1. Pentecost

On Pentecost, Christians celebrate the presence of the Holy Spirit. The word "Pentecost" is from the Greek word for "50", and Pentecost takes place 50 days after the end of Passover. Pentecost is a Christian festival, but we did not invent it. Before the events in this morning's reading from Acts, Pentecost already had a thousand years of history as a festival.

Pentecost started out as an ancient Hebrew harvest festival. By the time of Christ, Pentecost was a celebration of God's covenant with Israel. One commentator noted it was 50 days between historical Passover in Egypt and the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. So Pentecost celebrated not only the harvest, but also God's covenant with God's people. It was thus an obvious time for Christians to celebrate God's new covenant with those who chose to be Christians.

2. Spirit

Because of the experience reported in the book of Acts, Christians today associate Pentecost with the Holy Spirit. In John's Gospel we hear Jesus talking about sending an Advocate to be with us -- a friend, someone who would speak on our behalf, a very good friend because this Advocate is the spirit of truth. We could get the impression then that the Spirit which has come to Christians since Pentecost is something new. But all it takes is a read through both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety to know that they are full of accounts of God's spirit from beginning to end.

In the Old Testament, God's Spirit is a dynamic, creative activity. Just as this morning's Pentecost story talks about the presence of God like a "violent wind", both the Hebrew and Greek language use the word for wind - ruach in Hebrew and Pneuma in Greek - to mean spirit.

Despite all of the modern notions of human life beginning at conception, the Hebrew idea was that it was at the moment when the newborn baby took its first breath, that the spirit of God entered the baby and gave it life and from that moment its age was counted as a living being. A primitive idea and yet more advanced than any age of humanity - to be a living human, that from God has to enter us and become part of us.

In the New Testament, Jesus ministry begins with the Spirit like a dove descending on him at his baptism in the river Jordan. When Jesus preaches in his home town synagogue in Nazareth, he reads from the Old Testament and says "the spirit of God is upon me" and then says, "this scripture has been fulfilled in your presence. Jesus claimed the spirit.

The Holy Spirit was central in St. Paul's relationship with God. For Paul, the Holy Spirit was supernatural. It represented divine power. It was accompanied by signs and wonders.

The Holy Spirit came from heaven as an act of God's love. It was bestowed on all the faithful as the adopted sons and daughters of God that we might know God's secret purpose of blessing.

For Paul the Holy Spirt was the divine pledge of immortality. Thus when Paul is talking about life in the Spirit, he is talking about life lived in the confidence of the resurrection, that death is not the end, and that death is not victorious.

The Holy Spirit makes us new creatures in Christ. In Christ we are spiritual creatures - pneumatikoi. We no longer are living according to the flesh. Participation in the spirit enables us to live the ethic of love.

Paul talks about both the gifts and the fruits of the spirit. In the letter to the Galatians (5:22-23) he gives a succinct of the fruits of the Spirit --"love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, friendliness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Fruits of the spirit develop over time as we mature in the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit.

Paul also talks about gifts of the spirit -- special abilities that some people are given. These abilities arise in God's grace. They are not deserved, but we receive them for a purpose. Gifts of the spirit that Paul was aware of included prophecy, healing, interpretation - and speaking in tongues. And that brings us to a central feature of today's story in Acts -- communication.

3. Tongues

If humanity stems from common ancestors, as presented in the Adam and Eve story, then at one time there were no different languages. In fact, the Bible presents the existence of different languages as something God did to punish humanity for its excessive pride. You remember the story of the Tower of Babel where humanity was going to build a tower so tall it would reach into the heavens. In that story, God confused their tongues, gave them different languages, so that they could no longer communicate or coordinate with each other. As a punishment for humanity's pride, God replaced communication with cacophony. God replaced understanding with empty noise. Ever since, we use the word Babble to refer to a collection of voices speaking at once where we cannot make out what is being said.

Ever since, languages have been a source of fascination for us.

With the internet, you don't have to go to Calcutta or Delhi or Bombay to buy an English language newspaper from India. You can just go on line and read it, including the matrimonial advertisements. Parents arrange marriages for their children and now a lot of it happens through the newspaper. Read them and you'll notice that everyone is looking for a homely bride. A homely bride? That's a startling thought to put in an ad -- and then you realize that English has already become a slightly different language there. What they mean is a woman who will be a good homemaker.

