Acts 2:1-21
In my middle year of seminary, I participated in a required cross-cultural experience: a planned three-week trip to another country, someplace that is guaranteed to pull you out of your comfort zone; its primary purpose is to offer students a greater perspective on how faith intersects with culture.
The cross-cultural trip might be to India, South Africa, Israel, Guatemala – in my year it was Cuba. There we were kept busy for three weeks traveling around the island meeting with local government officials and church leaders, touring their big medical school and a farming cooperative, and visiting lots of churches.
We visited churches of all kinds – Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Pentecostal. From impressive cathedrals to tiny storefronts. One Sunday morning when we were in a city called Ciego de Avila, we managed a double-header.
Two congregations had invited us to worship, so our group split up and half of us attended worship at the Pentecostal church while the other half went to the Baptist church. At the Pentecostal church, we were greeted with kisses from perfect strangers – which seems to be the Pentecostal way, at least in Cuba. During the service we experienced what we hoped were minor communication problems that we tried to fumble our way through. Being a guest can be difficult when you don’t know for sure what is expected of you.
The Pentecostal service started earlier than the Baptist service, and so when our bus picked us up and returned to the Baptist church to collect the rest of our group, they were still in the middle of worship. We were torn between wanting to join them in worship and not wanting to disturb their worship.
This Baptist church was one of the tiny storefront churches. The front windows were open, but covered with iron bars. This was often the case in Cuban stores and homes as well. The church was quite full, and to walk in and try to find a place to sit would have caused a disturbance, we were quite sure. So we remained outside. And it was behind iron bars that we stood on the sidewalk watching the worship going on inside.
Well, our efforts to be unobtrusive actually caused us to be somewhat obtrusive. Some of the Cubans began handing hymnals to us so we could sing with them. For reasons I don’t think I could explain, we did not pull the hymnals through the bars so we could hold them comfortably, but instead we reached our arms through the bars to hold the hymnals on the inside.
It was a strange experience of feeling together and yet separated. We were worshiping with our American and Cuban brothers and sisters inside the church and yet we were very aware of the bars that separated us. I suppose you could say those bars were symbolic of the barriers between our two countries, our two languages, our two cultures. It was just another aspect of the daily struggle we experienced during our time there.
We reached the point in the worship service where they began the celebration of communion. At this point, the bars felt even more like an unwanted obstruction. What would we do? Could we share communion with one another through a set of iron bars?
On the day of Pentecost, Jesus’ followers were still occupying that upper room, the place they had gathered with Jesus before his arrest, the place they had huddled in fear after the resurrection, the place they had returned to again and again during this in-between period. After he ascended, leaving his followers behind, they returned again to the upper room and devoted themselves to prayer. That is what they were doing when the feast of Pentecost arrived.
Pentecost was a religious festival, a reason for Jews from all over the diaspora to travel on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, bringing the first fruits of the harvest to the temple. While the disciples were cloistered in their room, the streets below them were crowded with a vibrant mix of people, cultures, languages.
There is no reason these men of Galilee should have been able to speak the native languages of all who were together in Jerusalem that day. But the Spirit gave them power to do so. God who knew their needs more completely that any of them did, gave them the ability to speak in a way that could be heard. And it really started something.
The good news began its travels across languages, across borders, across mountains and seas; across nationalities, across races, across religions and creeds. The word of the Lord, by the power of the Spirit had wings.
Jews and Christians, and Muslims, as well, are called the people of the word. Our faith is founded on our understanding of the word of God. Particularly for Jews and Christians, who share a common testament, and understand the very creation of the world as an act of divine speech. God said, “Let there be light;” then God said, “It is good.”
Later, God spoke to a man named Abram, and guided him to a place and a promise that would reach all the peoples of the world through all the generations of the world. God brought life to barren men and women, God sustained life in barren places, all for the sake of this promise.
Later still, God spoke through judges, priests, and prophets, mending what had been broken, healing what had been wounded, all for the sake of this promise.
And then God spoke through Jesus, whose words and actions, life, death and resurrection from the dead, transformed people and brought them together for a common purpose: to carry the good news of God’s redeeming love to every corner of the world.
And yet – we continue to divide ourselves, to erect barriers that separate us, to shut people out, away from the promise. In our efforts to separate ourselves from others, we try to put limits on God’s redeeming love.
For God, of course, there are no language or cultural barriers. As the creator of all that is, God understands us intimately, completely. God speaks our language fluently, whatever language it might be. And it is only through God, and the amazing power of the Spirit, that the promise truly lives, moves and grows.
For us, it is a matter of letting God. The first followers didn’t need to open the window to let the Spirit in, she burst in on her own. Yet, looked at another way, they did let the Spirit in – in the way they devoted themselves, together, to prayer.
Do we invite the Spirit in and let the Spirit take hold? Or do we erect barriers, like those bars across the windows of the Baptist Church in Ciego de Avila? How can we share together in the body of Christ when we allow barriers to separate us?
On that day in Ciego de Avila, we didn’t. As we stood outside those iron bars listening to the great thanksgiving prayer of communion, we began to see how absurd it was. The Cubans inside looked at us outside, and we knew they weren’t going to pass the bread and the cup through a set of bars. The time had come to be a disruption. We all began to pour through the door, just as the Spirit blew through the walls of that upper room in Jerusalem. We had no common language, but we shared an understanding that the presence of Christ in the sacrament, the work of the Holy Spirit, eliminates barriers.
There is no barrier that can keep out the power of God’s Spirit. There is no wall that can stop the power of God’s word in action, communicating the good news of our salvation. There is no thing – no hate, no fear, no doubt that can stop the power of God’s love. Let it in, let the Spirit move in us and around us. Let the power that is God’s love fill the world.
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Photo Credit: Ciego De Avila. By Leon Petrosyan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25287658
