Pentecost

Remember the great and terrible day of Pentecost? If you don't I'll take a moment here to refresh your memory, because it's a good story.   It's long, but I don't really want to cut any out.

The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost

2 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. ² Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³ They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues^[a] as the Spirit enabled them.

⁵ Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. ⁶ When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. ⁷ Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? ⁹ Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,^[b] 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia,Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome ¹¹ (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” ¹² Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

¹³ Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

¹⁴ Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. ¹⁵ These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! ¹⁶ No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

¹⁷ “‘In the last days, God says,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your young men will see visions,
    your old men will dream dreams.
¹⁸ Even on my servants, both men and women,
    I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
    and they will prophesy.
¹⁹ I will show wonders in the heavens above
    and signs on the earth below,
    blood and fire and billows of smoke.
²⁰ The sun will be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood
    before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
²¹ And everyone who calls
    on the name of the Lord will be saved.’^[c]

²² “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. ²³ This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men,^[d] put him to death by nailing him to the cross. ²⁴ But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. ²⁵ David said about him:

“‘I saw the Lord always before me.
    Because he is at my right hand,
    I will not be shaken.
²⁶ Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
    my body also will rest in hope,
²⁷ because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
    you will not let your holy one see decay.
²⁸ You have made known to me the paths of life;
    you will fill me with joy in your presence.’^[e]

²⁹ “Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. ³⁰ But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne.³¹ Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. ³² God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. ³³ Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured outwhat you now see and hear. ³⁴ For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
    “Sit at my right hand
³⁵ until I make your enemies
    a footstool for your feet.”’^[f]

³⁶ “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

³⁷ When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

³⁸ Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.³⁹ The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

⁴⁰ With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” ⁴¹ Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.

How lengthy!  But Pentecost has always been an important festival for us as Christians, because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Who is the Holy Spirit?  He's the part of God that lives in us and goes with us always.  He's the part of God that is a permanent presence in our lives.  So what's the deal with him?

  And with Pentecost?  

Well, you Christians need to be aware of the nature of Pentecost.  Because we all want to fulfill the initial pursuit of Pentecost, to know Christ and to make him known, to take his name and his word to the ends of the earth, as he commanded us to do in his own testament.  Now what we want to do is to take Christ's words, and make sure that they have access to it in Africa, and in Asia, and in those funny Australian islands where mammals lay eggs and stuff.  And how do we do that?  By replicating Pentecost, and making sure that everyone has access to God's word in their own language.  They need to have the Bible in their own tongue, so they can see God and hear him in their heart language.  

Of course, the Bible is available to 98% of the people on earth in a language they're fluent in, so really, how pressing is the need to make sure this stuff is translated?  Odds are it has been.  But what language has it been translated into in this nation?

 Well, the biggest language that the Bible has recently been translated into is 'church.' That is, the language of the scriptures, and the language of the Gospels, the good news, is now in the language of church.  

Speaking of the Gospels, have you ever asked yourself why there are four of them?  Why we have Matthew, Mark, Luke as well as John?  Couldn't we just have one?  Or perhaps two?  Granted, you'd need John, as he tells of different events than the other three, but why not just have John plus one of the others.  They weren't written in different languages, they were all written in Greek.  They weren't written at vastly different times, all within a few decades of the death of Christ.  But the reason we have

 different Gospels is because they were written for different people. This is a point that is so big that we in the church seem to have missed it quite significantly in recent years.  Think about this: the events of the life of Christ were told in the language of four men, some of whom saw the events (Matthew, Mark, John), the other of whom complied it from eyewitness accounts (Luke).  Given this, Matthew was writing to those who had an idea of Jesus as one who was foretold in the Old Testament.  Mark focuses on the deeds of Christ, his miracles and his activity. Luke's Gospel is a book of the church, written for the church and to be used by the church in a proclamation of the Gospel to the baptized and the unbaptized.  The intended audience for Luke is the church itself.  John's Gospel is the mystical book, the one that holds the divinity and humanity of Jesus closely within it.  

And yet, they're all telling the same story of the same guy, believe it or not.  They're all telling the story of Christ, the savior of the world, who came into it to teach, live, die, and rise again for everyone.  But what in the world does that mean in the big picture of everything?  It means that in addition to translating the Bible into Tagalog, or Xhosa, or Urdu, it means that we have to translate the message of the Scriptures into the languages of single parents, of working poor, of atheists and agnostics, of doctors and scientists, of university students, of teenagers, of the broken and the wounded.  And yes, I do know that's harder than translating it into Swahili.  

If you want the Bible in a foreign language, you can translate it word by word and idiom by idiom, and then just drop it off with a foreign language speaker.  But if you want the Bible to be relevant to someone who is foreign to God, that's a different matter entirely.  But that's our call as post-pentecost Christians.  We have a duty to take God and bring him to those who don't know him.  

And no, that doesn't mean dropping a Bible off with someone who doesn't go to church and assuming that it'll somehow work through osmosis.  That's what the Jehovah's witnesses do, and you and I both know you don't read the Watchtower cover to cover. It means making the Holy Scriptures, and God himself, relevant to people who don't speak church.  People who have perhaps never been to church, and who don't know what it's all about.  People who have no idea about the small or large catechisms, who have never heard of the formula of Concord, who check out churches only for Christmas, Easter, and the odd wedding.  Those are the people that you have to deal with now.  They speak English, to be sure, but they don't speak church.  

I know, I know, our compulsion is to make sure that people are fully fluent in church before they come to our congregations, but that's a Pharisee way of thinking, really, trying to make sure that only the 

people who are already in God's good graces can get to God.  The real reality of it is that Jesus went looking for those who were so far from church, so far from respectability, that they were in some cases about to be killed for their immorality.  And yes, we say that everyone is welcome in our churches, of course, but let someone wear jeans, or have dyed hair, or be gay, and all of a sudden, the tut-tutting begins.  

So, for heaven's sake, (literally ,for the sake of Heaven), let's do our best to drag the Gospel out from where we've hidden it.  Those of us who are in Canada, it's a good idea to translate the Bible into a wide variety of languages, but it's also a heck of a good idea to translate it from church back into English.  Because it tells the most incredible story ever told.  It tells the story of a God who made everything, and who came into his own creation, lived by its rules, and died trying to make everything better.  But death itself couldn't hold him, and so he came back from the dead, promising that we all could as well, and that even the eventual heat-death of the universe won't stop us from being alive forever.  He left part of God here on earth, and that part of God lives with us always, and has promised to never leave us.  

You present that to people ,and they may not believe you, but hopefully they may see that at least there is something worth believing.  

This is most certainly true.

PJ.