Referring to how people use different words on each side of the Atlantic, Winston Churchhill once said that the Americans and the English were one people divided by a common language.

My parents had a language story. My father had been in China in the 1930's and could read, write, and speak Chinese. He came back to the States in time to get stuck here during World War II and married my mother. They went on some speaking assignments to churches and he said "you can translate". And she said, "but I don't know Chinese". He said, "no problem, I'll write it all out, I'll speak a sentence in Chinese, then you can read the English translation. They did this and my mother discovered to her embarrassment halfway through the presentation that she'd gotten ahead of him - she was reading the translation first. Thinking quickly, she chopped a sentence in half so that she could get behind him again. Relieved, she thought perhaps the error had gone undetected. On the way out, one person said to them in Chinese - "bou tsaw, bou tsaw" - Mandarin for "not bad, not bad."

St. Paul had some language stories, but he wasn't amused by them. The people in Corinth weren't just mixing up a few words, but had become obsessed with gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly speaking in tongues. Someone has described speaking in tongues as "inspired gibberish." People opened their mouths and what came out were sounds nobody could understand. I'm told that speaking in tongues can be very uplifting. Pentecostal churches, so called because of their emphasis on speaking in tongues, emphasize this gift today. It may function as a psychological release of tension in which one is able to just let go and not apply conscious control to the sounds coming out of one's mouth.

But for the church at Corinth, it had become a problem. First of all, if speaking in tongues was a gift from the Holy Spirit, you also had to have people with the gift of interpretation - who could translate for others -- for the gift of tongues to have any value for others.

More importantly, gifts of the spirit had become a matter of possession and pride. People owned their gifts. People were proud of their gifts. People with gifts of the spirit were sure they were more Christian than others around them, since they clearly were more favored by God. Of course the others resented this.

The church, with its obsession about gifts of the Holy Spirit was going out of control. The congregation split into rival parties and even got into fist fights over the food at the communion table.

It seems like half the weddings you go to, you will hear someone read the 13^th chapter of Paul's first letter to Corinthians, and it's very understandable. The "love chapter" is among the Bible's most treasured, along with the 23^rd Psalm. But it didn't arise in a vacuum. Paul wrote it to quiet the cacophany of the contentious Christians in Corinth.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love,

I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge

and if I have faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

Paul wrote his letter to the church in Corinth about 20 years after Jesus' ministry in Galilee -- about the year 50, AD.

Scholars say about 30 more years passed before the book of Acts was written. This is important -- to realize that Paul's problems with speaking in tongues in the churches took place 30 years before this morning's Pentecost passage in Acts was written. That allowed time for a lot of reflection, a lot of sorting out what was important and what was not. The author of Luke and Acts wanted to write something which would be of value and build up the church for years to come. Surely in writing, the author of this morning's passage wanted to learn from Paul's experience.

And so in recording the experience at Pentecost, this morning's writer doesn't focus on the cacophony of inspired gibberish. He highlights the true miracle of Pentecost - the Holy Spirit bringing communication to bridge human differences.

The miracle was one of understanding. The disciples spoke, and visitors from all over the ancient world each heard them speaking in their own tongues.

4. Conclusion

We need the presence of the Holy Spirit as much today as ever. Paul's words in this morning's Romans passage are as true as ever. The whole creation is still groaning as a new creation is being born. This new creation is our own lives in Christ and our lives together as the Body of Christ.

I had a meeting once with someone who had been needling me with little nasty comments about things I had written. Entering the meeting, it was important to sort out my own feelings. I was aware that I certainly had an impulse to take my fist and flatten the other person across the wall. That would not have accomplished anything positive!

Facing the meeting, I faced the question, "What can I say that will be truthful, will build and connect and not destroy and separate, and will free us to get the work done?"

To ask such questions is to ask for the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is to ask for clear and positive communication such as happened in this mornings story about Pentecost. It is to ask to be a part of building the body of Christ and the kingdom of God.

The Holy Spirit empowers. The Holy Spirit communicates. The Holy Spirit is a friend and Advocate. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth.

The Holy Spirit is as essential to us as the air we breathe and the wind to which it is likened.

We pray for the Holy Spirit to surround us, to strengthen us, to give us safety, to shape all of our communications - and to give us a consciousness of our connection to God.