Are Flaming Tongues Prophetic?

The season of Pentecost is the life of the church, marked first by the day of Pentecost, which comes 50 days after Christ rose from the dead.  Pentecost is often remembered for the dramatic gift of tongues given to the apostles long ago.  At this point the conversation usually descends into an argument concerning whether spiritual gifts are today.  I propose we look at the whole narrative arc found in the lectionary readings for the day.  There we will find a focus on the prophetic and not on tongues, which should lead us to a missional outlook for the Pentecost service.

The narrative begins in the Israelite camp during the Exodus.  Two men have begun to prophesy, and Moses is asked by Joshua to stop them.  Moses replies, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!” (Num. 11:29)  Moses wishes that the whole camp would have the Spirit of God placed upon them.  Flash forward to Pentecost.  The apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in tongues.  The crowd gathering around is confused by what is happening, so Peter, quoting Joel, says to them: “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.” From Moses to Joel to Peter, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the background of Pentecost, is that people will prophesy.

To understand the narrative arc of Pentecost it is crucial to connect the prophetic to the filling of the Holy Spirit.  The good news I find in this narrative is that the connection of Pentecost to the prophetic shifts the focus of Pentecost away from the arguments concerning spiritual gifts and onto the presence of God’s Word in the community.

We often forget that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ.  This being so, when we are filled with the Spirit we are filled with Christ: we become Christ’s presence in a dramatic and powerful way.  The flaming tongues, a dramatic sign of the filling of the Spirit too often takes the focus off of the way that the filling of the Spirit empowers people to speak God’s Word to their local communities.  First, in the Numbers passage, the two men who prophesy are speaking to the community of Israel.  Joel echoes Moses’ sentiments in his writing, hoping for the day when sons and daughters will prophesy.  Finally, in the Acts passage, Peter testifies that this has happened: the sons and daughters may prophesy, the Spirit has come to Christ’s body. To this point, the narrative arc of Pentecost focuses on how the filling of the Spirit is a missional function of the local church.

So what does this mean for a Pentecost service?  I think sometimes we chase the flaming tongues instead of the prophetic.  We have in mind a spectacular supernatural event.  I don’t want to discount the fact that this may happen, I just don’t think it should be our motive during a Pentecost service, or any service for that matter.  Instead, as we celebrate the first Pentecost we should look toward the purpose of Pentecost, which is to fill those who follow the way of Christ to be his presence in the world and his local church.  The filling of the Spirit cannot be divorced from the filling of Christ, and in this we are called to be the presence of God’s Word in a prophetic way.  Pentecost calls us to remember that we as the local church are the living water of Christ’s teachings.  We, as Christ’s body, are to be the presence of Christ in the midst of the world.  In this missional remembrance of Pentecost we find the true calling of the liturgy: “the work of the people.”  The Spirit is given to us so that we can be a dramatic presence within the world, a continual testimony to the world rescuing work of Christ through his death, resurrection and kingdom.

What Idolatry Says About Us

Today’s lectionary readings chronicled the relationship of the people of God to the Mosaic law, from their idolatry to Hebrew worship to Jesus’ exhortation of the crowds for not seeing that Moses’ words point to him.

The golden calf is the most detailed episode of idolatry in the Scriptures.  The lessons, from Sunday school to the pulpit, are often on how God feels about idolatry, he’s jealous, and how our idolatry is sinful worship.  While this is true, I think it is a one sided view of the situation: it focuses on God’s relationship to idolatry.  But other than sinfulness, how is our personal psyche affected by idolatry?

Our fathers made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock. (Ps. 106 NAB)

This psalm interprets the golden calf incident in terms of Genesis 1.  God is a jealous God, but he is unchanging.  He is hurt by idolatry but unaffected.  How people are affected though, through idolatry, is that the image of God is exchanged for the image of something else.  When we speak of the idolatry of money or power or materialism or addiction we speak of sinfulness.  But there is so much more to it than that.  When we are idolatrous we begin to make ourselves in the image of the idol.  When material possessions or money become an idol we begin to remake ourselves in the image of money.  That’s a scary thought.  When we seek after other things we do more than just sin, we begin to take on the image of something else, the powers of this world.

The scenes in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce about purgatory show the powers of this world best: not in Dante’s horrid images of Inferno but in dull greys.  Idolatry’s re-imaging is not equal to the power of God’s image—it is only a shadow—and it turns us into shadows or wraiths, shells of ourselves, sapped of our glory and left with the hollow image of fleeting worldly power.

The Book of Wisdom and Paradise Lost

I made the switch from the Revised Common Lectionary to the Lectionary of the United States Council of Catholc Bishops.  Nothing personal high church Protestants, I just wanted to keep things fresh with a new Bible translation, one that I had never read, the New American Bible.

The past few days there have been these Old Testament readings I have never read before.  They are from the Book of Wisdom.

Apocrypha alert!  I’ve never been an apocrypha hater.  I’ve never read it extensively either.  I am apocrypha-neutral. Or indifferent. Or ignorant.

From yesterday’s lectionary reading is the pithy pronouncement:

God formed man to be imperishable;
the image of his own nature he made them.
But by the envy of the Devil, death entered the world,
and they who are in his possession experience it. (2:23-24)

I always thought this kind of theological reconstruction of time and the Adversary’s motive was shaped in Protestant tradition by Paradise Lost: 

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe…
for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov’d our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour’d of Heav’n so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc’d them to that foul revolt?
Th’ infernal Serpent; (Book I)

This type of reading presented in the Book of Wisdom acknowledges the Protestant fixation on the consequences of original sin.  In Paradise Lost, and in much of Protestant thinking, the Adversary is
fighting a cosmological and spiritual battle and acts primarily out of
evil and not envy. What I find interesting about the Book of Wisdom‘s view of the Adversary’s motive is that he was envious of our image, that we were icons of God.  This creates a tension of divinity and deprativity that is eclipsed by the tension of the cross and our daily lives: we re-enter the imperishable state of Paradise yet remain in the clutches of bodily death.  The Book of Wisdom expresses our current tension well:

But the souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and no torment shall touch them.
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace. (3:1-3)

We are in the hand of God.  We may appear to be dead. But just as Christ, the Second Adam has thrown off "utter destruction" so to we will arise as imperishable images of God.