Sermon — What Does This Mean?

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, on Sunday, May 24 — Pentecost. It was in response to Acts 2:1–21. You can listen to the audio at this link.)

Here is something strange that happened to me at a restaurant.

Our family had spent a year living in Finland. All six of us. And while we were there, we heard languages everywhere. Finnish, of course. But also Swedish, Russian, German, French, Spanish. We got used to it. After a while, hearing more than one language in a day just felt normal.

Then we came home. After a very long day of travel, exhausted, we sat down at a restaurant. And Abby and I both noticed something at the same time. The table next to us. We heard them. Really heard them. And we looked at each other with wide eyes.

They were speaking American English.

We had not heard American English as the normal sound of daily life for almost a year. And for a moment, we didn’t know why it sounded so striking, so present, so clear. And then we laughed, because we realized we were back in the United States. Of course they were speaking American English. But our ears had changed. We finally heard what we had stopped hearing before we left.

I’ve been thinking about that moment all week as I’ve sat with this text.

The feast of Pentecost is already ancient before we get to Acts 2.

It is Shavuot, which is what the Jewish people called Pentecost. It was one of the great pilgrimage festivals, fifty days after Passover, a harvest celebration giving thanks for the first fruits of the wheat. Luke tells us in verse five that devout Jews from every people under heaven had gathered in Jerusalem. Think about that. This is not some quiet religious gathering. This is an occupied city. Roman soldiers are posted at the gates. The empire has a keen interest in what happens when large crowds of Jews gather for festivals, especially festivals that remember liberation from slavery, that celebrate gifts that come not from Caesar but from God.

These pilgrims had come from across the known world. From Parthia and Media and Elam, which is modern-day Iran and Iraq. From Egypt and Libya in North Africa. From Rome itself, on the far western edge of the empire. They had crossed mountains and deserts and seas to be here, and they were not here to honor Rome. They were not here to celebrate Caesar. They were gathered to praise God. Together. In their languages, carrying the stories and histories of their own people.

That is already a quietly radical act. Rome saw itself as the great unifier, the divine order that had brought the world under one rule. Latin was the official language of the empire, the language of power and command and law. But the Spirit doesn’t arrive speaking Latin and making official decrees.

God is doing something different here. God is gathering the scattered, not to erase their differences, not to absorb them into one imperial tongue, but to meet each of them exactly as they are.

And then the sound.

Not wind. The sound of a rush of violent wind. There wasn’t a storm. Nothing was destroyed. The curtains didn’t blow. But the sound of it filled the entire house. And then what looked like tongues of fire appeared above each of them, resting on them. Not burning. Not consuming. Just present.

I want to stay here for a moment, because I think we rush past this too quickly.

We don’t entirely know what these things looked like. We know they looked like fire. We know the sound was like wind. Luke is reaching for language to describe something that went beyond the language he had. The Spirit doesn’t fit neatly into our categories. It never has.

The Spirit was there at the very beginning, moving over the waters at creation. The Spirit rested on the judges and the prophets. The Spirit overwhelmed Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, breathing life into what was dead. The Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism. Each time, the encounter is its own thing. Each time, it stretches our vocabulary for what God is doing.

This is not the Spirit’s first appearance. The Spirit is not new. What is new is this moment, this gathering, this community of frightened and grieving and hopeful people who had watched their teacher executed and then claimed they had seen him alive. The Spirit comes to them, in this moment, in signs that are real but not fully explainable. Signs that say I am here. Pay attention.

And here is what I keep returning to: the signs don’t entirely make sense. Wind that isn’t wind. Fire that doesn’t burn. That is the point. The Spirit’s presence doesn’t submit to our frameworks of control. You can’t manage it, regulate it, or contain it. You can only notice it. You can only ask what does this mean?

And here is something important. This encounter with the Spirit is not something the disciples went out and found. The Spirit came to them. That is how it has always worked. It is never about us getting to God. It is always about God coming to us. God coming into our humanity, our limitations, our confusion, our grief. God meeting us where we actually are. Not where we think we should be. Where we are.

And the crowd speaks in languages.

Not in some private spiritual vocabulary that only insiders can understand, but in the languages of the people gathered there. Parthian. Mede. Elamite. Arabic. Egyptian. Latin. The languages people grew up in, the languages in which their mothers told them stories, the languages in which they dreamed.

Learning a language is not a small thing. Anyone who has done it knows that when you learn a language, you don’t just learn words and grammar. You learn what the people care about. You learn the jokes that don’t translate. You learn the history that lives in certain words. You learn the food and the grief and the unique way those people see the world. Language and culture cannot be separated. To speak someone’s language is to enter their world, not just their ears.

