Acts 1.2-21, John 14.8-17
The people we meet in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles are a long way from home, a long way from those comfortable, familiar things which say “home” to them. We’re told that Jerusalem is crowded with Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest. They have come to Jerusalem from all around the ancient Near East– the Parthians, Medes and Elamites and all the rest… people from all over the ancient world from Mesopotamia in what is now Iran to Libya in North Africa, from the island of Crete to Phrygia in the Anatolian highlands of Turkey to the Arabian peninsula, and people from the great city of Rome too. Some may have been there on business, or just passing through, and some – the proselytes in that long list – were people who were interested in Jewish faith, but not ethnically Jewish. But it’s likely that many would be from Jewish communities - in some cases centuries old - founded during times when the people of Israel had been exiled from their homes by invading powers and had had to make their homes in foreign lands. Some had just merged into the surrounding culture, but others held onto their Jewish faith, and the commandment that all Jewish men should go to Jerusalem for certain important festivals, like Pentecost, the festival that celebrated by the early summer harvest, and the giving of the law to Moses on Mt Sinai. Of course, not everyone went – it would have been expensive and dangerous – but perhaps just once in a lifetime you might make the trip if you could manage it, just like the Muslim pilgrims who this week are travelling from all over the world for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
But when you got to Jerusalem I wonder what it was like for you? Maybe you thought you’d feel at home, but the reality was probably complicated. If you were a second, third, fourth, or even more, generation immigrant, you would have grown up surrounded by the language and customs of the place you lived in – high on the Anatolian plains or in the cultural sophistication of Rome, perhaps. Whether you liked it or not, it would be the sights, sounds and smells of that place that felt most familiar, that really felt like home; in Jerusalem you felt like a fish out of water.
But then those homesick pilgrims hear something strange. They hear their own languages, their own particular dialects, being spoken by an excited band of people who seem to have a message they are burning to transmit. It’s not just the words that catch your attention if you are one of those far-from-home travellers, it is the sound of home, “how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” Our own mother-tongue… Not in some garbled translation – Phrygian spoken with a Galilean accent – but as if by a native, our neighbour in our home village, someone who knows where we are coming from, literally, but also culturally, spiritually, emotionally. Someone who has shared our experiences, who knows how the mountain stream tumbles through our village, or where the best grazing is up in the hills. Someone who has been where we have.
I’ve often described the Holy Spirit to people as “God in the here and now”. We sometimes speak and think of God in ways that make him seem a million miles away up in space, or thousands of years in the past, but the Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit making him known in people’s daily lives, breaking through that barrier of time and distance. The Spirit puts the words of God into the minds of the Old Testament prophets for example, and in Ezekiel’s vision breathes life into the dry bones of Israel (Ezekiel 37). In the book of Exodus, the Spirit even inspires the craftspeople who built and furnished the tent where the people of Israel worshipped as they journeyed across the wilderness, as they embroidered its curtains with pomegranates, (Exod 35) and beat metal out to make its sacred vessels. In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the Spirit praying in us “with sighs too deep for words” when we can’t think of what to say.
God in the here and now, our here and now, whatever that is. God knows where we are coming from, because he is there too, at home with us and in us, just as he was in Jesus. “Show us the Father,” says Jesus’ disciple, Philip in today’s Gospel reading. “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…” We haven’t seen Jesus, not in the way Philip had, but through God’s Spirit we can have the same experience. He is the Advocate, says the Gospel – literally the one who speaks for us. Through the Spirit God is present in our lives, understanding our language, the things we say, and the things we don’t and maybe can’t say, better than we can understand it ourselves.
And, of course, if that’s true for us, then it must equally be true for every other person he has made. He must equally be present in their lives, at work in them.
How different would our world be if we really lived out that belief, that in everyone we meet, we also meet with God?
I’d like to finish with a poem by Malcolm Guite, which says all this far better than I can. It is called, simply, Pentecost.
Today we feel the wind beneath our wings
Today the hidden fountain flows and plays
Today the church draws breath at last and sings
As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.
This is the feast of fire, air, and water
Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.
The earth herself awakens to her maker
And is translated out of death to birth.
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release
Today the gospel crosses every border
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace
Today the lost are found in His translation.
Whose mother tongue is Love in every nation.
Amen
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