June 8, 2025 – Pentecost
Leviticus 23.15-17, 21-22
Acts 2.1-13
Pentecost Pilgrims
Pentecost
There are three Jewish Holy Days that encourage a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The best-known is Pesach, or Passover, which as we know commemorates the events leading up to the exodus from slavery in Egypt. Jesus’ Last Supper may well have been a Passover meal. Another is Sukkoth, sometimes called “the feast of booths;” it remembers God’s sheltering care during the wilderness years of the exodus. If you drive by a temple or synagogue during Sukkoth you might notice a small shack or shelter in the front yard – this is called a booth, or shelter, and represents that piece of Israel’s history. The third pilgrimage holiday is the least well-known. Shavuot, or “the feast of weeks,” celebrates God’s giving the torah to Moses on Mt Sinai. It is called the feast of weeks because it falls seven weeks, or fifty days after Passover; it was just celebrated last weekend. Shavuot is a harvest festival, and occurs this time of year when the first harvests are taken, as Jennifer described for us from Leviticus.
It was this last pilgrimage holiday, Shavuot/the Feast of Weeks, that brought all those pilgrims to Jerusalem from the places we read and heard about this morning. Pilgrims came from Parthia, Medea, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete and Arabia. Jews from the far corners of the known world gathering in one place for holiday, a high holy day, there on a hilltop in Jerusalem, where God blessed them all with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Our family has done a fair amount of traveling through the years, and it has always been fun to be in another country on a holiday to experience how others celebrate them. One of the most memorable was the 4th of July we spent in Scotland. I wondered how that part of Great Britian would celebrate our Independence Day, if at all. We found a July 4th celebration in a nearby town, it was billed as the “American Independence Day Fête,” and instead of hot dogs, parades and fireworks, it featured highland dancers, a Grampian dog show, a bagpipe ensemble, and, in a typically highlands nod to the colonies, venison burgers. It was delightful, and at age two, my daughter Blythe was all about the pipes. Debbie and I did get fireworks though, more than we bargained for, on the New Year’s Eve we spent on Brazil’s Ipanema Beach. Explosives were everywhere. The beach was packed with people that night, and it seemed like every one of them was lighting and tossing firecrackers and cherry bombs and other incendiaries indiscriminately, things were exploding all around you, and not even the ocean was safe, thanks to a New Year’s ritual of sending out tiny makeshift boats with fireworks on them in order to appease the spirits. Somehow we survived. And I’ve told you before how we once celebrated our anniversary in Paris, which also happened to be Bastille Day, and we allowed ourselves to believe the parades and music and flyovers and yes, more fireworks, were all for us! Granted, these were not pilgrimages per se, although two of them occurred on sabbatical. But like those pilgrims from across the world coming to Jerusalem for Shavuot, we do know what it is like celebrating familiar holidays in unfamiliar places far from home.
But it was not until I took a deeper dive into Pentecost this week, that I paid attention to what brought all those folks to Jerusalem, and to the Feast of Weeks. To me Pentecost has always been more a story about the formation of the church, the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to send the spirit and the admonition we read last week to be Jesus’ witnesses “In Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” But this week I began to notice the symmetry: the crowd on which God’s spirit was poured were already from all Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth – they had come from across the known world to Jerusalem for Shavuot. And after the festival, they returned home. Now does this mean all those Jews suddenly became Christian missionaries when the spirit of God moved among them? No, I don’t think this is the point of the story. Remember, everyone in the story is a Jew at this point. The idea of what it would mean to be Christian would not develop for another fifteen years. Rather, they likely returned home with a new understanding of how God can bring wildly disparate people together, deliver a powerful blessing, and then send them home with a mission and a good story. “You will never believe what we saw during our Shavuot pilgrimage this year!” they likely told family and friends and neighbors, stories about the mighty works and witness of the spirit of the God to whom they had belonged since the days of Abraham. In a way it was a melding of traditions, Jews from Jerusalem being joined by Jews from around the world, remembering the giving of the Torah, celebrating the first harvest, and experiencing God together in a way they hadn’t before.
And this is one of the great things about travel, that when you experience a different culture, whether it is in Alhambra or in Alabama, you return with a different set of experiences and understandings than before you went. This is what that Pentecost moment meant to all those pilgrims visiting Jerusalem from far away. Whatever they gained in the moment the Spirit of God was poured upon them they carried with them back to their homes, their neighborhoods and their communities. When they heard the Judeans speaking, each in their own native language, they knew something powerful and transformative had come over them. They returned home different people than when they arrived.
And here is a bit of not-so-trivial trivia. In biblical Hebrew, the festival is called Shavuot. In New Testament koine Greek, it is called Pentecost.
Now I have a question. How many of you grew up and/or spent most of your lives in Chester? OK, you can tune me out for a moment. To the rest of you, I wonder what it is that brought you to the United Church? Because after a fashion, you too are pilgrims. This bears reflection on a morning we just welcomed five new members, five pilgrims, into our covenant fellowship. Our journeys have taken us many places. At each stop, we have learned a little something, or a lot of something, about ourselves. At each stop, we may have discovered a slightly different way of understanding our place in the world and how it shapes our lives, shapes our faith, shapes who we are, what we do. And I think we carry with us a small bit of each stop along the way, whether it is somewhere we lived or somewhere we’ve traveled, something that makes us more fully ourselves. What I learned last year about the indigenous cultures of Hawai’i, New Zealand and Australia, I will always carry with me, they have to a degree reoriented my understanding of my place in the world. It shades what I bring with me into the pulpit, it shapes the way I understand others, those like me and those unlike me. The stops along our life’s journeys have helped make us the people we are today.
OK – you life-long Chesterites can tune back in, because you too have been on a pilgrimage, which has taken a different, more direct route, and thus has its own shades and contours. But it has been a journey nonetheless that has led you to settle here on our little hilltop, and prepare a place of welcome and worship and wonder to latecomers like myself and all those who have found in the United Church of Chester a faith community where God is alive.
The point is, we know where our pilgrimages have taken us and what they have done for us so far. Where will they lead to next? How will the next person I meet influence my knowledge of myself? Or as the story from Pentecost asks, How will the person I am touch the life of the next person I meet? What will we bring with us as we go out into Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth? And how much of this is because of what the Spirit has poured into me, and into us? This morning we welcome Sherrie and Elaine and Bill and Nick and Sarah to come along on our shared journey, and offer thanks to God that we are blessed to be on this Pentecost Pilgrimage together.