Together Despite Differences

Reflections on the Lectionary for Pentecost

The Feast of Pentecost, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308—obviously before accurate depictions of ethnic diversity had become important for artistic renditions.

Last night I had to pick up one of my kids from a friend’s house, and I was driving through Aurora, a large city that neighbors Denver just to the east. Perhaps you’ve heard of Aurora recently, since Donald Trump has made it the center of a number of conspiracy theories and outright lies about Venezuelan gang activities. Driving through Aurora, I passed lots of suburban neighborhoods and the usual assortment of chain restaurants and shops—hardly the “war zone” that Trump described. But I also drove past a rich variety of restaurants, and I began to notice how many different cuisines were represented: Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai, Indian, and Salvadoran, all on the four corners of just one intersection. Aurora is a center for immigrant settlement—a place where people live after having been gathered into the United States, by choice and sometimes by force. That’s probably what Trump means when he describes it as a “war zone,” even if he doesn’t know that he means it—he means that Aurora is a place where people belong together despite differences and are different from each other, despite unity. There are thousands of places like that in the United States—places where ethnic and religious and linguistic (and culinary) diversity show up in powerful ways. For many of us, that’s kind of the whole point of America, and that’s America’s promise, too. But for others, that kind of diversity feels like a “war zone,” a threatening kind of circumstance where their core imagination of themselves is threatened.

This Sunday is Pentecost, a standalone holy day in the Christian calendar when the church celebrates the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is essential to the liturgical calendar, and at the same time it’s marginal to it. It’s essential because for many churches Pentecost represents the only real attention paid to the Holy Spirit, and for many communities the Spirit goes un-remarked-upon for the rest of the year. But Pentecost is also marginal, because in contrast to Advent or Lent, Pentecost is more of a moment than a season. (It’s true that the largest part of the liturgical calendar for many churches is sometimes called “The Season after Pentecost,” but even that preposition “after” puts Pentecost in the margins of something else). Pentecost is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of moment in the life of the church, but it’s one that carries important possibilities for making meaning. And Pentecost is also arguably the only time of the year when many churches put the Book of Acts at center stage.

It's not an accident that the Book of Acts chooses to describe the Holy Spirit arriving in a place like Aurora, filled with lots of diversity and unity. “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs,” the text expounds, almost reveling in the variety it gets to describe. It’s the kind of list that could probably keep on going endlessly; you get the sense that Acts is not offering a complete list but gesturing toward an uncountable multitude. Acts is certainly not describing a “war zone.” It was clearly important for the author of Acts to capture the way the essential unity of Pentecost—Jews gathered in Jerusalem for a Jewish festival—included people from all over the known world. Acts is describing a diaspora, even if it isn’t using that word, and Acts is describing how the far-flung parts of the Judean diaspora have maintained their cultural ties across distance and through the disruption inflicted by imperial violence. And Acts is also describing the kind of unity that can be found in (and produced by) empire, even if it’s unity manufactured at gunpoint; Acts is describing empire’s territorial expansiveness and its tendency to create new kinds of belonging.

If you peek under the surface of the Book of Acts, you’ll find two important questions underneath—questions about the same two aspects of diversity and unity that I mentioned above. The first question is how do we belong together, despite our differences? And the second question is how are we different from each other, despite our unity? These two questions thread through the whole Book of Acts, but they are especially prominent in the lectionary reading for Pentecost, which is Acts 2:1-21. Those two questions about difference and belonging show up in lots of ways throughout the book: as economic practices, as theological unity and division, as companionship and discord, as ethnic distinctions. But the most important and consistent way these questions show up is in Acts’ descriptions of life under empire and life in diaspora. Belonging and difference are the grammar of the story Acts tells, and empire and diaspora provide the vocabulary for telling it. As it tells the story of a movement that began in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and worked its way westward toward the empire’s heart, Acts is always thinking with the geographies, identities, economies, practices, and symbols of empire, and it is always having its characters negotiate what it means to belong.

We understand that kind of negotiation of belonging, don’t we? Scholars might debate the extent to which the United States is or is not an empire; if you take certain definitions, we might or might not meet the criteria. I’ll take just one definition, the one found on Wikipedia (quoting Stephen Howe), to make the point. In Wikipedia’s definition, an empire is “a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples, ‘usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries.’” To my mind, there’s no denying that by that definition, those of us who live in the United States since at least the early 20^th century live at the heart of an empire. (We might disagree about whether the United States being an empire is a feature of our country, or a bug). The United States itself was formed (and continues to be formed) through many acts of conquest, and in its current form it acts as a center from which its power dominates any number of peripheries. And there’s no denying that first part of the definition, “a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples,” applies really well to the United States. The United States encompasses territories from Guam to Guantanamo Bay and military bases from Okinawa to Lebanon to Kenya to Germany. But the aspect of that Wikipedia definition that most of us will resonate with most strongly is peoples. The United States, like the Roman Empire in which the Book of Acts was written, is made up of a dizzying number of peoples, some gathered in by choice and others gathered in by force.