This is what the Spirit does. The Spirit doesn’t stand at a distance and send out a signal everyone has to figure out on their own. The Spirit moves toward each person, each story, each history, and speaks there. Good news spoken in a language you understand is not the same as good news shouted at you from across a wall. One reaches you. One doesn’t.

So what would it sound like to hear good news in a language you understand?

For someone living in poverty, the kind of poverty where you are counting what is left and figuring out how to make it to the end of the month, good news sounds like you will have enough. It sounds like rent paid, food on the table, the lights staying on. It doesn’t sound like a lecture. It sounds like someone finally showing up with help.

For someone who has been pushed out, told they don’t belong, made to feel invisible, good news sounds like you are welcome here. Not barely tolerated. Welcome. Fully, with no conditions attached.

For someone struggling with addiction, good news sounds like there is a way through, and people will walk it with you, and you are not your worst moment.

For someone who has been trafficked, good news sounds like you are not property. You have never been property. You are a human being made in the image of God.

For someone who came to this country to build a life, who crossed a border, who worked the jobs no one else would take, who raised children who know no other home, good news sounds like you belong here. You are seen. You will not be disappeared.

For someone struggling with who they are, who they love, how they understand themselves before God, good news sounds like God made you, and God does not make mistakes, and you are beloved.

For someone in pain, with a mouth that has hurt for a long time because there was no money and no access, good news sounds like someone is here. Someone will help.

The list goes on. It keeps going. And each one is different. Because the Spirit speaks in languages. Real, specific languages. Not one general signal for everyone to sort out on their own.

But there is something else here. Something that might be harder to hear.

There is also good news for the oppressor.

I know. I know that on a week when the administration signed an executive order directing banks to screen their customers for immigration status, on a week when more than 120,000 approved refugees remain stranded because the refugee program has been frozen, on a week when the new policy tells immigrants seeking to become permanent residents that they need to leave the country and apply from outside, I know it is hard to talk about good news for the people designing those policies. Some of us are sitting with real anger right now. Some of us have people we love who are terrified. Some of us have neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes.

And that anger is not wrong. It is, I would argue, the Spirit moving in you.

And yet.

The person using cruelty as a policy tool is also in bondage. The person who has built their identity around who they can exclude is living in a smaller and smaller world. The person who reaches for contempt and blame to feel powerful is not free. They are enslaved to it. They are carrying something heavy, and they may not even know it yet.

Good news for the oppressor is this: you can be set free from this. You don’t have to live like this. The cage can be unlocked.

But they probably won’t hear it that way. The ones with power rarely do. They will hear it as a threat, as something that shakes the ground under them, as something to push back against. They believe the status quo is the good news. They don’t see how the cruelty they are causing is also damaging them. They don’t see how their need for control is itself a kind of suffering.

And that is, I think, exactly what we are watching when we see the policies designed to make life harder for immigrants, for refugees, for the poor, for anyone who doesn’t fit the preferred image of who belongs. There is always an excuse. There is always a reason. The goalposts are always moving. The ends always seem to justify the means. This is the voice that says they are filled with new wine.

Two responses. There are always two responses.

The first: what does this mean? A genuine question. An open posture. Confusion, yes, but confusion that is reaching toward understanding. These are people who know that something has happened and they want to know what it is and where it points and what they are supposed to do now.

The second: they are filled with new wine. Dismissal. An explanation that requires no further examination. Move along. Nothing to see here.

You know this dynamic. You live in it every week.

There are always going to be people who explain away God. Who explain away justice. Who explain away peace and mercy and the slow stubborn movement of the Spirit toward the margins. There are always going to be people who, when confronted with something they cannot control, reach for a story that protects what they already have.

We hear it in policy language that calls cruelty a deterrent. We hear it in the insistence that complaints and accusations about immigrants are really just about law and order. We hear it sometimes even in church, in the statement: pastor, you are being too political.

These statements are not invitations to a conversation. They are moves to stop the conversation. They are filled with new wine. They are the way of saying that I do not want to look at this. I do not want to ask whether my comfort and my beliefs are in tension with what Jesus actually taught. I want you to stop.

But Peter doesn’t stop. Standing in the middle of Pentecost, he quotes Joel.

Why Joel?

Because Joel addresses exactly this moment. The moment when people claim the Spirit is doing something unexpected, and the ones who want to explain it away try to do just that. Peter says that this is what the prophet spoke of. The Spirit poured out on all flesh. Sons and daughters prophesying. Old people dreaming. Young people seeing visions. Even on those whom the empire has decided don’t count, the Spirit will be poured out.

