A Joyful “Vision of Heaven” in a “Freak Imitation of Pentecost”

In the beginning, a wind from God swept over the chaos bringing forth the wonders of creation (Gen. 1:1). Creator God then breathed into the nostrils of a creature made from mud, bringing it to life (Gen. 2:7).

The psalmist reminds us that everyone dies without God’s breath, and likewise that God’s Spirit renews the very face of the earth (104:30-31).

John’s Jesus told Nicodemus that God’s Spirit is just like the wind—it blows wherever it wants to, untamable and uncontrollable (John 3:8). John later tells us that the risen Jesus breathed on his closest friends, inviting them to receive “Holy Spirit” for the work of forgiveness and to find peace.

These and other biblical writers relished making at least this one pun: in both Hebrew and Greek, the word usually translated as “spirit” can also mean “breath” or “wind.”

The Latin word anima is usually translated into English as “soul” but it can also mean “breath” and “vitality”; it comes from an ancient Indo-European verb meaning “to breathe.” In that sense, every single creature of God with the breath of life has a soul—humans, dogs, cats, birds, cattle, pigs, elephants (the list goes on).

The English word “inspiration” comes from a Latin verb that means “to breathe into.” When we are inspired, we are being filled with God’s own breath, the Holy Spirit.

Yesterday’s celebration of Pentecost marked a notably dramatic instance of that inspiration; as we most always do on Pentecost, we heard that story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21). Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, a group of his followers heard the sound of rushing wind and what seemed like tongues of flame danced on all of their heads.

I think we should be really clear about this: “all” of their heads does not mean just twelve men, even though that’s how this scene is often depicted, with a grand total of twelve men receiving the Spirit.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, depicting Pentecost in that way actually serves an institutional purpose—to restrict the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first twelve male “apostles” defines who can become “bishops.”

But there’s another way to read this story. The evangelist Luke, who also wrote Acts, notes that there weren’t just twelve people gathered on that day; there were at least 120, and not all of them men.

That’s probably why Peter feels compelled to quote from the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel for that occasion, who wrote about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh—not just twelve people, not only men, and probably not just human beings, but all flesh.

When “all” really does mean all, communities become seriously diverse. And I confess: I sometimes find such diversity uncomfortably messy. I can’t be the only one who still thinks it would have been much more efficient and orderly if all those foreign visitors to Jerusalem on that day had suddenly understood a single language, but that’s not what happened.

Luke tells us that each of those visitors understood the Gospel in their own native language, in their own cultural idioms, and with their own ethnic sensibilities in place.

The indigenous translation we used at my parish yesterday morning makes very clear that many of the places from which those visitors came were considered “outsider nations,” at the very least treated with suspicion by Jerusalem’s “insiders.”

The Spirit breaks down those barriers between groups, not by making everyone the same, but by forging a much stronger unity than mere sameness ever could—forged from previously unnamed shared hopes, the drafting of common dreams, discovering a surprising confluence of desires and yearnings.

For some years now on Pentecost, I reflect on a wonderful story about what can actually happen when a community embraces this broader Pentecostal vision of being church together. Here’s just a brief version:

Back in the early 1900s, African American preacher William J. Seymour and his wife Jennie opened a small mission in an abandoned stable in what was known as the “Black ghetto” of Los Angeles.

As the story goes, God poured out the Spirit there on Azusa Street, drawing dozens of people to Seymour’s preaching and Jennie’s teaching. Soon hundreds were coming, not only for the preaching and teaching but for the ecstatic trances, the speaking in tongues, and the miraculous healings.

The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 and lasted, quite remarkably, until roughly 1915. This astonishing moment in a rickety building on a neglected street corner launched the world-wide Pentecostal movement, still the fastest growing branch of Christianity.

At the time, it was also the most scandalous. Erupting in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, this revival attracted white, Black, Latino, and Asian converts, all of them “intermingling,” as one commentator complained at the time.

Even more: fourteen years before women could even vote in the United States, the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street encouraged women in positions of leadership. This alone caused some to dismiss that revival as “outrageous” and even “blasphemous.” One local minister called it “a freak imitation of Pentecost,” and a “horrible, awful shame.” (See Jack Hayford and David Moore’s account of this in their book The Charismatic Century:)

Breaking down racial barriers and rejecting gendered privilege enraged both secular and religious observers alike. Azusa’s participants, by contrast, called those social disruptions nothing less than a vision of heaven, and a taste of salvation.

Maybe because I still draw from the insights of my Evangelical past, and love my Pentecostal colleagues, and have been shaped by Catholic traditions in my weirdly EvanPenteCatholian life, but I think it’s high time for Azusa Street moment today. I mean something like a revival worthy of today’s challenges, for a renewal of Pentecost in the twenty-first century, for an outrageous and scandalous vision of what Gospel transformation looks like in a broken and fragmented world.

We cannot, of course, manufacture such moments ourselves but they can happen when we cultivate a joyful spirituality.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, reminded that the vestry of the parish I now serve identified “joyful spirituality” as one of the aspirational values we seek to embrace as a parish, and it needs much more attention. Joy, after all, is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t mean happiness, which is almost always associated with how we happen to feel, with our material possessions, with our social and economic status. Joy has nothing to do with any of those things.

Joy, it seems to me, is resilient gladness, completely independent of one’s circumstances—in times of scarcity and abundance, in times of suffering and hope, in times of consternation and confusion, the Spirit’s gift of joy remains.

A community gifted by the Holy Spirit with such resilient gladness will not merely grow—it will deepen its diversity, it will find healing in hospitality, it will, as the prophet Joel declared, see visions and dream dreams never before imagined.

We’re overdue. The need is real. The time is now.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.