Acts Quick Background
As universally as possible, scholars agree that The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles were written as two volumes meant to be read together. In Luke, Jesus’ birth and ministry lead to that fateful Passover weekend when he would be crucified. Acts, like the sequel it is, picks up immediately after Jesus’ death and describes the resurrection, ascension, and expansion of his message. That expansion takes firm root on the day of Pentecost, when thousands of people come to a deep understanding of what it means to be One people of God.
Acts 2.1-13 (CEB)
When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.
There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them?
How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!”
They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!”
Rumi
You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
—
Last week we discussed Ascension as an individual awakening into Christ Consciousness, something accessible to all of us. As we more consistently live in the mindset of Jesus, we are changed from within into quite different beings. We change the way we think about the world and our behavior in it. Our faith in and connection to God starts to take root in our daily activities. Ascension is our spiritual goal and the point of the Jesus cycle.
This chapter of Acts makes it abundantly clear that the author of Luke-Acts also thought the ascension of Jesus was about the enlightenment all of us, not only Jesus.
I like this translation because it ends with that beautiful metaphor about everyone being filled with new wine. Other translations end “they have had too much wine,” the implication being that everyone was drunk. And I’m sure that’s what it would have looked like to observers, all these people reveling in utter slack-jawed awe as God awakened them en masse.
Remember, Pentecost was when thousands of Jews gathered for Shavuot, a harvest festival. It was one of only three times a year Jews from around the world, representing many different sects and beliefs, united in the same place to celebrate their covenant with God.
For Christians, this would be akin to having a global denominational conference, where everyone from Evangelicals to Human Secularists gathered under one roof. Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces if all of a sudden, no matter from which corner of the globe we’d come, no matter our thoughts about the nature of God or Jesus, we could understand each other?
And I don’t just mean linguistically.
The story in Acts isn’t about language or speaking in tongues. It’s about a deep knowledge of God that leads to seeing each other as unique emanations of God’s One spectacular being.
Pentecost is about Oneness, seeing in in each other, and accepting each other unconditionally as God in the flesh. Like Jesus.
God’s revelation in Acts is about peering into each other’s souls in such a powerful, undeniable way that we are overcome with joy and love for one another. Like our ancestors, we, too, dance around, singing, shaking in our boots, hugging each other, weeping tears of joy, and otherwise looking like a bunch of lunatics. I imagine the cacophony would be ear-splitting. To an observer, we’d look like we’d been imbibing a little too much of something, for sure.
In truth, though, that sort of spiritual epiphany, especially on as a massive scale as described in Acts, isn’t because we’re high on anything other than transcendent reality. Epiphanies happen because we’re drunk on God, who has filled us with new wine, unlike any wine we’ve ever tasted before. It’s so pure and perfect, and full of unconditional love that it makes us giddy.
At Pentecost, God’s perfect love flows through us all in such a powerful way that we see past our grievances with one another and finally focus on the big picture: sharing divine love here and now.
Pentecost is also a beautiful reminder that Ascension is not just an individual experience, but a human experience.
We live on this planet, in this spacetime construct, because we are in the process of ascending to Oneness with God, and through God to each other.
If we paid a little more attention to our journey and a little less attention to the screaming death pains of socio-economic and political systems collapsing under their own brutality, we might start to counteract the fear of change—the fear of God’s love that continues to embroil the world in violence.
Yes, we are afraid of God’s love. That’s why we fight about it all the time. Especially Christians, whose tens of thousands of denominations are proof that even when God does something for everyone, we make it about “us” versus “them”.
At Pentecost, although everyone gathered was Jewish, they were theologically, politically, and socially diverse, just like us. I take this as further proof that in a world ruled by God’s love, we’re not all the same, rather, we’re all a part of the same thing. That awareness, understanding, and acceptance of our uniqueness changes the world.
At Pentecost we realize we are all, part and parcel, mind, body, and soul, intertwined in and interconnected through God. That’s what Oneness is: Perfect union with the perfected Mind of the Universe. And God’s Perfect Mind is the conduit that allows us to communicate with and love each other in a deeper, more profound way than any of us currently comprehends.
Anyone doing the exceedingly difficult work of following Jesus, whether they call themselves a Christian or not, comes to a deeper, Pentecostal-like understanding of the importance of unconditional acceptance of all people as beloved children of God, without exceptions for things like skin color, sexual orientation, and social status. When we ascend, any hatred toward anyone we don’t understand from another culture is dissolved, forever, in the unconditional love of God.
In that Christ Conscious state of absolute Oneness with God revealed at Pentecost, we not only recognize each other as valued, beloved, and worthy, we know we are each other because we are each the physical embodiment of a singular universal consciousness we call God.
We desperately need to understand that we are all a part of the same thing if we are to survive as a species. And if we want to thrive, solving problems like hunger and homelessness; if we want to explore the farthest reaches of the universe, we simply must learn to accept each other as equals and exalt every person as precious and beloved.
That ascended state of perception gives us a new, non-verbal language, the love language of God. And once we understand God’s love language, we understand each other. There are no more foreigners, there is no more hatred of the other, in fact, we finally realize there is no other, there is only God, in an astounding assortment of creations.
Once awakened, filled with new wine, we attain at least a modicum of the heightened state of being human exemplified in Jesus. We see, without any doubt, our interconnectedness with each other, every single person a universe within universes, respectfully bowing toward each other, bowing toward God.
Amen.
Featured image by Mark Durham: www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-The-Pentecost/963848/3444664/view
