One of America’s best-loved preachers, Fred Craddock, was about to give a lecture a few years ago at a seminary on the West Coast. Just before he began, one of the students stood up and said, Before you speak, I need to know if you are Pentecostal. The room grew silent. Craddock said he looked around for the dean of the seminary! He was nowhere to be found. The student continued with his quiz right in front of everybody. Craddock was taken aback, and so he said, “Do you mean do I belong to the Pentecostal Church?” He said, No, I mean are you Pentecostal? Craddock said, “Are you asking me if I am charismatic?” The student said, I am asking you if you are Pentecostal. Craddock said, “Do you want to know if I speak in tongues?” He said, I want to know if you are Pentecostal. Craddock said, “I don’t know what your question is.” The student said, Obviously you are not Pentecostal. He left.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. It’s the birthday of the Church with a capital C. And so, in a sense, everyone who is part of the church today is Pentecostal.
In spite of the fact that we sometimes don’t understand the question Are you Pentecostal?, we are unwilling for the word simply to be a noun. We don’t want Pentecost to represent only a date in the history of the church. We refuse for it to be simply a memory, something back there somewhere. The church insists it can have adjectival form. When the church is alive in the world, it is Pentecostal. And it is Pentecostally alive in the world when it lives under the influence of the Spirit.
But Pentecost was a date first. It came fifty days after the first harvesting of barley. Pilgrims from all over the known world made their way to Jerusalem to worship in the temple of God. They were there to celebrate the God’s giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The giving of the Torah meant that Israel was an organized people, constituted by law and not just by the whim of tribal leaders. They had been delivered from slavery to the pharaoh in Egypt and had become a movement. At this point they were a people, a people who lived by these laws.
So when the Holy Spirit came upon that multiethnic, multilingual crowd at Pentecost, sounding like a mighty rushing wind, God was blowing new life into them. God was literally inspiring them. God was blowing all their differences away in order to order their lives from the inside out rather than the outside in. From this point on, it would be the law of love within more than the love of law without that would make them a people. And all of that because, as Peter preached, the prophecies of old that God would pour out the Spirit on all flesh were coming true because of the crucified and risen Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.
The first evidence of this was that the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles as they spoke in other languages. All those Jews gathered in Jerusalem, who spoke languages from every part of the world, heard these uneducated Galileans speaking to them in their own tongue. It completely amazed them that they could understand them. The church, from the very start, under the influence of the Spirit, spoke to people right where they were. The church did not force these people to learn a new language; it miraculously learned their languages. And the result was one new language of the Spirit that gave a common understanding that made one new people.
I don’t know about you, but I have always felt limited by not knowing other languages. A couple of weeks ago Kim and I met a Danish couple while we were on vacation in New York. We had a nice long visit, and when we parted, they thanked us for allowing them to use their English. They had learned it in school and spoke it very well. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know a word of Danish or even enough of another European language that we could share. You know what they say: if you speak several languages, you are multilingual; if you speak two languages, you are bilingual; and if you speak only one language, you are American.
The beauty of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit gave Aramaic-speaking-only Jewish disciples of Jesus from Galilee the capacity to speak to the heart of people from all over the world so that they could understand the love and power of God for themselves.
Julia Graham was thrilled recently to receive the new publication from Lebanese Baptists about their educational resources. She and her late husband, Finley, were long-time missionaries in Lebanon. When they first went, all mission work was being done in English. Beirut was once the Paris of the Middle East—a tourist destination before it became a war zone. Finley believed the gospel ought to be heard by people in their own tongues, so he translated everything into Arabic. Today, Arab Baptist work is thriving where other mission endeavors have withered. The children and grandchildren of those the Grahams led to faith in Christ are leading the vibrant Christian witness there. Though it took generations to come to this, not one stunning day, it is nonetheless a Pentecostal miracle. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit, done under the influence, you might say.
Anytime such a thing happens, it will make people wonder about how it could have. Notice the amazement of those who witnessed what was happening in Jerusalem that day. They had no explanation except to figure that those disciples were under the influence of alcoholic spirits.
