Adonai, send forth Your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

In the book of Acts, Pentecost is a miraculous inbreaking of God’s Spirit. Xenolalia, a phenomenon in which a person is able to speak, write, or understand a foreign language they could not have acquired by natural means, is as chaotic and startling as it is miraculous in the narrative of Acts. Why is this how God chose to demonstrate the movement of her spirit amidst Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem?

Bless Our God, my soul. / Adonai, my God, how great You are! 

Empires demand homogenization for the sake of domination. There are a variety of intimate and totalizing ways homogenization is demanded, but it is always enforced through death, albeit slow or sudden. When the Roman Empire murdered Jesus, they demanded an end to his vision of the Kingdom of Heaven that would conflict with their enacted ordering of the Kingdom. However, Jesus’s witnesses refused to accept the political determination of death as an end. Even in the face of death, they testified to resurrection, a different interpretation of life not solely determined by the empire. The Spirit of God transcends the declared boundaries of life and death. 

Adonai, what variety You have created; / Earth is completely full of the things You have made.

Perhaps this is why the Spirit of God is demonstrated through the miracle of xenolalia in Acts – to spur the imagination of the early church into the divine imagination of what they could and should be: a community not limited by the homogenizing principles of a nation-state or a spiritual community defined by any one, specific lingual/cultural imagination. Instead, they must exist as a radical alternative to a homogenizing imperial vision – a collective multitude of witnesses to the Spirit life – that is by its very existence a witness to God’s vision for the world. 

This radical alternative community that aims to hold all things in common, even across difference, is then not just a happy ending to Acts 2 but the natural outflow of this disruptive moment of Pentecost. To hear God’s message(s) in multiple tongues (lingual and elemental) at once is to acknowledge that God does not speak singularly – in singular narratives or modes, or to singular communities or to people who then disseminate information, blessings, etc to the less chosen, less holy. No, God speaks to all of us, for all of us, all at once. This is radical democratization of spiritual access and authority. Hence, this disruption would lead the early church to radically reorganize their community in terms of power, family, economy, and worship. As Acts says, they even sold property and possessions (Acts 2:45) to enter into a shared form of collective need and living. This is a radical witness to collectivism that goes beyond words into new arrangements of living, just as their witness of the good news exploded language initially to declare life in surprising ways. 

Adonai, send forth Your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

This is the legacy of Pentecost I want the church to remember and re-member. But I often wonder how the church can earnestly celebrate Pentecost for its radical reorderings, all while knowing the modes of domination sustained inside and outside the church that continue today. I want Pentecost to be a divine spark for the church, a fire that never goes out, but do we treat Pentecost as a fire like any other fire? A place for stories and community visions that eventually burn out when people get tired of keeping them going? Will we accept that we must always awake to ashes?

You turn Your face away, they suffer, / You stop their breath, they die and return to dust.

How do we honestly proclaim a Spirit of new life and collective liberation, this spirit that descended at Pentecost, in the face of astounding apathy to the mass death of today’s world order? Of course, this question has been wrestled with by Christians since the beginnings of the Jesus movement. Most days, I have no words that feel adequate to testify to the magnitude of death this world order demands. Just this week, as I write, I’ve seen pictures and videos of charred children in Palestine, people kidnapped by ICE and sent to prison camps in El Salvador, ongoing eco-death all over the globe, and the mass starvation of several nations of people. No violent rushes of miracles seem to be descending that I can see from where I pray. What does it mean to believe in miraculous inbreaking and reorderings in the midst of this? What does it mean to testify to a God that is renewing the world with her spirit? 

You give breath, fresh life begins, / You keep renewing the world.

A reflection from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley

For the multitude

God of every tongue,

We are grateful that in the presence of the Spirit, we are not asked to forget ourselves but to remember. To remember where we came from, to recall the sound of our own cultures and languages. Help us to heal from those spaces that have demanded assimilation from us under the guise of unity. To belong, we are told we must exalt commonality over particularity. Teach us the kind of belonging that is not threatened by those things that make us different but comes alive at the site of inclusion. Protect us from communities who only welcome our cultures as a theatrical symbol of their own benevolence. Lead us into spaces where our presence is longed for not as a mark of achievement but out of the deep recognition that hope cannot survive on one tongue alone. Amen.

Breathe

INHALE: I won’t forget myself.

EXHALE: I will listen for my voice.

Are there fires of revolution that your community is uniquely positioned to spark? What are those divine fires?

What communities’ testimonies tend to be ignored, spoken over, or silenced?

How does the Spirit of life move amidst chaos and death in your immediate community?

This video from the Atlanta City Council March 6, 2023 published Square Mile Media Atlanta shows Rev. Keyanna Jones speaking on behalf of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City, an activist solidarity network against the construction of Cop City Training Center that would lead to massive deforestation, displacement of Black families, and heightened training for racist and classist warfare in Atlanta and America at large. Here, Reverend Keyanna Jones preaches on collective power and witnesses to realities of death while testifying to a theology of the multitude.