🐮 Pentecost
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to Pentecost Sunday. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from, I lost my place on the computer from Genesis 11, Psalm 104, Romans eight, and John 14. And the day of Pentecost the name means 50 counts or 50 weeks.
Pente meaning five, like Penta Tuke, five books. And it is 50 days. 50 days, yeah, 50 days after Passover. And that's important because Passover is one of the central. Holidays of the Hebrew Bible, but also Pentecost already has a name. It doesn't appear in the old Bible as Pentecost is called The Festival of Weeks.
And the Festival of weeks is when the barley and the wheat begin to mature and get cut down to be sorted between the chaff to be thrown away and the wheat to be ground into fine flour. And if that reminds you of anything, it's one of many or several of. Many parable of Jesus as well as the prophets.
And this is the moment in time now, I live in Albany and I live in Linn County and Lynn is the grass seed capital of the United States. Maybe the world, I don't know, but it's, they claim some thing to it. And all spring I've seen the grasses, the different grains grow and they're gonna start looking like they're dying.
They go brown and they produce seed. You can see clouds and clouds of seed, pollen of grass, seed, pollen, and you. If we were further south, this would've happened, I think already. I live at about 45 degrees latitude and Palestine, and the land of Israel is about 33 degrees latitude, so it's further south and it's arid, just like Oregon.
And so a little while ago, they would've start seeing the things that I'm just now seeing. And where I'm at the Festival of weeks or the grain harvest would happen in, I don't know, about a week maybe. But part of our, the unifying part of our faith is that it's centered in Jerusalem, or centered in Palestine.
But I wanted to point out, and I bring all this up because the reading from Genesis takes us to the Tower of Babel, and this is this very interesting proto. Anthropology. I'm getting into language. I think it's really important if we want to understand cultures and everything that flows out of a people, it begins with language.
And that's one of the reasons that John the Johanne literature is so interested in log offs, the word and the words that we use. And we string together and pro create rules around called grammar. This is really important if you want to understand. Underneath the English versions you have, and even underneath the Greek New Testament and the Sept and the me, the Hebrew Masoretic text with its vowels, you have to understand the nature of language and the nature of human beings to create language as a tool to get sh get stuff done.
People are workers and language is one of the first tools that I think humans created. And so in Genesis, when we get the Tower of Babel, this is the old hebrewic imagination, the Hebrew Bible trying to or beginning to get at the nature of language, the dawn of human of humanity. When we graduated from some form of ape or primate or something, I don't know all the distinctions and became homo sapiens.
We all had one language. It was probably somewhere in Northern Africa or Central Africa, and we started expanding. Homo sapiens started peeing the earth. We started in Africa and so as it says in Genesis, they came from, they came east or sorry, from the east and they settled early human history before we.
Had civilizations or cities, we were nomadic. We had we. Relied upon the earth and its produce mostly livestock. And then, the hunter-gatherer period at the end of the Iron Age, I think is when a lot of these texts are set. Not when they're written, but when they're set. And so before we developed language and moved away from each other we developed new languages the further we got from each other.
And so in the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis 11, they are imagining why there's so many different languages and they seem to know or intuit that there was once one language, that language expands just as humanity expands and populates the earth. And this is the explanation of the mythic explanation. Of what happened.
Why do we have so many languages? And the Hebrew Bible places the blame on human arrogance. Let's build a tower to the heavens where we believe the gods are, and make a name for ourselves. Let's be showy. Let's be known for something. And that is taking a good thing, which is self-confidence and spoiling it, which is arrogance.
But that's not really what I think Pentecost is about. And this is why I think I understand that Pentecost, the tongues descended as in as of flames, right? And so well what of everybody's restoring speech? That we have this really interesting notion and Pentecostal traditions that, you speak in tongues that it's not any language, but we play this game.
Like I know what he's saying and I don't know. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Because of the nature of language. I think there's something underneath that superficial kind of reading of Pentecost, we're all gonna blather on and call it tongues and say that everybody can understand. No, there's a way that people can understand and it has to deal with what language is and how it works.
If you wanna speak to someone across cultures, you're gonna have to use sign language. You're gonna have to use, tone and you've got to get creative if you want to get back to that like original language. So in Pentecost, sure, yeah. Everybody understands in their native tongue, but that's not what Pentecost is.
A callback to Pentecost. The grain harvest, that's when we would the Bible would have us celebrate the festival of weeks, the grain harvest. And what happens? At the Festival of Weeks it is actually the giving of the law at Mount Sinai Passover happens 50 days later in the wilderness, read Exodus 19 and Exodus 19 goes over how Moses goes up the hill and receives the tablets of the law.
And in preparation from that, for that. The people are going to see the Lord. Exodus 19 verse 18, and Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And now we're listening to Acts two verse two.
And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting divided tongues as a fire appeared among them and a tongue rested in each of them. Descending as fire from the heavens. Pentecost is about the receiving of the law at Sinai when language, God, the ineffable, the thing that we can't name and yet gives us a name, comes to us where we're at.
Yeah, Passover has just happened. We've e escaped from, the corruption of civilization. We'll call it empire, we'll call it entitlement, we'll call it, capitalism and mammon and all the rest. That's fine. But we've just been released from that. When Jesus is killed, on the cross is Passover, and then 50 days later, the festival of weeks, we received the law at Sinai.
Right down comes the fire from Heaven. Whether that's to let us hear one another or allow us to hear God, the point is the same. It's not, Genesis Levi is the problem that we have created in making many languages and isolating ourselves from one another, such that we forget what old words once meant, but language and linguistics.
We can trace this stuff. The proto into European language and the Asiatic languages and there's all these, there's ways that we can trace these back. We can actually get to something like these ancient religions, or I'm sorry, ancient languages that may have, mythically existed at babble.
And that's not to become God. We already have, God, there's nothing. To become let's allow God into ourselves and in our hearts. And that, negates the need for God coming down and keeping us from being too arrogant. So when we think of Pentecost, think of the receiving of the law at Sinai, which kind of redeems Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel because.
God does not want us to be arrogant because then we think that we are Gods. God doesn't want us to be entitled and to think that we just deserve things because look at us. Aren't we cool? No. Forget babble this today, Pentecost, the inauguration of ordinary time in the Christian calendar is a reminder that now we have God with us.
Whether that's in the wilderness or whether that's in urban centers. God has descended like fire on Pentecost just as God did at Sinai. And as we enter the season of ordinary time after Pentecost, it's important that we remember what these texts call out to us to do. I get Genesis 11. Of course, it's scattering the languages, but like what God is doing is a.
At Pentecost is a deliberate evocation of what God did at Sinai. We should remember Sinai the thing that we want to remember, not the thing that we did wrong. And there's all the I think here of like positive reinforcement. Yes, we can remember why we did something wrong, how we did something wrong, that we got scattered.
But it's also important, and I think even more important to remember how God has continued to act in history and to look at those things to be able to look at those things we need to be speaking. And embodying and living a culture that is more reminiscent of the people that we once were. And if you are a Christian or a Jew or Muslim, if you're talking about the religion of Abraham and Abraham as our father, this is the inauguration of us as a people at Sinai and at the at Pentecost, when we say the church, the assembly, the gatherer, the gathering, has occurred to allow us to come back together despite our differences unified by the one thing that unifies the source of all our wisdom and language and the things that make us, which is to be good and to be together.
