May 24, 2026
In Words We Could Understand
Acts 2:1-21
Not long after I was ordained in 2006, I was invited back to preach a homecoming service at the small Baptist church where I was baptized, and to the congregation where I spent my childhood, where I hunted Easter-eggs in the yard and learned to ride my bike in the parking lot.
I was twenty-six, freshly graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, embarking on doctoral studies in preaching, full of purpose and ideas. I wanted to do justice to everything I had learned. I worked on my sermon for weeks and preached what I thought was a careful, theologically rich sermon.
The congregation sat quietly through the whole thing. I didn’t really know how it landed until the pastor got up to close the service with a benediction. Normally, in that church, it was a very short prayer – but this time he went on for a while.
He had been their pastor for decades and he knew them. He prayed through all of the themes of my sermon, but in words they could actually hear and in a way that registered in their daily lives. Somewhere in the middle of the prayer, I realized with a mixture of embarrassment and gratitude, that he was finishing my sermon. And when he said, “Amen,” people were ready to go to lunch. Because they had been to church.
Frederick Buechner once wrote that God speaks to us more often than we realize — not in starlight, but in the ordinary, helter-skelter events of each day. The question, he said, is not whether God is speaking. The question is whether we have ears to hear.
Which is another way of asking what many of us wonder, somewhere beneath the surface of our days: is there a word for me in all this noise, a word I can understand?
Because there is a great deal of noise. We are the most word-saturated generation in human history. News, commentary, opinion, argument, content — it comes at us from the moment our eyes open until the moment we put the phone down and try to sleep. Everyone is talking. The noise is relentless.
Yet underneath it, we carry a quiet, persistent hunger for something that registers. A word that finds us. Honest and direct. One that arrives in the dialect of our actual life.
That is what Pentecost is about. The wind and fire are spectacular, but what stops the crowd is a word they can understand.
The story begins fifty days after Easter. Jesus has ascended. The disciples have been told to wait for the Spirit, and so here they are, a hundred and twenty of them, gathered in a house in Jerusalem, praying. They are not working up a ten point plan, or putting together a go-to-market strategy for the gospel. They are doing what Jesus told them to do. Waiting for the Spirit.
Suddenly she arrives. They hear a sound like the rush of violent wind that fills the entire house. The Greek word Luke uses for that wind, biaios, is the same word that appears in the ancient Greek translation of Exodus for the wind that parted the Red Sea so that the Israelites could escape from slavery under Pharoah. Luke is drawing a connection here, telling us how to read this story. This is a liberating Spirit. This is a wind that rescues, delivers, and sets people free. It is a mighty wind that makes a way out of now way.
Then tongues like fire appear, and rest, individually, on each person in the room. It is a corporate, collective event that is experienced individually and personally. The Spirit is a personal resting. One by one. The Spirit is given to the church, and to each person, one by one.
Then they begin to speak. They have prayed, they have waited, they have received, and now they speak. Not because they have just something to say, but because they have been spoken to.
Outside, Jerusalem is at full festival capacity. Devout Jews from every nation under heaven are in the city for the Festival of Pentecost — and Luke names them. one by one. It’s remarkable that Luke took up so much space to list every place. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete, Arabia. Fifteen far-flung regions. The known world gathered in one place.
And it is a festival, and it is loud.
Yet into all that noise, a hundred and twenty Galilean voices cut through and draw a crowd. Why? Not because they were louder than everything else. Because they were speaking in a language that each person could understand.
Each person hears the great deeds of God in their own language. In their own mother tongue, each of them. They were used to hearing Greek, the language of finance; and Latin, the language of power. But this was the language they were born in, the particular dialect they spoke. The language of their grandmother’s table and their childhood prayers and their earliest memories of God.
Think about what that would have meant. Most of these were diaspora Jews, scattered around the world. Many of them, no doubt, had never heard God’s goodness, and mercy, and power spoken in their own language.
But now, from these Galileans, these rural, provincial, who had no way of knowing all these languages, it was happening.
John Calvin, when he was trying to describe how God speaks to human beings at all, reached for this image. He said that God is like a nurse with an infant. Unable to use grown-up language, a nurse speaks what Calvin called “baby talk” — not because the truth is small, but because we are small before the Truth. The whole movement of the incarnation is God stooping to our level. The Word becoming flesh. God learning our language so thoroughly that God became one of us.
The event of Pentecost is the Spirit continuing that movement. God does not speak in one universal language. God speaks to each person in their own, irreplaceable and utterly particular mother-tongue humanity.
