it could be. As it should be. In today’s Church, we still feel the legacy of racism and division, the incompleteness of the vision of that early Church. As Dr. King once said, “The most segregated hour in the world is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” But Pentecost teaches us about a God who is restoring broken relationships and healing the wounds of racism and segregation.

Happy Birthday Church.

May we become the Church we dream of.