A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA
by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026
Pentecost Sunday/A • May 24, 202
Acts 2:1-21 • 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 or Acts 2:1-21 • John 20:19-23
I grew up in the era of diagramming sentences: did you? Do you remember this? It was how grammar was taught. Since I was a big doodler on notes, I imagine if you could go back and find my old English class notes, they would be an amazing mass of lines parsing a sentence and little drawings of sailboats. I wasn’t very good at grammar then. It wasn’t until I took Ancient Greek in college that I got serious about it. Greek is all about grammar. One of the forms we learned was the future perfect. The perfect means action completed; the future part says it’s happening in the future. So, for example, “When the service is over, I will go home and have breakfast”, means I’m certainly going to have breakfast but not until later. “By 2:00 PM, Jim will be ready for a nap”, is another future perfect. That’s all the grammar I want to do this morning, so you can relax now. But I wanted to make this point: Pentecost is a future perfect of God doing what the prophet Joel said: “I will pour out my Spirit on all people.”
Pentecost is often called the birthday of the church but it has counterparts in other faiths. It occurs on the Feast of Shavuot, a Jewish celebration of the giving of the Torah; the moment God’s people were set aside as a whole community.. In the Muslim world, pilgrims gather for Eid al-Adha marking the end of the Hajj, where differences in wealth, status, and nationality are set aside before God. All these have in common the experience of being a community inspired by God’s Spirit, moved by God’s Word.
Pentecost follows on the story of the Ascension that we read last week. There, Jesus tells the disciples, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” [Acts 1:8] Now we’re told they are gathered and there is a sound, a “Whooooooshhhhhh” throughout the room. Say it with me: “Whooooshhhh”. Pentecost begins with sound. Then there are the tongues of fire. Ministers love to play with this. One of the ministers I listen to laughed this week about using flash paper in a bowl early in his career; the flame whooshed up and he lost his eyebrows. I’ve thought about doing something like that but honestly this building has been here since 1822 and I’m not about to risk being the pastor who burned it down. The members of the building committee can thank me later. So I’m not doing flames today; you can imagine them.
After the tongues of fire, we get more sounds. The disciples, the followers of Jesus go out into the street. Now perhaps because it’s Shavuot, there are lots of people and miraculously they can understand them and the people can understand the disciples. Have you ever been in a place where no one speaks your language? It’s frustrating. Simple things like going into a store and asking, “Do you have a AA battery?” become complicated. Every once in a while, you run into someone who speaks your language and it’s like a little miracle.
This bit about the languages is the center of some churches; their services have people doing what’s called ‘speaking in tongues’. But ecstatic speech like that is not Pentecost. Pentecost is about that little miracle of understanding. Genesis tells a story of the building of the Tower of Babel, an effort by people to become God like that becomes the occasion for God to create languages and misunderstanding. So Pentecost is the reversal of the Tower of Babel. It’s a future perfect: suddenly, instead of being divided by language, people are united together, understanding each other. That’s the energy of Pentecost: it isn’t in the whooshing wind, it isn’t in the fiery tongues, it’s in the gathering of all people because, as Joel said,
In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.
Pentecost is a vision of a future God has already seen.
John gives us a different account of the arrival of the Spirit among believers. He says that just before Jesus ascends, he tells the disciples,
“Receive the Holy Spirit. f you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” [John 20:22b-23]
So the coming of the Spirit has a purpose: it’s to empower God’s people to do the work of forgiveness. God’s making a future; Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who presided from the dark storms of apartheid in South Africa into the dawn of a new society based on equality said, “Without forgiveness, there is no future.” When we are chained by guilt over past wrongs, we can’t see a way forward; the same is true for others. So our job is to create a future by teaching and practicing forgiveness.
This doesn’t happen in a moment; it isn’t now, it’s a future perfect, it’s where we’re going, it’s where God is going. We recognize it when we say with our lives, “Jesus is Lord”; not our past, not our resume, not our prejudices. We all let these run our lives at times but when the Spirit controls us, then we say with our whole selves, Jesus is Lord and act like it. That’s the point Paul is making in the letter to the Corinthian Christians. Their church is filled with conflict because they are making a hierarchy out of gifts; Paul simply says, many gifts, one Spirit, many gifts, one Lord, many gifts, one purpose by one God who intends to form us into the body of Christ.
This doesn’t happen in a moment; it isn’t now, it’s a future perfect, it’s where we’re going, it’s where God is going. Every time we come to the Table of the Lord, we remember where we are; every time we come to the Table of the Lord, we remember where we’re going. Every time we come to the table of the Lord, we are meant to recognize him in our midst. Every time we come to the table of the Lord, we should come forgiving and knowing we are forgiven. For every time we come to the table of the Lord, it’s meant to be a little Pentecost, a moment when we see again, as a future perfect, how God’s love is gathering, nurturing, inviting, and claiming us. You are not your own: you are a part of this wonderful congregation, some of which meets here today, some is throughout the world, and in the future perfect hope of God, all of which is living out the love of God.
Amen.