A prophet does not just predict the future. A prophet declares where God is headed. A prophet says pay attention, because this is the direction things are moving, whether or not it is the direction you expected. The Spirit is moving toward the margins. The Spirit is being poured out beyond the boundaries of the expected, beyond the people with power, beyond the ones who thought they had the whole thing figured out. And those who want to explain it away still have to stand in the middle of it. They don’t get to set the agenda. They are just trying to silence the people asking the real question.

Music is a language.

This week in Watertown, Wisconsin, a high school band director had his students spend the whole school year learning a piece of music called “A Mother of a Revolution!” It was written by a gay and Black composer named Omar Thomas, dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender woman who was a central figure in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, one of the defining moments of the movement for LGBTQ+ equality.

One week before the spring concert, the school board voted to ban the piece. They called it indoctrination, even though there isn’t a single line of words in the piece. They said it violated their controversial issues policy. The students who had spent a year learning it were told they couldn’t perform it.

So the community gathered. They packed a local church. Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Watertown. Standing room only. The composer himself came and stood at the front and led the students in playing the piece that had been banned from their own school’s stage.

The school board said they are filled with new wine.

And the Spirit said gather anyway. Play anyway. The song will be heard.

Music is a language. And for the young people in that band, and for everyone who came and packed that church, that music was good news spoken in a language that reached them. The board tried to silence it. The Spirit gathered a church full of people to hear it.

We see the Spirit here on Allison Hill all the time.

I need you to know that. Because it would be easy, in a week like this one, to lose sight of it.

We see it when a young woman finally stops making excuses about her addiction and agrees to go into a recovery program. Something shifts in that moment that is not willpower alone. Something breaks open.

We see it at the dental clinic, when volunteer dentists use their skills to help someone who has lived with pain in their mouth for months, pain that was quietly shaping how they ate, how they slept, how they showed up for their life. And that pain begins to ease.

We see it when people come here for a tour. They come in with ideas about what Allison Hill is. They hear the stories. They see the faces. They see this church and these clinics and these people. And they walk out in tears because what they thought they knew was shattered and something true got in.

We see it every Sunday in the sharing of the peace, when people who have been told in a hundred ways that they are not welcome anywhere discover that in this place they are welcomed as they are.

That is the Spirit. It is not a metaphor. It is real.

And here is the most important thing I want to say.

The Spirit’s action is not waiting on us.

Look at Acts 2. The disciples didn’t go out and find the Spirit. The Spirit came to them. The people in the streets didn’t make this moment happen. God made it happen. The languages poured out not because someone planned a multilingual worship service, but because the Spirit moved.

We talk about having a choice, and we do. But let us be clear about what the choice is. The choice is not whether to create something new. The choice is how we respond to what God is already doing.

The Spirit is already moving. The Spirit is already speaking in languages, already showing up at the margins, already gathering people who have been told they don’t belong, already breathing life into what looks dead. God’s action is not on hold while we make up our minds.

So, we can respond the way the crowd did when they heard those languages and asked what does this mean? We can open ourselves to the question. We can let it cost us something. We can ask what it means for us, for this community, for the arrangements of power and exclusion that shape the world we live in. We can ask what it means for those who have been pushed aside and silenced. We can ask what it means for those doing the pushing, because they are caught in something too. We can let the question lead us somewhere new.

Or we can respond the way the others did. We can see what is happening and take up a defensive posture. Protect our comfort. Protect our familiar ways of understanding who matters and who doesn’t. We can say new wine and mean don’t ask me to change. Don’t ask me to see. Don’t ask me to follow the Spirit somewhere I didn’t plan to go.

But here is the thing about Pentecost.

The Spirit cannot be unheard. It cannot be unseen.

The sound filled the house. The tongues of fire rested on each of them. The languages poured out into the streets of Jerusalem and thousands of people could not pretend it wasn’t happening. Even the ones who said they’re drunk had to explain something. You don’t explain something that isn’t there.

The Spirit is still moving. The Spirit is still speaking in languages people understand. Still showing up at the margins. Still gathering people who have been told they don’t belong. Still breathing life into what looks dead.

A school board banned a song and a Lutheran church filled up to hear it played anyway.

A young woman says yes to recovery. A volunteer dentist picks up a drill. A visitor walks out of this church in tears because something they thought they knew just fell away.

The Spirit is not waiting. The Spirit is not asking permission. The Spirit is pouring out on all flesh. On the people you would expect, and on the people you would not. On sons and daughters, on old and young, on the ones with power and the ones with none.

And we are here, gathered together, in the middle of it.

Which means the question Pentecost puts to us is the same question it has always put to every generation that found itself in the middle of what God was doing.

What does this mean? What does it mean for you? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for the world?

The Spirit is already moving. Thanks be to God.

Originally published at https://pastormatthewbest.com on May 26, 2026.