It’s Not The Church’s Birthday

Reflections on the Lectionary for May 28th

It’s the birthday of the church! Isn’t it? Not really.

Pentecost is a singular day on the Christian calendar, unlike anything else. As a way of explaining what the day is and what it might mean, I often hear people talk about Pentecost as “the birthday of the church.” That isn’t wrong, exactly, although it’s certainly not right, either, at least in any uncomplicated way. Pentecost isn’t a story about birth; it’s a story about arrival. And the church isn’t the thing that’s arriving, because it was already there at the beginning of the passage: “they were all together in one place.” The assembly of people was already in place, and the thing that arrived (but that was not born on that day) was the Spirit—a newly-unleashed (but hardly new) expression of God’s presence. This is the story of the Spirit’s arrival, dramatically and flamboyantly, into the lives of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem.

Acts 2:1-21 is, as far as I am concerned, one of the most complicated and layered passages in the New Testament. There is so much to talk about here, each thing worthy of books upon books of analysis. Why “tongues, as of fire,” and why are they “divided?” What does it mean to be “filled with the Holy Spirit?” Why do these followers start speaking foreign languages, instead of some kind of specialized unknown language (which seems to have happened sometimes in early Christian communities)? What is at stake in this passage’s geographical scope, and its enumeration of many different locations and nationalities? How does the text play in the tension between all of these places and nationalities, and the Jews-in-Jerusalem setting of the story? Why does Peter cite the passage from Joel, and why does he change Joel’s words in subtle ways to heighten the eschatological tension of the citation? What, exactly, is this Spirit, and what does it mean to say that it has arrived? Why are fire and wind the symbols of this Spirit’s arrival?

It doesn’t seem right to choose just one of these questions to think about, but what’s most interesting to me about this passage—at the moment—is the way it speaks to the experiences of living within and on the underside of a trans-geographical and trans-ethnic empire, and the way it thinks about divine presence as inhabiting and moving along those very barriers of belonging. It’s a place where the text of Acts feels surprisingly modern to me—an entry point where might recognize ourselves and our concerns in the way the story is being told.

A bit of background. Jerusalem was a city, and Judea was a Roman province, on the eastern edge of a vast empire. That empire was centered at Rome, but stretched from Spain to Syria and from North Africa to (sometimes) Britain and Germany. As such, the Roman Empire incorporated innumerable ethnicities, usually as conquered peoples who had been brought into the cultural and economic unity of empire by force. This is how empires work: they project power and violence from a center, outward to the periphery, and they draw resources from the periphery, toward the center. Because Judea was on the eastern edge of the empire, it played a special role in the empire’s strategies and in its imagination. It was a kind of buffer zone or tidal zone, in which the ebbs and flows of territorial control could be isolated from more central (and important) provinces. Judea was the kind of place where conflict could be exported to. The Parthian empire lay just to the east, along the Fertile Crescent, and provinces like Judea were important for insulating the empire from whatever shocks might come from that direction. Judea, then, was far from the center of the empire, but it was central to the empire’s methods of pushing violence toward its periphery and pulling resources inward. You can see that in the gospels, where Roman violence always kind of looms in the background, and where symbols of Roman economic and military power—tax collectors and governors and soldiers and centurions—populate the landscape.

At the same time it was at the periphery of the empire, Judea—and especially Jerusalem—was also a center. That’s really clear in this passage; Acts 2:5-11 describes “devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem,” which makes it a kind of nerve center for a much wider-flung Judean diaspora. A “diaspora” is a spreading-out of a people; today we can speak of an African diaspora, consisting of people of African descent living all over the world, or of an Appalachian diaspora, in which people with Appalachian roots live in many different places but nevertheless maintain some sense of common identity. Within the Roman Empire, Judeans (also translated “Jews”) were a diasporic people. Because of war, economic need, the slave trade, and other reasons, ethnic Judeans (Jews) lived all over the place, while still maintaining a common identity as Judeans or Jews, and while still thinking of Jerusalem as a kind of center of their belonging. There are parallels in our own modern world—Cubans who are spread out all over the United States, or Koreans who have moved away but still keep Korea as a spiritual homeland, and still identify as Korean, even if they have never been to Korea. That’s what Acts is talking about here—people who had been born into the diaspora in many different places (Parthia, Elam, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Egypt, and all the rest), but who still thought of themselves as Jews or Judeans, and who had “returned” to Jerusalem, a place they were not born, to live.

