Pentecost Goes Something Like This

Pentecost is wild, creative, unimagined. We need Pentecost again, right now.

Holger Schué

Pentecost is like the church’s crazy uncle: he’s got some wild stories, real barn-burners, but you get nervous if he starts gearing up when company’s over. Acts’ images are madcap: a holy tempest rattling the walls, fire dancing on heads, and that language circus bewildering even the most impressive polyglot.

But perhaps, in a world teetering and breaking apart, Pentecost is exactly what we need.

At the heart of Pentecost, the Spirit moves to dismantle and then reimagine human language. Of course, reconstituting our verbal jargon means so much more than merely reconfiguring our vocabulary or accent. Our communication is our identity, our dialect. A reversal of Babel, the tectonic plates of human culture — the ways we’ve thought of ourselves, the ways we’ve configured our world — were blown to smithereens. This disruption erases our isolation and supposed superiority, challenges our national stories, upsets our whole idea of who is the other, who is the stranger. We are sti…