Pentecost is best known in most American churches as the day everyone wears red, someone reads a scripture filled with unpronounceable Ancient Near Eastern geographical regions, and the children’s minister convinces the kids that it’s the birthday of the church.  If you’re lucky, you get birthday cake.

Pentecost (Greek for 50 days) is actually the Jewish festival, Shavu-ot, the Festival of Weeks.  It comes seven weeks after Passover, commemorating the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai, and celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to the Temple.  Acts 2 tells of the disciples waiting in Jerusalem as faithful Jews came from around the world to celebrate Shavu-ot.  As the Torah was once given on Mt. Sinai, Acts tells of the Holy Spirit being given to the disciples on that Pentecost, with signs of fire and the ability for everyone to hear the Gospel proclaimed in their own language.  The Christian celebration of Pentecost commemorates a renewal and expansion of God’s relationship with the people of Israel, where the presence of the Holy Spirit of God is given to the followers of Jesus the Messiah.

In the New Testament, the gift of tongues (Greek: glossolalia) was regularly cited as a sign of the new birth in the Holy Spirit.  It seems clear in the Pentecost story that this was first the ability to speak in languages, previously unlearned, to make the Gospel story known to people with no common language.  It also seems clear that in most other instances, the gift of tongues was an unintelligible and ecstatic prayer language, that may or may not have been translated by someone else.  The gift of tongues is also reported well past the canonization of the New Testament, perhaps most famously in the rejection of the teachings of Montanus and his two female prophetesses (late 2nd c.), who claimed to receive new prophecies from the Holy Spirit in moments of ecstasy.  Tertullian was probably the best known early church figure to follow Montanist expressions. (Read more about it)

More recently, William Joseph Seymour led the Asuza Street Pentacostalism in the early 1900’s that shapes most of modern experience with glossalalia.  Seymour’s prayer and preaching led to a massive international movement of men and women speaking in tongues.  The Pentecostal Church teaches that no one is baptized in the Holy Spirit unless they have spoken in tongues at least once.  The Charismatic movement tends to broaden that to the belief that speaking in tongues is a gift of the Holy Spirit that can be ongoing, or for experienced for a brief period of time, but charismatics still tend to assume that tongues are essential to true life in the Holy Spirit.  A third view, one adopted by most Wesleyans, is a “religion of the heart,” a real sensation of assurance in God’s love, that is accompanied by the gifts of the Spirit, which may or may not include speaking in tongues.

I love how John Wesley blames Constantine’s watering down of Christianity for the loss of speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts.  Craig Adams has a fantastic article on Wesley’s theology of the spiritual gifts at this link.  For now, meditate on Wesley’s words below, and ask yourself whether your faith could be made more alive were you to receive the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit.

It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the Emperor Constantine called himself a Christian; and, from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby, heaped riches and power and honour upon the Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not, (as has been vulgarly supposed,) `because there was no more occasion for them,’ because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake; not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian. The real cause was, `the love of many,’ almost of all Christians, so called, was ‘waxed cold.’ The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of Man, when he came to examine his church, could hardly `find faith upon the earth’. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian church; because the Christians were turned heathens again, and had only a dead form left.          Sermon 89, The More Excellent Way

Have a blessed Pentecost.  May your church be disrupted by the Spirit this Sunday, and every Sunday.