Acts 2:1-12
Today is Pentecost Sunday when churches remember and celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ disciples for the first time. Fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection and ten days after his ascension 120 disciples were praying and worshipping in an upper room of a house.
They experienced a deafening sound like a violent rushing wind and the appearance of tongues of fire rested on each of them. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak miraculously in languages that they had not learned.
They went outside the house where their commotion attracted a large crowd of people, who were amazed to hear Aramaic-speaking Galileans – that was the local language — praising God in the diverse languages of the Jewish diaspora from throughout the Roman Empire.
This event occurred during the celebration called the Feast of Weeks, or, Shavuot, which gave thanks to God for the completion of the first harvest season, and later in Jewish history came to celebrate the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai.
Many Jews living throughout the Roman Empire had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, and many of them were in the crowd that day and heard Jesus’ disciples speaking in their various native languages. They were amazed and said to each other, “what can this mean”?
That’s the question that we’re doing to try to answer. Of all the miraculous ways that God could have manifested the coming of the Holy Spirit, why this one? Why did God empower the disciples to speak in various languages?
One reason may have been that such an amazing miracle would have given credence to the disciples’ message that Jesus is the risen Messiah. Another may have been that many of the diaspora Jews present didn’t understand Aramaic, and God wanted everyone present to hear and understand the Good News. Also, speaking in dozens of languages prophetically foreshadowed the spreading of the Gospel throughout the world.
These all could be part of the explanation for why God did this. But there’s another perhaps even more important reason.
Language is one of the ways that human beings are divided from one another, along with nationality, race, ethnicity, and economic class. These division of humankind result in bigotry, hatred, nationalism, and war. But In Christ God is overcoming these divisions and bringing human beings together in unity in Jesus.
On Pentecost the language barrier was miraculously transcended as a sign that everything that divides humanity and brings conflict will be dissolved in Christ. That humanity will one day be united as God’s family at peace with God and each other.
God’s plan is for this unity to demonstrated now in the churches, as a model to the nations. We see that in our church with our mix of ethnicities, races, and nationalities.
Yet unity is not simply a matter of being together. Unity in Christ means making changes in how we relate to each other. It means listening to each other and learning from each other. It means caring for each other. True unity in Christ means relating to each other in loving and just ways.
Sometimes without realizing it we can bring the injustices of the world into the life of the church. For example, for many years our church sermons were usually preached in English with headphones available for those who needed to hear a translation into Spanish. But the headphones often didn’t work well, and it was sometimes difficult to follow the sermons.
English was being treated as the privileged language, even though we are a multi-national, bi-lingual church. This was unequal treatment and unfair.
We can think of the warning given in the book of James: “My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. . . If you show favor to some people over others, are you not discriminating among yourselves and becoming judges with evil thoughts?”
That’s what we were doing in our church: showing favoritism toward English-speaking church members, discriminating against Spanish-speakers.
Some of us will remember that our sister Griselda spoke up about this unequal treatment. Often someone speaking out about an injustice is not listened too, but is shut down, ignored, and even punished. But our church community heard Griselda and responded.
Since that time the sermons are preached from the pulpit in both English and Spanish. Our unity in Christ was deepened and made more just.
Discrimination against other people is tragically common, treating people unfairly within families, churches, and society at large.
In Scripture we read that the early church struggled with this problem. The Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers in Jesus discriminated against Greek-speaking Jewish Jesus-believers. Then, as the church spread beyond Judea, Jewish Jesus-believers discriminated against Gentile believers, and Gentile believers discriminated against Jewish Jesus-believers. Financially well-off believers mistreated believers who were struggling economically.
There is injustice in the church and even more in society at large. But God empowers us as followers of Jesus to embrace justice, to seek right relationships among all people. Justice is a priority for God. Justice in the family, in the church and among the nations. The prophet Amos cries out, “Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
Justice is an essential element of the unity of humanity that God is bringing. And we can be people who act to bring more justice to our personal lives, to our church, and to the wider world.
An example of a Christian who helped make the world more just was Samuel Jones. Samuel Jones lived from 1846 to 1904. People called him Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones because he sought to live by Jesus’ golden rule, to “act toward others as you would like others to act toward you.”
Jones owned a factory in Toledo, Ohio, and he ran it like no one else ran a business. He paid his employees 50% more than the typical worker received. He paid women and men the same wage for similar work. And he banned child labor within his factory. This was in the late 1800s, an era when working people were commonly exploited.
At a time when workers had to work 10 hour a day, 60 hours a week, Jones implemented an 8-hour work day. He provided his employees with paid vacations, subsidized meals in a company cafeteria, and free childcare for their children. Jones created a health insurance cooperative for his employees. He introduced a profit-sharing plan so that his employees could benefit financially from the company’s success.
As you might imagine, these acts of justice caused Jones to be disliked by other Toledo businessmen. But he was loved by the people of Toledo who elected him mayor four times.
As mayor, Jones instituted an 8-hour day for city employees. Throughout the city he set up free kindergartens, developed a park system, and established playgrounds for children, especially in low-income neighborhoods. He strictly enforced rules against police brutality. He sought other reforms, such as lowering streetcar fares, which were blocked by the city council or state government. But he did all that he could to ensure better lives for the people of Toledo.
Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones was a Christian who cared about justice. He was a model of business and government leadership in the character of Christ. Jones acted on Jesus’ commands to have just relationships with others: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.
.We may not be in positions to do things on the scale that Samual Jones did, but we too can act on behalf of justice in our own spheres of life:
Something simple, but at times difficult, is that we can graciously correct someone who makes a racist or bigoted remark, speaking the truth to them in love.
If something unjust is happening in our family, our social circle, or at work, we can speak up, clearly and respectfully, like Griselda did. And if our spouse or friend or co-worker speaks to us about some injustice we’re committing, we can listen to them and with God’s help make the needed changes.
And to the extent God gives us the opportunity and power to do so, we can seek to correct the injustices that we encounter in society at large, like Samuel Jones did.
In these ways, and others, we become instruments of God’s great work of bringing unity with justice to humankind.
That is the lesson of Pentecost. God is uniting humanity in love and justice. One Day God will bring his wonderful work for unity to completion in his coming kingdom. We are living joyfully now in the dawn of that glorious Day, learning now to be people of love and justice, to the glory of God and the praise of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Marty Shupack, 05.24.2026