Pentecost Day 6.8.2025

Pentecost Day

Church of the Atonement

The Rev’d Charles Everson

Acts 2:1-21, John 14:8-17, 25-27

Today, the Church erupts in red as we celebrate the great Feast of Pentecost: the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles in tongues of fire, and the Church, empowered and emboldened, was born.

What a dramatic scene we heard from the Acts of the Apostles! A sound like the rush of a violent wind fills the house, flames appear over each disciple, and suddenly they’re proclaiming the Gospel in languages they do not know. Outsiders hear and are stunned—not by noise or chaos—but by clarity: each one hears the Good News “in their own native language.” From Parthians to Egyptians to Romans, all are addressed personally. The Spirit speaks everyone’s language.

This miraculous event is often called the “birthday of the Church.” But it is also a theological corrective—a divine reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel. At Babel, as we heard in Genesis, humanity sought to make a name for itself. “Come, let us build ourselves a city,” they said, “and a tower with its top in the heavens.” It’s a story about human ambition masquerading as unity—about building upward in order to claim equality with God, and in so doing, turning inward, fearful of being scattered. The result? God intervenes by confusing their language and scattering them across the earth. Babel ends in fragmentation, suspicion, and isolation.

At Pentecost, however, God does something radically different. God doesn’t erase difference; he blesses it. Instead of requiring everyone to speak the same language, the Holy Spirit enables the apostles to speak the languages of the people. Unity is no longer achieved through enforced sameness—it is made possible through Spirit-given understanding. The multiplicity of languages remains, but it no longer divides. Now it reveals a Church that is multilingual, multicultural, and missionary.

And that vision speaks directly to our life here at Atonement. Ours is a parish richly blessed with polyglots and travelers, immigrants and expats and language teachers. Some of us speak multiple languages fluently. Others carry the rhythms and metaphors of other cultures in our hearts. Language is more than vocabulary and syntax—it carries story, memory, and identity. Pentecost tells us that God meets us in that diversity, not in spite of it.

I’ve seen this dynamic of clarity amid confusion play out in real life—most memorably during my time in a little country church in Arkansas. The pastor—Bro. James—was a fiery man with little formal training but an abundance of zeal, especially when it came to the Holy Ghost. One day, I asked him to pray for me over something I was struggling with. Midway through the prayer, he began to speak in tongues. Or at least, that’s what I understood was happening. I remember feeling confused, even a little frightened. The cadence was repetitive, almost chant-like, and it left me wondering: is this what Pentecost felt like? When people thought the apostles were drunk at nine in the morning?

Twenty years later, a parishioner—who had come out of a rather traumatic few years in the Charismatic movement—demonstrated for me how he was taught to speak in tongues. And to my surprise, it was exactly what I’d heard that day back in 2001 – the same cadences, the same babel. Theologically, there’s much that can be said about glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, ultimately, this line from 1 Corinthians has helped me put my experience with Bro. James into perspective: “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” The Holy Spirit may move in unexpected ways, but her fruit is always clarity, love, and peace.

The Prayer Book says it this way: “How do we recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives?” “We recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit when we confess Jesus Christ as Lord and are brought into love and harmony with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation.”

Jesus speaks of that same harmony when he says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” The peace he speaks of is not mere calm or comfort. It isn’t the kind of peace you get from silence in the mountains or a glass of wine on a quiet evening. It is the peace that comes from being seen, known, and forgiven. A peace that recognizes you are a sinner in need of redemption and still says: you are my beloved.

That’s the peace of Pentecost. Not order for its own sake, but love strong enough to create clarity amid confusion. It is the peace that steadies the flame. It is what makes true unity possible.

This Spirit-given unity is not abstract. It is visible, tangible, sacramental. It takes shape at this altar in the simple creatures of bread and wine, where we who are many become one Body because we all share in one Bread, and one Cup. It takes shape in our baptismal promises, which we will renew in a moment— promises that join us to a communion broader than borders and older than empires. It takes shape in the Church’s mission—to proclaim the Gospel to every creature, in every language, in every context.

So what does this mean for us here and now?

It means we must resist the temptation to build Babels of ideology or exclusion. It means we must cultivate a Pentecostal imagination—one that listens for the Spirit in unfamiliar voices and expects to find Christ in the face of the stranger. It means we must be willing to be set on fire with the love that casts out fear and overcomes division.

The miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone understood the Hebrew language. The miracle is that God, through the Spirit, spoke to each heart in its own language. That is still our mission today.

From Babel to Pentecost, from confusion to communion, the Spirit continues to guide the Church from fragmentation toward unity. And here, in this city of Chicago, in this neighborhood of Edgewater, in this parish family of Atonement, that work continues…not to erase what makes us different, but to reveal what makes us one.