Most of us — a lot of us, anyway — don’t like surprises. We like our days, our weeks, our months, our lives planned out and going according to that plan. This is especially true when the plan is working and our lives are going well. And this is most especially true in church. After all, “But we’ve always done it this way!” is a phrase that was coined as a mocking, sarcastic description of the expected reaction whenever someone suggests change in the church.

            However! What this passage tells us is that a major component of discipleship — that around which church is expected to center its life — is the expectation, if not the anticipation, of change. We are called here to live in the expectation that there will be times when the Spirit will — figuratively or, who knows, maybe even literally — blow through our meeting place like a violent wind, lighting us up with tongues of fire and giving us whole new languages: tongues we don’t know, with which to speak of God’s deeds of power to people we don’t know, who will possibly think we are drunk.

The way it was and wasn’t

            This is the way it both was and was not for those first disciples and apostles, on that first Pentecost a couple thousand years ago.

            It’s how it was: after all, the sound like a violent wind, the tongues of fire, the new languages — all that is more or less what actually happened. We’ve got the report right here in front of us.

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