PENTECOST as a festival made very little impact on me as a child. I could be found crouched between the pews at the back of the small country church, my Sunday-school workbook resting on a damp hassock as I lazily coloured just enough to achieve my attendance stamp (remember those?), which, even in that particular rural backwater, was recognised as old-fashioned.
Fast-forwarding to young parenthood, I was startled one Sunday by the appearance of jumpers and scarves of vivid scarlet, making a strange contrast to the duns and heathers of the rest of the church-going outfits. “It’s Pentecost!” crowed an over- enthusiastic curate. “We celebrate by wearing red!” This was my first introduction — a congregation-wide wardrobe malfunction — to one of the major feast days of the Christian Church.
TO BE fair, Pentecost was always going to be a struggle, as it has not been assigned any exchange of consumer goods, not even curiously-moulded chocolate shapes which once were eggs but have now morphed into everything from toolkits to spaniels. Added to this is the curiously incorporeal nature of the Pentecost event: births and deaths are understandable, even miracle births, and deaths followed by resurrections. The coming of the Holy Spirit, its appearance as tongues of fire, rushing wind, a multiplicity of different languages — these are hard to grasp, and even harder to explain and make relevant.
Where, then, to start? Perhaps with the Tower of Babel, the Old Testament story that is linked with Pentecost. The Jenga-like activity of trying to build a tower higher than anything ever built before resonates with everyone who has seen the increasingly tall buildings dominating our cityscapes, witnesses to the drive of human beings towards the bigger, taller, and ever more imposing.
With Babel, our obsession with dominating our landscape and our communities — which began so long ago and continues today — received its nemesis not in the collapse of the tower, but in the disintegration of the community that had engaged upon its construction. This left the edifice half-built — a monument to self-aggrandisement and pride. The monoglot builders were scattered and “confused” with multiple languages among them, their ambition to “make a name for themselves” temporarily crushed. Thus, the message apparently goes, God deals with those who seek superiority over humanity and God.
FAST-FORWARD again to those heady days after Jesus’s resurrection: days filled with the strange and unexpected appearances of Christ; periods of excitement and drama followed by times of waiting in hope, gathered together in one place, not in order to out-achieve God, but to await the fulfilment of his promise.
The disciples were in Jerusalem because Jesus had told them to stay there and await the Holy Spirit. Everyone else was in Jerusalem because it was the Festival of Weeks when the Jewish people celebrated God’s gift of the Law and thus their identity as His people. There they all were, witnesses to the incredible event that was the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, accompanied by the “sound of rushing wind” and “divided tongues as of fire” resting upon each person’s head — evidence of the indwelling of the Spirit in every individual. Ontological change, in fact, which is the biggest thing that can happen to a human being. Renewal, rebirth, everything is the same and yet utterly changes.
THE Tower of Babel remains a warning of our inclination to overreach ourselves, but the scattering of those who gathered to compete with God has been redeemed. Instead of being flung to the four corners of the earth in disarray and confusion, we see, through the lens of Pentecost, a world where diversity is not a punishment but a joy — where buildings are no longer the places where God might be found, but where every place is holy ground, and every person is potentially a receptacle for the Holy Spirit.
AlamyPentecost fresco by Mikhail Vrubel in St Cyril’s church, Kyiv
Speaking many languages is no longer a device to cause “confusion”, but a gift enabling the transmission of news so important that its meaning cannot be mangled. The scattering of God’s people like so much confetti enables the spread of the news of his love for each created thing, communicated in ways tailored to every community; and, just like confetti, it gets everywhere.
The “tongues of fire” are an echo of the burning bush that called Moses to his ministry and that calls each of us to ours: the sign of God’s presence in the Temple and his Spirit within us, calling us to a living, loving relationship, in harmony with God and neighbour. Just as the Word became flesh, so, too, has the Church.
SO, HOW to big up this undervalued feast day? Traditionally, those wanting to expand beyond “Colour Me Pentecost” have focused on the festival as the “birthday of the church”, with cake, birthday banners and balloons. The danger with this, of course, is that it encourages us to look round affectionately at the (usually) slightly shabby building — a little bit cold, definitely in need of something being fixed somewhere — in which we gather for worship, when in fact Pentecost signalled the demolition of the Church as buildings and its relocation from bricks and mortar to flesh and blood.
I’m not even sure about tongues-of-fire headbands, although making straw and paper flame-launchers will endear you to over-active children (search this on the internet). These focus on the symbol rather than the event itself, which, like most of the really good stuff, is a mystery and therefore beyond description. Rather, fill the church with the flowers and greenery that a significant celebration merits, and encourage people to take seriously their new, changed selves by genuinely loving God and loving their neighbour.
PENTECOST is more than just wearing jolly red jumpers, waving red and yellow streamers, and shouting out “happy birthday” in as many different languages as your church community can lay claim to. This is not to disregard these activities completely, however. It is up to every one of us to communicate the glory of the gospel in ways adapted to those we are trying to reach. Our remit is the whole earth, and our methods of communication should be as diverse as the 7000-plus different languages spoken on it.
But let us not limit ourselves, or God, reducing a mystery to a sound-bite. Like baptism and ordination, Pentecost celebrates the complete recalibration of ourselves from flesh-and-blood mortals to adopted children of the living God: citizens of the New Jerusalem, living in hope and infused with the Spirit.
Perhaps, after all, it doesn’t need gaudily wrapped gifts or peculiarly shaped chocolate: it’s amazing just as it is.
- Pentecost redeems the Tower of Babel. The people no longer seek to reach up to heaven to find God, but celebrate the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. From God-Out-There, to God-Everywhere.
- A multiplicity of languages is no longer designed to confuse, but to spread the news. Diversity is to be celebrated: everyone is invited to the party.
- Celebrate Pentecost in ways that have meaning for your own particular community, whether this is wearing red, waving banners or a quiet recognition that the church is not a building, but the people who gather in it.
- Don’t run away from the mystery. Acknowledge it, embrace it, and let it change our lives.
The Revd Dr Sally Welch is Vicar of the Kington Group in the diocese of Hereford.