Apple recently released a software update that turned standard AirPods into clinically certified hearing aids. What makes this technology striking is how it works. It doesn’t simply make everything louder because that would only amplify the noise. Instead, it requires a personalized hearing test first. It maps the specific frequencies that your particular ears struggle to receive, and then it selectively boosts only those frequencies while actively dampening the surrounding noise.
The Spirit works something like that. The Spirit helps us to hear the good news in our own language. Not as megaphone that makes the universe louder and more chaotic. The Spirit is precise. She meets each of us at the frequency of our own life, our own losses, our own longings, our own half-formed questions, our own doubtful answers. Because the Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus who became one of us.
When they witness this miracle, the crowd’s reaction is exactly what you would expect. Some are amazed. Some are perplexed. Some ask the obvious question: What does this mean?
And people in the crowd reach for the nearest explanation they can find. They must be drunk.
When God encounters us, the dismissive explanation is always available. When God calls, convicts, blesses, we can always dismiss it. That is far easier than the alternative — which is to acknowledge that something real has happened, that you have actually been addressed, that God is doing something you cannot account for, and to which you must attend.
The question — What does this mean? — is always the more courageous response. It stays in the mystery. It is willing to not know. It keeps the door open to transformation.
At this point, Peter draws himself up and does what Jesus commissioned him to do. He tells them about what God has done in Jesus.
He quotes the prophet Joel: In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on male and female servants, in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.
All flesh. Every boundary that would normally limit access to God is crossed. In the Old Testament, the Spirit was for kings, priests, and prophets — a reserved anointing, not widely distributed. Peter is declaring that age over. The Spirit is now poured lavishly, like water over dry ground, on whoever will receive it – each one who longs for it.
On all flesh. Including old ones who have given up dreaming. Including young ones who too scared to see visions. Including the exhausted and the grieving and those who no longer think God has anything to say to them. The liberating Spirit is poured out on all people.
On Pentecost weekend this year, our nation will pause to mark Memorial Day, and to honor those who gave their lives in this service of this country. At their best, and at our best, they gave their lives for something larger and more noble than themselves. They sacrificed for the freedom of people to choose their own future, for the right of every human being to live into the full dignity of their humanity.
The vision of human flourishing embedded in the ideals of our nation, in its best sense, is not far from the vision of God’s liberating Spirit. The Spirit that is poured out on all flesh — on Parthians and Egyptians and Romans and Cretans, on sons and daughters and servants — is a vision of a common humanity that does not erase differences but honors them in a bond of mutual love. Every person is reached in their own language and welcomed into a new creation that embraces all.
How do we hear the Spirit who is speaking to us? This week I had the opportunity to go hiking with a good friend and two of his friends, up Graybeard in Montreat.
Over the course of 9 miles, the conversation turned to what everyone was doing this summer. I was struck that so many of their plans includes intentional Spirit time.
One person was planning an eight-day silent retreat at a Franciscan monastery. Two of them were taking a multi-generational hiking trip to connect with one another and with grandchildren. Another spoke of sitting regularly in the sanctuary of his church for silent meditation. He said it began as a challenge from the pastor, and at first he thought it was weird. But after doing it he discovered it was a profound blessing.
These are not pastors. They are not super Christians. They are not all retired. These are simply people who are hungry for the Spirit. And they are trying to get to a place where they can hear.
The good news is that the Spirit does not wait for perfect conditions. It does not require an 8-day retreat, though that can help. The Spirit arrived in a crowded city, into the middle of noise and bewilderment and mockery, and spoke to each person in their own language. The Spirit can speak in the 10 minutes of silence before the kids wake up, or in the chaotic rhythm of traffic, or the anxious and distracted waiting of a doctor’s office. The disciples were ready not because they had achieved a spiritual state, but because they were waiting, prayerful, and receptive.
There are many ways to have a waiting and prayerful posture in a world that is rushing and noisy. Silence and solitude are one way. The patient, slow reading of scripture is another, letting the ancient words do their work without rushing to say what they mean. So is service to others, which has a way of emptying us of the ego-noise that makes hearing hard. So is worship itself: showing up week after week, not because every service breaks open the heavens, but because the practice of showing up is its own way of saying, I am here.
Speak to me. Give me a dream. Give me a vision. Give me a hope. Give me a peace. Give me a calling.
The Spirit is still speaking. Still parting waters. Still making a way where there is no way, and forming a people where there was no people. For all people — the ones who have stopped dreaming, the ones who are drowning in noise, the ones who are dismissing her voice.
Preachers don’t always have a word that lands. But the Spirit always speaks in the language of a particular life. God’s faithfulness, God’s goodness, God’s mercy, and God’s promises are spoken to particular people in a language each one can understand.
The question is not whether God has something to say to us.
The question is whether we are listening.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina