Pentecost: when God rebels against her handlers

Yes, I said her. But on Pentecost you can do that. Jesus calls the one who sent him Father. Obviously, Jesus was a dude himself. But the Holy Spirit is at most gender-neutral and at best gender-bending, because the Holy Spirit makes both men and women prophesy, as Peter controversially declares on Pentecost. So God the Spirit can be “he” or “she,” even if you object to putting a “she” on God the Father or God the Son. This genderqueer Spirit has messed with God’s people throughout history in a continual rebellion against all the men (and rare women) who have tried since the time of Constantine to make God into the justifying puppet of their empires. Because God is invisible, it’s very easy to do that. It’s very easy to project a God who’s mad as hell about everybody else’s sin and happens to consider whatever lifestyle comes naturally to you to be the epitome of holiness. Pentecost is God’s rebellion against people who do that.

Is it totally contrived for me to call Pentecost a rebellion? All that the Holy Spirit did was to make a bunch of Galilean rednecks speak in a whole lot of different languages and cause a bit of a ruckus on a holiday when Jews from throughout the ancient world had made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It made some people sneer and say those Galileans are just drunk. But there wasn’t a huge controversy or anything, certainly not compared to the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Nobody got thrown in jail until Acts 4. And yet Pentecost represents a paradigm for how the Holy Spirit moves throughout the book of Acts, which caused tremendous controversies, the most dramatic one being the radical determination that Gentiles could become the people of God without being circumcised or submitting to the Torah regulations that had always defined who God’s people were.

I don’t think that God has closed the book on the Holy Spirit’s work of disruption just because the Bible is a finite book that only covered events through the very beginning of the early church. Pentecost and the book of Acts teach us how we should expect to see the Holy Spirit continuing to act today. Contrary to the wishes of those who want to put a tight leash on God so that he doesn’t threaten their comfortable suburban lifestyles, God is free to force us to reinterpret the ancient truths of scripture according to new insights offered by the Holy Spirit just like he did to the bewildered Jewish followers of Jesus in the book of Acts. For many Christians today, the Trinity is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Father, Son, and Holy Bible. If the Holy Spirit acts at all today like s/he/it acted during the book of Acts, then we should expect to have our interpretation of “what the Bible has always said” uprooted on a regular basis.

We should expect to face the same confusion and disorientation that Peter experienced in Acts 10:28 when God showed him that he “should not call anyone profane or unclean” since the Gentile Cornelius was one of God’s people too. We should expect to be “astounded” like the “circumcised believers who had come with Peter” to visit Cornelius when they saw “that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God” (Acts 10:45-46). God doesn’t always do things in the order that we prescribe. From the best information that Peter had when he went to visit Cornelius, the Gentiles were supposed to get circumcised and go through the Jewish mikveh baptism and other initiatory rituals in order to become God’s people. But the Gentiles started speaking in tongues before they were baptized. Who knows? Maybe there are people today who are filled with the Holy Spirit who have never even said the word “Jesus.” The Spirit can do that if she wants to. That would be a contemporary analogy to the scene that astounded Peter and his fellow circumcised believers in the household of Cornelius.

We’re no different than the original circumcised believers with our expectations for how salvation is supposed to work. We just have a different “circumcision” that we expect to happen. We want a covenant that can be turned into a formula. God, if I pray this specific prayer to accept Jesus as my Lord and savior, then you have to let me into heaven. If I give 10% of my  money to the church, worship regularly, participate in a small group, and avoid and condemn homosexuality, that means I’m holy, right? God says nope. You’re only holy when you lose control and are possessed by my Holy Spirit. If we only had the book of Acts to go by, then the more radical Pentecostals would be right: only those who speak in tongues have been saved. That’s about the only “formula” we see in the book of Acts for salvation. When people are baptized by the Holy Spirit, their tongues start to roll. Thank God Paul contradicts this by telling us in Romans 10:9 that we can be saved by confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. Otherwise most Christians today would be screwed.

Now it’s true that not every person babbling incoherently in supposed “tongues” is actually following the Holy Spirit. There is unfortunately an epidemic of false teaching in the Pentecostal movement in particular, which I’ve highlighted in the past. What we also see in the book of Acts is that the Holy Spirit’s revelation is always anchored in prophecies that have been handed down to God’s people in their established canons. The Spirit doesn’t give the apostles out of nowhere, completely new revelations that are discontinuous with the past, but rather reinterpretations of established scripture. That’s what Peter does when he quotes Joel 2 on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. That’s what James does when he quotes Amos 9 at the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council that met to determine whether to make Gentiles get circumcised and follow Torah. The way that James authenticates the Holy Spirit’s legitimacy is instructive. He says, “This agrees with the words of the prophets” (Acts 15:15). What the Bible gives us are the “words of the prophets” with which we can test any new revelation for agreement.

It’s important to note that the Jerusalem Council decided to contradict what they had presumed was the law of God not on the basis of scriptures about God’s law, but reinterpreted prophecy. They did not resolve their disagreement over the circumcision of Gentiles by word-searching biblegateway.com for all the proof-texts containing the word “circumcision.” They contradicted prior teaching about the most basic law in the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 17:10-14) on the basis of seeing God’s purpose in Amos’ words that the kingdom of David would be restored “so that all other peoples may seek the Lord–even Gentiles over whom my name has been called” (Acts 15:17).

James had no explicit textual justification in Amos 9 for saying that Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised. The text of the prophecy says nothing about whether or not these Gentiles who seek the Lord should for that reason “be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5) as the Pharisaic Christians had argued in the Jerusalem Council. If James tried to use his exegetical approach about any analogous issue in a gathering of fundamentalists today, he would get laughed out of the room. But the reason his argument held forth was because the reinterpreted prophecy confirmed the spiritual fruit that the apostles had witnessed in the Gentile believers: “God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15:8-9). If we want to live in the Pentecostal spirit of the book of Acts, then our way of evaluating each controversy that emerges and contradicts our understanding of what the law of God teaches should involve the same combination of evaluating spiritual fruit and looking for the confirmation of a Biblical prophecy even if it doesn’t explicitly name the issue at hand, just like Amos 9 doesn’t say anything about circumcision.

The purpose of the Holy Spirit’s rebellion throughout the book of Acts is not simply to create chaos and confusion. We see her purpose expressed most explicitly in the original event of Pentecost itself. On Pentecost, God translates the gospel into every language and culture that was represented in Jerusalem that day. Granted, in the original Pentecost, this doesn’t involve more than speaking different languages, but anyone with any experience in translating foreign languages knows that it takes a lot more than simply substituting one word for another. Spanish has concepts and phrases that don’t make sense in English. For example, Spanish makes no distinction between righteousness and justice. In the Spanish Bible, both are simply justicia. This is actually closer to the original Greek which uses the root dikaio for the slightly different words that English translates into righteousness and justice.

All this is just to say that in every translation, you inherently end up with different concepts that seek to capture the idea being translated within each culture’s conceptual framework. The result and purpose of the gospel is the same, but the way its salvation is articulated must rely on a different combination of terms according to the language and culture it’s being translated into. For much of the past several centuries of Christianity in the modern colonial era, European Protestant missionaries have evangelized in a decidedly un-Pentecostal way, figuring that they were supposed to teach natives in foreign countries how to be good Europeans which was to them synonymous with being Christian.

Now we are entering a time in which the white people throughout the world have mostly succumbed to secularism. Secularism actually originated in the false assumption that the gospel does not to be translated into other cultures and can simply be accessed and appropriated without difference as an abstract universalized truth (that eventually got “universalized” away from Christianity itself through thinkers like Immanuel Kant). Many white Christians seek to resist the corruption of secularism mightily but they conflate the easy suburban moralism of avoiding unchaste sex, drugs, and cuss words with the holiness of radical discipleship that renounces the worldly privilege of whiteness. Thus in our day in time, Pentecost happens when privileged rich straight white people like me are reevangelized with Jesus’ gospel by the outsiders we assumed to be beneath us.

Instead of Amos 9, the confirming prophecy that I would pull out at any modern-day Jerusalem council for today’s bewildering Pentecostal disruption is 1 Corinthians 1:28, “He has chosen the base things of the world, the despised ones and those who are not, to bring to nothing the things that are.” That’s what I see happening around me. The Holy Spirit is moving in the people who are most despised by the religious insiders to reteach us the gospel. Yes, even and especially gay people. That’s the story of how I found the gospel that I preach today. I was evangelized by a gay Methodist church in Toledo, Ohio 12 years ago. Since then, my spiritual journey has been a process of building on the beautiful vision of God’s love that they shared with me.

God’s rebellion against the hegemony of religious insiders will continue until the gospel has gained full translation into every culture and language and gender identity and sexual orientation and any other identity markers of human existence. There is a way for every culture and language and gender and sexuality to shine with the full beautiful humanity of Christ. This is by no means the same thing as advocating an “anything goes” kind of morality. There are broken, fallen expressions of every culture, language, gender, and sexuality, just as there are redeemed, holy, and beautiful expressions. The Spirit is continuing to show us how to translate the gospel as we discover new cracks and crevices in the dark corners of humanity where those who were different had been hidden and misunderstood for thousands of years in shame but can now step into God’s light to be transformed by the Spirit into the sanctified, beautiful version of who they really are. The Spirit continues to pour out on all flesh. Long live Pentecost and the rebel breath of God!