If you look closely at the story being told in Acts 2:5-11, you’ll find a description—almost a mapping—of life under empire. You’ll find a wide array of languages and nationalities, and a push-and-pull of geographies. The story takes place in Jerusalem, but it features representatives “from every people under heaven,” and a long list of the far-flung places they’re from. The diversity extends to language, too. The people in the story had expected to hear Jesus’ disciples speaking Aramaic (“are not all those who are speaking Galileans?”), or maybe even the Greek in which Acts itself is composed. But instead they hear speech “each of us, in our own native language,” the kind of linguistic diversity you would expect to find when a broad array of people have gathered together. Acts is setting a scene and telling a story in which those two questions, how do we belong together, despite our differences and how are we different from each other, despite our unity, are played out in very literal linguistic terms.

Notice this: everyone in this story is a Jew, and everyone in this story is a subject of the Roman Empire, and yet this story is full of diverse nationalities and languages. How does that happen? How can people who share an ethno-religious identity (Jewishness) and who find themselves in the same place (Jerusalem) exhibit such a wide range of places of origin and native tongues? The answer can be found in the workings of empire itself, and the ways empires fracture identities through violence and then stitch together new ones with a variety of social and economic and territorial strategies. Empires are machines that chew up peoples and spit out diasporas and polities on the other side. Empires destroy belonging, but they also create new forms of it, and you can see all of that on display in this passage about Pentecost.

There is a lot to grieve and mourn and be angry about life in the United States in 2025, but there’s a silver lining to the reality of living here and now, amidst so much nationalism and isolationism and outright xenophobia. The suffering brought on by the United States’ new immigration policies is real and profound, but it’s also clarifying, because it forces us to ask what kind of belonging and unity we desire. This recent article about a town of ten thousand people in Missouri describes the ways the deep-red town is now divided after federal immigration forces detained a beloved long-time resident. A local fixture, a waitress at the town’s breakfast spot named Carol, was detained and is in danger of deportation. “No one voted to deport moms,” one person is quoted as saying in response, even though many people did. “This is Carol” who’s in danger of being deported, she said, not the bad kind of immigrant that the town and the state voted so overwhelmingly to deport. The situation strikes me as a tragedy for Carol and for everyone who knows and loves her, but it’s also a useful inflection point for the rest of us, because it forces us to confront the questions of how we belong together, despite our differences, and how are we different from each other, despite our unity? When people realize that Carol (and people like Carol) belong to them and with them, they might begin to think differently about voting to deport her and others like her.

Acts tells the story of diversity and unity from a perspective of wonder. The people who bore witness to it were “amazed and astonished,” in the language of 2:7, and “amazed and perplexed,” as it says in 2:12. The differences between the people who were gathered in Jerusalem appear as an occasion for surprise and amazement in Acts, and the unity that bubbles up inside those differences is even more powerfully amazing. The Roman Empire was responsible for the way they were gathered—in an eastern outpost of a sprawling empire, as representatives of a diaspora scattered by empire’s violence and cutthroat economics, as people trying to hang onto ancestral traditions even as they were battered and carried off in the currents of imperial power. Their multiple languages and nationalities were evidence of the estrangement brought on by empire, but Acts reserves its wonder not for the strength of empire but for the power of something new and mysterious—something that Acts calls the “Holy Spirit”—to transcend all of that.

In the best moments of America, we have been able to transcend the violence and power of empire and its many harmful effects, and we have been able to watch as an underlying unity emerges from so much diversity. Even if people like Donald Trump don’t believe in it or refuse to see it, there is deep beauty in places like Aurora, where people from everywhere live side by side. The church is the same way, or it can be—if the story of Pentecost is to be believed. The thing we call the Holy Spirit is nothing but the moment that happens when we are different from each other despite our unity, and when we belong together despite our differences. The story of Pentecost is the story of how difference becomes unity, how estrangement becomes togetherness, how holiness and wonder emerge in the moments when we gather across all the lines that are supposed to divide us.