A few years ago I was part of a foursome that went to Colorado for a few days of golf. We arrived in Denver late and rented a van. Steve Brookshire took the wheel, with Doug Hill, Daryl Kirkham, and I in tow. As we pulled into the city limits of Breckenridge, lights started going off behind the van. Steve pulled over. The local police were all business. They said Steve was swerving across the centerline and suspected he was driving under the influence. When they couldn’t smell alcohol, they figured him for marijuana. Steve was amused at first. The police weren’t. He told them we were a church group and his pastor was in the back seat. Somehow that didn’t sway them. Go figure.
They put him through the most acrobatic sobriety test I’ve ever seen. Don’t know how you could pass it if you weren’t in good shape otherwise. Unable to prove he was stoned, they asked if they could search the van. They took our luggage and golf bags apart. Finding no funny-looking grass, they let us go. But even as they did, the policeman wouldn’t give in. He only said he couldn’t prove what he figured: that Steve really was under the influence.
Would anyone accuse you of living under the influence of the Holy Spirit? Would anyone accuse our church of that? I mean, what would it take for people to see you or us as being under some kind of culture-defying influence that so disoriented people from the status quo of law and order that all they could say is that something had taken hold of us?
We need only to look at this passage to find one way we could do that. If our church could be known as the place where all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds and languages and life experiences and social and economic settings were to find themselves in one accord as a community of faith shaped by the Spirit of Christ—well, that would do it. And it would do it because that isn’t what churches are much known for, don’t you know?! We are known more for keeping the social order intact than for reshaping it. We are known more for keeping the peace that is enforced by law than making the peace that is informed by justice.
Some years ago a teenager who grew up in our church watched in the narthex as a poorly dressed and dirty person off the street came into the church. Instead of welcoming him and helping him find a place of refuge in our sanctuary, the usher quickly led him out of the building. That boy may not have had all the facts, and maybe the usher knew something we don’t know today. But when that boy grew into young adulthood and moved back to Dallas with his family, he found another church to attend—one downtown, without a big steeple, where all kinds of people gather and worship together.
It’s not always easy—it’s never easy, let’s face it—being that kind of church. There’s a lot of history and attitude to overcome. But look again at what Peter says are signs of the Spirit: sons and DAUGHTERS will prophesy (yes, that means preach!); YOUNG people too, whom we think haven’t lived long enough to see the world rightly, will see visions; and OLD people, whose future we think is behind them, will dream dreams. SLAVES—that is, men and women from the lowest classes of society—will also possess the Spirit and have something to offer. And the whole world will seem off kilter, when in fact it is finally just finding its proper footing.
After World War II, Baptists in Europe, working with Southern Baptists in the United States, purchased an 8-acre estate in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, for a new seminary that would bring Baptists together across the languages and cultural histories that had divided them. One of my former theology teachers, the late John Kiwiet, whose wife Margaret just offered a prayer this morning in her native Dutch language, said of it: Establishing Rueschlikon was a peacemaking movement. You had to take your enemy into your camp—eat and drink with them. On Wednesday nights they would kneel for prayer and sing hymns in German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and English. It was a place, Margaret wrote in her soon-to-be published memoirs, where you tried to work things out, getting rid of old difficulties and anxieties.
Margaret had to do that herself. She was working with a German student one day, cleaning windows outside, when the young man asked where she stood with Germans. She said she preferred not to talk about the war, after what she had seen happen to her Jewish neighbors at the hands of the Germans. Well, he said, most likely they got what they deserved. With that, Margaret said, as she remembered the faces of children on trains going to the gas chambers, If they deserved that, you deserve this! And she pushed him into a patch of thorny rose bushes. When the president of the school heard of it, he reminded Margaret of the school’s mission to be a place of forgiveness and reconciliation. But that kind of righteous indignation is part of the Spirit’s work, getting us together over all our past hates and hurts.
Sometimes I hear people say things like, This is not the church I grew up in. And I would ask you, if it is a church living under the influence of the Holy Spirit, could it possibly be that? If we are living under the influence, people will sometimes wonder what spirit has taken control of us when our church is Pentecostal like this. But if we are living under the influence, we may just see everyone—people of all kinds among us—calling upon the name of the Lord and being saved.
