Community Presbyterian Church Port Aransas

Pentecost is the one major Christian festival that has so far escaped commercialism. No one has yet come up with a way to market Pentecost. There are no bunnies or bonnets for Pentecost as there are for Easter. No one goes out and buys a new Pentecost outfit for a Pentecost parade. It is not a feast that draws families together for great meals like Thanksgiving. Restaurants do not advertise special dinners for the Pentecost season as they do for Lent. And, of course, Pentecost doesn’t hold a candle to Christmas. There are no pre- or post-Pentecost sales in our stores. Advertisers do not have a countdown telling us how many shopping days are left to Pentecost. Radio stations do not play Pentecost music and the real evidence is that television networks do not run Pentecost specials.

There is a gift for Pentecost, however, Jesus promised it to his disciples–and to his present-day disciples. It’s sort of a going-away present, for Jesus promised it when he was warning his followers that he would be leaving them. The gift is a divine Presence that would come into their lives, to help them, counsel them, guide them, comfort them, and create a community that could surmount all barriers.

Pentecost is one of those festivals common to both Judaism and Christianity. It is one of the three great celebrations of Israel, along with Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles (also known as Sukkoth). It celebrated both the Spring harvest and the giving of the Torah to Moses. The followers of Jesus also adopted Pentecost as it was historically the celebration of the gift of the Spirit of Christ to all of his followers and the creation of the Church. The signal of the coming of the Spirit was the ability of the disciples to communicate the gospel to people of many cultures and languages in their own tongues.

The disciples and their listeners understood each other because they were talking about the basic realities of life. Love and loyalty, need and failure, sin and salvation, hope and freedom–these things are common to all humanity regardless of race or nationality. How tragic it is that so often we Christians waste our opportunities by talking about lesser things, things important to us but often meaningless to others, things like doctrines, styles of worship and local traditions. No wonder others do not understand us! We communicate best when we speak of the common questions of life: God, sin, death, Christ, sacrifice, love.

Pentecost reminds us that the first gift of God to the church as a whole is the gift of speaking—clearly, understandably, convincingly—in the languages and idiom of the world, whether it is one of the 2,796 different languages spoken around the world today, or the unique lingo of adolescents.

If we expect the world to listen to us, we are going to have to re-learn the lesson of Pentecost. We will have to stop expecting everyone else to learn our church-talk (repentance, salvation, redemption, sanctification and all those other religious words) and begin again to talk with people about the basics of life and death, hope and fear that everyone understands. And we will have to re-learn the second lesson of Pentecost—that life in the Spirit is a party, a celebration of joy. The first followers of Jesus were having so much fun that some people thought they were drunk.

So during Pentecost, which lasts from Sunday until late in November, let’s remember to laugh, sing, talk and listen to the voice of the Spirit in the words and the wishes of everyone we meet.