Anyone who is part of a diaspora can tell you that it can be a complicated way to live. There are divided loyalties, and often there is the sense that one doesn’t quite belong fully either to the place from which the diaspora emerges, or to the places toward which it reaches. There’s an otherness that can follow you around, and a sense that one’s belonging rests most fully in an absent place, a place you might never have the chance to visit.

That seems to have been true for the diasporic Judeans we meet in Acts. All through the book, Judeans from Jerusalem and Judeans from elsewhere interact with each other, sometimes coming into conflict with each other and sometimes collaborating with each other. It’s “Jews from Asia” who ultimately cause Paul trouble later in Acts, when he is arrested in Jerusalem in chapter 21, and it was Judeans in lots of towns across Asia and Greece who both facilitated and resisted Paul’s work—at least according to the way Acts tells the story. (And that storytelling itself is inflected with the marks of diaspora and imperial violence, and thus must be interpreted that way).

In chapter 2, the forces of diaspora come into focus. The story takes place in Jerusalem, ostensibly the center of Judean belonging but also the periphery of imperial belonging. People from all over the place were gathered there, from a truly impressive geographical spread that encompassed large swaths of the eastern, southern, and central Mediterranean basin. These folks are described in the text as having come from all over the place to live in Jerusalem, but they are also described as Jews, people who, despite their diverse geographical origins, all belonged somehow to Judea. Many scholars have noted that this is both a recitation the far-flung edges of Jewish diaspora and a kind of mapping of the Roman Empire at the same time. It’s a way of signaling that the stuff that started in Galilee with Jesus and his disciples was becoming relevant to a much larger group of people. The text is making a claim about the scope of Jesus’ movement, and the ways it could be expected to appeal not only to people at the center of Judean belonging but also to people throughout the empire.

In quoting the prophet Joel, this passage doubles down on the centrality of Judean belonging (and Israelite belonging more broadly). The citation, which is modified a bit from what you’ll find in the book of Joel, suggests a coming age of prophetic power, and Peter’s quotation of it implies that the prophetic moment imagined by Joel has come to pass in Peter’s own time. That’s what the story of Pentecost brings together—an old vision with a new moment, met in a familiar place and witnessed by people from everywhere. It’s heady stuff, enough to make everyone seeing it think that they were all drunk.

So, it’s not quite the birthday of the church. It is that, in some shallow way, but I think that way of describing it fails to do justice to the story of Pentecost. There’s so much at stake in this passage—it’s a leveraging of the story of Israel, in a moment in which it seemed possible that the promises of the nation of Israel might be fulfilled, to a group of people who represented both the shattering of the nation and the potential for its remaking. To reduce that to “the church” is to cut its power off prematurely, and to miss the geopolitical, ethnic, and symbolic dynamism of the moment. Rather, the story of Pentecost is suggesting something much more grand than the church, and certainly something more important than a birthday. Pentecost is a story about what it might look like if God’s promises were fulfilled, and if all the forms of violence and oppression and division and mistrust that flow through the world were to be stopped for a moment, or even reversed. It’s an undoing of diaspora, a stitching-together of divisions, and an overwriting of the stories the empire liked to tell about itself and the people it had conquered.

Today, we experience different kinds of difference, fragmentation, estrangement, and loss. We labor under different empires and we belong to different peoples and geographies. But as much as the details matter in this story, and as much as the particularities are important, the overall pattern matters too. The particularities of Pentecost have to do with the promises of Israel, the fragmentation of the nation, and the realities of life under the Roman Empire. The universality of this story is in its vision of repair and rebuilding, in its undermining of empire and all of empire’s violence, and in its insistence that Spirit arrives in the middle of empire’s violence as a way of putting things back together again. That’s a hopeful idea not only for the first century, but also for the twenty-first century—that everything that has been broken might be mended again.