On the day of Pentecost, says the
book of Acts, the disciples of Jesus “were all together in one place.” And that “together” is a prelude to what
happens next. Because the sudden sound
of a howling wind from heaven brings people running to them from every
direction. They come rushing together into
that same place, and when they get there we see that a kind of United Nations
has spontaneously broken out. And just
like at the United Nations, where the delegates put on their headphones and
listen to the simultaneous interpreters in the back room, these people all hear
the same speech, but each of them hears it in his or her own native
tongue.
But you notice that as soon as the
extraordinary experience is over, they all turn to each other and start
conversing normally about what has happened.
And then Peter stands up, and addresses all of them together at once,
and quotes at length from the Bible. He
can do this because they all know the Bible in the same translation, and they
share a single language that all of them can understand. It is the common language of business and government,
of science, philosophy, and literature, of magic and religion. It is called Greek.
Greek was the language of a unity enforced
from above, imposed on the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean by a conquering
empire. But in the flaming tongues of
the Holy Spirit, these pilgrims and residents of Jerusalem experience a new
possibility—a unity of the heart. The
“all together in one place” of the Jesus community opens up and invites them to
enter a new world. And this invitation comes
to each of them, individually, in a way that reminds them of home.
I once had a girlfriend from
Germany. More precisely, she was from
East Germany, and she had come to Berkeley to study theology a couple of years
after the wall came down. We met during
the final year of her graduate fellowship, and when it was over she decided to
return home. She had already determined
that she would not go on to get her doctorate.
And she was an only child, estranged from her parents, so I asked her
why on earth she would want to go back to the grimy, depressed, post-Stalinist
world she had grown up in when she could remain in California with me. And she told me how homesick she was for the German
language. As a theologian and lover of
poetry, her true home was not a place, but the sounds and the meanings of her mother
tongue.
This first part of the Pentecost
story appeals to us today. “Diversity”
is a positive watchword of our culture, and the “spirituality” that is not
“religious” believes that languages as diverse as psychology, physics, and the
world’s varied sacred traditions all say essentially the same thing. But while it is the new orthodoxy that we
must tolerate each other’s differences, and there are no differences that
really matter, real unity seems far beyond our grasp.
Even on Pentecost Day, there were
those in the crowd who were cynical and scornful of what they had seen and
heard. That’s when Peter stands and refers
the crowd back to their common story. He
quotes to them from memory their sacred scriptures, in the Greek translation
they all know. And he says that the
ancient promise of God is coming true, the promise of the pouring out of God’s
Spirit, making prophets of everyone, young and old, men and women, even slaves. And again we hear this and it makes us feel
good, because it seems very egalitarian and progressive, just the kind of collective
spiritual experience we would want to have.
But Peter keeps going with his
quotation from scripture. Because in
this prophecy the Spirit that is promised to all people is not an isolated thing;
it is but one part of a greater fulfillment—the coming of the great and
glorious day of the Lord. “What you have just experienced,” says Peter
to the crowd, “is a sign of the times, a harbinger of the climax of God’s
saving acts in history, and the promised judgment of the world.” If only Peter had stopped a verse or too
sooner, because this is a promise that sounds to us like more of a threat, the
kind of thing that makes “spiritual but not religious” people shudder, and religious
people, well, embarrassed.
But that is because we imagine that
God’s judgment is like ours. We like to
think we are tolerant, but we have judged the world and found it guilty, so we
assume that God will do the same. We judge the world and find it guilty, when we
see the needless suffering of the innocent and the folly of the mighty and shrug
our shoulders and say, “what can you do?”
We judge it guilty when we accept our own simplistic explanations for
the actions of our enemies, and refuse to consider that they might have reasons
for the things they do and say. We judge
the world and condemn it when we have no hope for its future, and pray to
escape to some other, better, one in the great beyond.
But I think that deep down in many
of us, maybe all of us, is the longing for resolution, the hope for real unity. We live in a world of conflicts—over power
and money, and market-share, over water, and land, and minerals; conflicts over
the interpretation of law and memory and sacred text; over borders, and who
belongs on which side of them; over who is the bigger victim, and who got more
love from Mom, and who’s to blame when something goes wrong. But in this welter of conflicted nations, and
sexes, and religions, of conflicted persons, with conflicted thoughts and
conflicted feelings, there are some who still hope for authoritative judgment
to decide what is right for everyone, and what needs to be done.
The Holy Spirit is the power of
that judgment, already at work in the world.
For Peter and the disciples, it is the Spirit that was in Jesus, and
according to the Gospel of John, he gave it to them on Easter night. They are
in their little upper room, hiding from the world in fear, and he comes to
them, and to their conflicted hearts his word is “peace.” In that peace sends them, as he was sent, not
to condemn the world, but that it might be saved. And so they can carry on his messianic work,
Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on them, giving them the power of judgment. "Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says, “If
you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of
any, they are retained."
We Christians have tended to treat
forgiveness as if it were a law to be obeyed.
But to forgive without making a judgment is to refuse the gift of the
Holy Spirit. It is to scorn the mighty
act of God that Pentecost reveals in tongues of many lands—that in Christ God entrusts
the loving judgment of the world to human hands. The kind of forgiveness that flows from the
wounds of Christ is not a magic wand that we wave over situations of injustice,
of cruelty and pain, and say “all is forgotten.” It is forgiveness founded on the power of the
Spirit to move hearts of stone to repentance.
It is about the restoration of broken relationships and the healing of
the soul.
The judgment of the world is
worship in Spirit and in Truth, and this requires that some sins be
retained. Not so that they can be
punished—that is exactly the kind of self-righteous hypocrisy Jesus condemned
so fiercely—but so that they can be forgiven.
Because without the acknowledgment that sin has been committed, and harm
has been done, forgiveness never comes. We
remember the things that were done and we remember that they are sins, because
this is the judgment that saves the world.
This judgment is a grave
responsibility, that falls on us as we bring it to bear on others, and if you
don’t feel a sense of awe in the face of this power, I fear for you. To accept it is to play with fire. It can get you killed, and it can turn you
into a monster. To use it wisely
requires tremendous humility, and patience, and total surrender to the wisdom
of God. But it is in this judgment that
that we will come at last to the unity that all people, from every land, have
sought for a thousand generations, the unity of the Father, and the Son, and
the Holy Spirit.
