Translating Pentecost
May 24, 2026
PENTECOST SUNDAY
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Acts 2: 1-21 & John 14: 15-19
We have come to the final, culminating Sunday of the Easter Season: Pentecost Sunday.
As the story goes, following the Resurrection of Jesus, the disciples and their entourage had spent 40 days with Jesus. Then, as we celebrated last Sunday, came the ASCENSION…which was the way those earliest followers named the last time they saw Jesus among them in bodily form… and on that occasion, his last instruction before his departure was that they needed to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.
No doubt, not at all sure what exactly they were waiting for.
The remaining verses in Chapter one of Acts, leading up to chapter 2 and the verses Becky read for us a few minutes ago…tell us what they were up to as they waited for this “coming of the Holy Spirit.”
They returned to Jerusalem, “to the room upstairs where they were staying.” Chances are, it was the “Upper Room” where they had spent their last night with Jesus before his crucifixion…a place, no doubt, where they felt a sense of his presence…comfort…perhaps security.
The 11 disciples—the text tells us—“were constantly in prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”
Evidently, they grew tired of waiting and got down to some early church business….here’s what happened next:
Beginning in vs. 15, the text tells us, at some point in that 10 day period between Ascension and Pentecost, Peter stands up to address a crowd of “believers”…about 120 were gathered. And he talks to the crowd about the business at hand: we need to find someone to replace Judas who had taken his life once he saw the tragic consequences of his betrayal of Jesus.
So much for waiting.
They proceeded to nominate two men to fill the slot: Joseph and Mathias. And they prayed that God would reveal to them which one of these two men they should choose.
The first business meeting of the church!
When all else fails, call a business meeting!
They didn’t have Robert Rules of Order in those days so there was no call for a vote…instead they cast lots. “Casting lots” is akin to drawing straws..throwing the dice..flipping a coin…. Interestingly, the only other time in the Gospels where we reading of “casting lots” was when the soldiers at the foot of the cross “cast lots” to see who would get Jesus garments. That doesn’t cast “casting lots” in a good light. Perhaps not the best practice for church life.
Anyway, the lot fell to Matthias. And he is chosen.
And we never hear of Matthias again!
Makes you wonder whose business they were about. They still seem preoccupied with making up for what was lost rather than looking ahead to what was to come.
And then Pentecost comes rushing in….
While they are busy congratulating themselves on getting down to business…"suddenly from heaven there came the sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues of fire rested on each of them. ALL of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the SPIRIT gave them ability.”
One thing is for certain from this episode….The spirit seems to have a different agenda than the one they had come up with…so much for church order.
They began, mysteriously, to speak in languages understood only by those outside their room who overheard the commotion.
“Devout jews from every nation under heaven…” non-jews…cretans and Arabs…it was a multilingual, multicultural crowd.
EVERYONE heard them speaking in their own languages. I cannot explain this episode…however, one thing is clear and unambiguous…
This GOOD NEWS was not going to be tied to or contained in one language, one culture, one place, one people…it was spilling over…out of their control…
The movement of the Spirit turned them dramatically toward the foreigner, the outside, the stranger…this is what it means for the church to be led by the Spirit…
This mysterious episode of Pentecost is never repeated. At the same time, one could make the case the remainder of the Book of Acts is the story of the earliest Christian community learning to follow the leading of the Spirit that breaks in and breaks up all their efforts to contain the Gospel.
As Robert Frost famously stated:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down.
That something in our story is a SOMEONE…the Holy Spirit of God!
No barrier would be too great…could contain this good news that has been made known in Jesus Christ…This work of translation is essential to the life of the church… Let me offer three stories about translation from the life of the Church.
The first comes from a memory of a young couple in their late 20’s: Gwenyth and Neville Southwell. They travelled from Western Australia, where I lived with my family, to a rural, tribal area deep in Papua New Guinea. There they lived among the Komba people who had no written language. They lived there for decades, raised their family, learned their language and translated the New Testament into the language of the people they came to know and love…so that the Komba people could hear the Gospel in their own language. Pentecost in a modern cadence.
My second story is of my father-in-law, Dr. Neal Testerman. Who is here, visiting with us today. He will be 97 this August. The year was 1960 when Neal and his wife, Warene felt called to serve in the Congo in Africa. Neal was a physician and Warene was a nurse. They traveled from their home in Kansas with the 5 children—the youngest (Jennifer, my wife) was 2 and the oldest was 9. Neal tells the story of going ahead of the family to prepare the way for them. He remembers flying into the Congo on a large airplane on which he was one of the only passengers.
The country was in the middle of a coup. No one was flying into the country. It would only be months before the family would join him in a very rural village where they would establish a hospital as part of a community of Christian missionaries and there, for the next 10 years, they would translate the Gospel through in deeds of loving service. They established a 300 bed hospital and Neal set up one of the first blood banks in rural Africa. St. Frances of Assisi once said, : "Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words”. The people in rural Congo heard the Gospel in their own language.
My final story comes from the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose life we have been contemplating here at FCC. He was a Christian in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s. In his day, German nationalism has become deeply intertwined with Christian identity…
I don’t have time to go into his story…invite you to our book discussion this Thursday…and to the presentation by Andy Root a week from Wednesday…all the details are there in your bulletin. He was, according to his day, a good German Christian. Deeply devoted to the church…to teaching theology and preaching to congregations and leading young people in classes about the faith.
By his late 20’s, as Hitler and Nazism began to rise, he witnessed the growing, virulent and violent anti semitism in his country, he was among the first to speak out publicly against it and called upon his fellow Christians to do the same…to rise up and speak out for the Jews who were being scapegoated by the State…he spoke out against the drumbeat and justification of war.
Sadly, he was like a voice crying in the wilderness. The German Church had become so wedded to German identity, equating allegiance to God with allegiance to the State—to break from that identity was extremely difficult….and for the vast majority of German Christians, it was a bridge too far.
To read the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is a story of what it meant for the Good News of Jesus Christ to be translated into his time and circumstance…Bonhoeffer’s story is a story of how the Holy Spirit broke in, broke up, blew away all his existing notions of what it meant to love his country and to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It was not an easy path and one that would eventually lead to his imprisonment and his execution by order of Hitler just days before the end of the war. He was 39 years old.
Bonhoeffer came to believe that the Church is the church only when it “exists for others”…particularly those who suffer injustice. Towards the end of his life, from his prison cell, he wrote about a “this worldly Christianity”. “By this worldliness,” he said, “I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in this world. That, I think, is faith. That is how one becomes a Christian.”
We don’t need to look back to Nazi Germany to see how the Church can quench the movement of the Holy Spirit…We have seen it much closer to home in how the church’s assumptions about race, about the role of women, about sexuality, about citizenship had to be broken up, broken through to recover its Holy Inspirited identity. Of course, that struggle continues in our day and time.
Thankfully, the Holy Spirit has not given up disrupting our unacknowledged attempts to quench the Spirit. Perhaps we are closest to the Spirit when we feel that disruption…that movement that moves us beyond our assumptions, awakens us to perceptions we didn’t even know we had…breaks up and breaks in upon our zones of comfort and conformity.
Hebrew word for WIND and SPIRIT are the same. The two are often equated in Scripture. As in our text today, the rushing of the wind is how the movement of the Spirit is named.
Perhaps, created as we are in the image of God implies that we are designed to catch the wind of the Spirit. That is what we are made for.
This morning we have heard, and will hear more, thanks to Holly, of the beautiful sounds of the oboe. It is rightly called a wind instrument. That piece of intricately designed metal remains inert until she blows into it…and then it produces some of the most beautiful sound you will ever hear. Perhaps we too are, in a manner of speaking, designed to be wind instruments…
As the Apostle Peter proclaimed on that first Pentecost, the promise of Pentecost is that God will not be contained…that God’s spirit will be poured out upon ALL Flesh…sons and daughters, men and women, young and old..even upon those enslaved…they shall all be wind instruments!
So, what is the promise of Pentecost? It is simply this: God will not leave us alone. And that makes all the difference..in life, in death, and every time in between.
Thanks be to God! Amen