Whoever gets to read our first reading today always draws
the short straw. It is notorious for being one of the trickiest readings in the year, with all
those strange names to deal with; Parthians, Medes and Elamates, the residents
of Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, Pamphylia and all the rest. There’s a reward in
heaven for the person who has to tackle them all. The author of the Acts of the
Apostles wasn’t being sadistic by putting them in though. As you can see from
the map I’ve given you, this was a way of saying that people from from every
point of the compass were present in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. In particular these were places where there were significant ex-pat Jewish communities. Some of
these communities had formed along trade routes, others had started when Jewish
people had been taken into exile or forced to seek refuge abroad at times of
trouble. Many of those who were part of them had essentially now become now
become Roman or Libyan or Parthian, speaking
the local language, wearing local clothes, sharing in the culture of that
place. The only thing that singled them out was their faith; they still
followed the teachings of Judaism, and read the Jewish Scriptures, even if
their understanding was coloured more than they realised by the beliefs of
those around them.
But the old country has a way of drawing migrants home from time to time,
and in this case it wasn’t just about nostalgia. Jewish law required people to
make sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem at special times of the year. That
wasn’t very practical if you lived in Rome or Parthia, but if you could, you’d
try to make the odd trip now and them. As
well as those who’d been born Jewish this passage tells us that there were
proselytes, converts, from those nations too, perhaps still exploring, perhaps
quite committed, but coming at this faith from the outside. The Old Testament
prophet Micah had spoken of a time when all nations would come streaming to
Jerusalem to worship on the holy mountain. “Many nations shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…that he may teach us his ways”
(Micah 4.1), and this seemed to be what was happening.
But what did these visitors find when they arrived in Jerusalem? Even if
they’d grown up as devout Jews, or studied hard to learn the customs, it was
all a bit alien. They couldn’t understand the language. The food, clothes and
customs were different. It should have felt like home, but it didn’t. These
visitors might think they shared a faith with the Jews of Jerusalem and meant
the same things by the words they used, but they’d inevitably be bringing assumptions
and ideas with them from the places they’d grown up in, and the differences
would probably be far more obvious than the similarities. The children and
grandchildren of migrants to this country from other parts of the world often
experience the same sort of cultural dissonance when they go back to where
their parents call “home”. It’s not home, not really, not to them, and they can
end up feeling that they don’t properly belong anywhere.
That sense of dislocation can arise for other reasons too. We don’t
necessarily have to migrate geographically to feel it. People can find they’ve
left behind the world of their parents because they’ve had a better education
or earn much more than they did. We can simply discover we are different in
some way from those we grew up among. However it happens, it is quite common for
people to feel like they have become fish out of water because their lives have
changed.
That’s the experience of these visitors to Jerusalem on the Day of
Pentecost. Here they are, gathered in
Jerusalem, the mother city of their faith, and yet they know they are outsiders,
and the locals know it too, and maybe remind them of it, looking at them
strangely. What right have they to be there? They’re not proper Jews, not like
them. Even the name of the feast, as it is reported in the book of Acts,
emphasizes the differences they might feel. It’s called the Day of Pentecost,
but that’s the Greek name for this holy day, the name these visitors would have
used. Its Hebrew name is Shavuot. Pentecost
means fiftieth, Shavuot means “weeks”. In a way both say the same thing – this
is a feast that takes place some time after Passover, but which name you call
it marks you out as an insider or an outsider to the homeland of the
faith.
The nature of the feast might have hammered that in too. Shavuot was a
feast that celebrated the first fruits of the harvest. On this day you brought to the Temple an offering of the seven sorts of
produce which ripened around this time in the land of Israel; wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives,
and dates (Deut. 8:8) . So it was all about your ties to the land, this land,
where these things grew. Did they grow in the mountains of Cappadocia or the
burning deserts of Arabia? Probably not.
Luke’s
story is a story about foreignness, strangeness, being an outsider, or viewing
someone else as one.
That is why what happens next in the story is so significant. The apostles
– those first followers of Jesus – were Israeli Jews, born in these Jewish
heartlands, just as Jesus had been. They spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, as their
ancestors had done. They were right at home here, in this Promised Land, where
their people had lived for millennia.
Jesus had preached a message that God’s love was for all, but it was only
now, after his Ascension, that his followers were starting to realise what that
might mean for them. He’d left them with the task of going out into the world,
the whole world, and spreading that message. But the whole world was a big
place, and the people in it were a mighty strange lot. Even the ex-pat Jews who
they saw around them on the streets of Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost were
pretty odd, never mind the rest. To fulfil this task they would have to go way
beyond their comfort zones. They’d not only have to cope with difference,
they’d have to welcome it.
How were they going to find the courage to do that? Not from their own
strength, plainly. As they sat in that room in Jerusalem they knew it was too
much for them, just as it would be for any of us. But the good news of this
story is that when God calls us, he doesn’t expect us to face the challenges of
that call on our own.
These frightened followers in Jerusalem could never really describe exactly
what happened next. It felt like a rushing wind, it felt like flames of fire,
even though there was no wind or fire, but the long and short of it was that suddenly
they knew that God, the God of heaven, the God of might and majesty and power,
the God of creation, the God who had raised Christ from the dead, had swept
into their lives and made his home in them. In truth he had always been with
them, but this was the moment when they realised it. God was at home in them,
dwelling in them. He wasn’t stuck in the
Temple, or sitting on a cloud in the distant sky. He was where they were, in
that ordinary room in Jerusalem, in the ordinary lives of ordinary men and
women, fishermen and tax-collectors, mothers and widows, people who’d met Jesus
by chance or design and whose lives had been changed by the experience.
God was at home - in them. And if God could be at home in them, he could be
at home in anyone. That was the message they proclaimed as they ran out of the
room to the crowd in the streets. They didn’t think that message up for
themselves. They didn’t even realise they were proclaiming it. But the words came
out of their mouths, we are told, in Cappadocian and Libyan, and Parthian, and
those who heard them, from Cappadocia and Libya and Parthia heard the voices
not of Israeli Jews, but of people they could have met in their own homes and
village squares.
For all its mystery, what happened at Pentecost conveyed a simple message
to those who were there. Whoever you were and wherever you came from, your home
was God’s home, your life was a place that God cared about as if it was the
centre of his universe. There were no foreigners, no strangers to him. Hearing
about God’s love in your own native tongue told you that he knew and loved that
little bend in the river you thought was just yours, that corner of your garden
where the evening sun shone through the trees. He knew and cared about that
secret corner of your heart too, that memory you thought was your own private
torment, those feelings that you were never going to be able to put into words.
It’s not even just that he understands our national or tribal differences. Each
of us has a unique personal language too, that sense of ourselves that even our
nearest and dearest can often get no more than a glimpse of – but God
understands it and speaks it as well as we do.
Grasping that truth can change not only our view of God and of ourselves,
but our view of others as well, because once we’ve truly come to believe that
God knows and loves us as we are, from the inside out, in all our uniqueness,
it has to follow that he knows and loves everyone else like that too. The New
Testament puts huge emphasis on breaking down the barriers that divide us, on
accepting and welcoming one another as we are. That’s because those who wrote
it had come to realise that if God lived in them, he lived in everyone, and
could be discovered anew in everyone they met as they went out into those
distant, alien lands and preached the Gospel.
But it all starts, as it did on the Day of Pentecost, with us. “Come down,
O love divine/ seek thou THIS soul of MINE” we sing. Our Pentecost prayer is that
we would discover the Spirit of God at home in us, in all the corners of our
life, so that we can go on to discover that the whole world, and everyone in
it, is his home as well.
Amen
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