Many years ago, Jill and I were traveling along Highway 412 from Caruthersville across the Missouri Bootheel to Paragould. It was one of those atmospherically heavy days, with a green sky and ominous clouds. Suddenly, Jill looked to the north and said, “There’s a tornado!” I glanced over, and, sure enough, a twister was tracking alongside our car from east to west. “What do we do?” Jill asked. “I think we keep driving,” I responded unsurely. “If that funnel cloud starts to get bigger, we’ll pull over and get in the ditch.”
What else could we do? We watched that violent wind for a mile or two, before the cloud rose back up into the sky from whence it came. It was a frightening and most unnerving encounter.
But then, I don’t need to tell you that. On March 31 of last year, we were all reminded of the fear and dissolution that tornados bring, when a violent funnel cloud touched down in southwest Pulaski County and proceeded to spin northeastwardly through Little Rock, leaving a corridor of devastation through the city that in some places remains today as though the storm was last week rather than fourteen months ago. Several of our own parishioners were among those whose homes were damaged or destroyed.
Being from Arkansas—Tornado Alley—we know to expect such violent winds. However, not everyone, everywhere does. Once when Jill and I lived in Roanoke, Virginia—a place not known for tornados—the air turned preternaturally still, heavy, and green, and without even turning on the television to see if there was a warning, I yelled through the house to Jill, “grab the kids and go to the basement!” Within minutes, a small twister set down in our neighborhood, the first tornado in Roanoke’s living memory. The next day at the church, everyone was buzzing about the complete surprise with which the tornado hit. Folks thought I must have ESP in my intuition to take quick cover. “No,” I said, “I’m from Arkansas.”
Our experience of tornados makes the customary Pentecost Sunday reading in Acts ring differently to the ear. We are told that the disciples of the ascended Jesus are gathered together, when “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”
We know that freight train-like sound. We know that terror. And we know what to expect next. We know that when those gathered open their eyes, the world around them will have crumbled at their feet. Some of them will likely be missing, carried away by the wind. They will be left to pick up the wreckage of their lives. That is what violent winds do. And even when the wind is a metaphor for God’s Holy Spirit, we presume that the result is often the same. When the Spirit rushes in, it discombobulates, upends, even destroys the lives we’ve lived, blowing us hither and yon, and usually where we’d prefer not to go. Isn’t that what we’ve come to expect? Indeed, in the mildest sense that’s the feeling we engender in Pentecost worship, when we surprise ourselves by hearing Acts read in different languages all at once. At the very least, it spins us off center.
But we may not be paying close attention to what happens in that Jerusalem room today. It turns out, this Holy Spirit wind does not cause destruction or sow disorder. In point of fact, it does the opposite. When we read Acts 2 carefully, we realize that when the Spirit arrives the crowd does not, in fact, hear a cacophony of noise. Rather, each ear hears all the other speakers speaking in his own language. In other words, if my native tongue is Aramaic, then the Greek speaker, the Egyptian speaker, the Libyan speaker all sound Aramaic to me. The Spirit enables each disciple to understand every other gathered disciple. The Spirit facilitates a depth of connection that had been, until that moment, impossible.
And just as the Holy Spirit grants ears to hear, it provides tongues to speak. Whereas until this moment, Simon Peter has found himself tongue-tied, confused, and dissembling, suddenly, Acts tells us, Peter “raises his voice” and declares the words of the Prophet Joel:
“‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'”
What a good word! But until the inrushing of that wind, Peter would not—indeed, could not—have spoken it with verve and power. The Holy Spirit gives him voice.
The very Latin verb inspirare, from which we derive our English verb “to inspire,” which connotes to spark, to animate, to impassion, literally means the entrance of the Spirit. In-spirare. When God’s Spirit arrives and inheres, we find our intuition, or understanding, our desire for God, our empathy for one another all sparked, animated, and impassioned. We do not find our lives falling apart but brought together. We do not find our worlds torn asunder but sinewed together in new and vital ways.
The Spirit of God repairs, it does not tear down. The Spirit of God clarifies rather than confuses. The Spirit of God empowers and impassions instead of paralyzing. The Spirit of God inspires.
On this Pentecost Sunday, what does that look like in your life? How is the Spirit of God giving you ears that listen to those around you in new ways? How is the Spirit of God granting you a voice where you have been speechless? How is the Spirit of God inspiring you?
This is never more important to grasp and embrace than on this day when we baptize new members into the Body of Christ. After baptizing with water, I will make the sign of the cross on each child’s head and declare, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The child may cry, or giggle, or sigh, but with whatever intake of breath, God’s very Spirit is in-spired. The Spirit enters into the little one, and the Spirit moves about this place, not pulling us apart, but drawing us to one another, so that we become like the Jerusalem disciples, who are able to hear one another, and understand one another, and love one another with a depth beyond what the world alone can provide.
The word in the Acts reading translated today as “violent” appears in the Common English Bible as “fierce.” I love that. Among the Jerusalem disciples those many centuries ago, among us here today, the Spirit arrives like a fierce wind: fierce in power, fierce in passion, fierce in love. May that Spirit carry us aloft from here, that we may inspire the world.