A Familiar Voice in a Dark Room

Of the many ways to describe what we know as Pentecost, the day when the fire of the Holy Spirit first fell, I think my favorite (when only given one word to do it) is talkative. How better to describe the spectacle– one of the first and one of the many that would come, now that the Helper was present and in full force.

And recently, this has been my question and focus. The Holy Spirit seems to be talkative. So, when he is, what should I be hearing? 

As I am wont to do in these mental dialogues, I approach my logical fallacies first. First on that list is the should of the thing. 

I’m a young adult, but in this walk with Jesus, I’m far younger. My age in years with Jesus parallels the time I’ve spent in the charismatic church space– such a fun way to describe this sect of Christians! I grew up with a church subspecies named after its proximity to England and Anglo-Saxony, and my denominational neighbors in the church after Martin Luther or a renowned inflexibility (not to put too fine a point on it). Now, I find myself in the church equivalent of an unincorporated community of organic, free-range, singers, dancers, and criers. I find that I am more at home than ever.

But not always. Sometimes, as in the day of Pentecost, all in the church (save for me) start speaking in languages I do not understand (be them heavenly or semantic). This experience, outside, but especially inside of the church, is universally isolating. I believe it’s a feeling we know, whether you’re in a charismatic church or another, or no church at all. But that doesn’t make the island any less barren. 

Don’t worry, the blockage isn’t theological or resentful. It’s only my forgetting the nature of the Holy Spirit in me, the verticality of the relationship, rather than the horizontality. 

[In botany, most plants can be sorted into one of two anatomies: they will either grow vertically (as in a vine) or horizontally (as in your lawn outside, or the closest one you can find). Not to get to metaphorical, spiritual, or simplistic, but I’m so glad that we were made to be neither one nor the other, but both.]

Recently, I was reminded of my position in the heavenly family. I’m a son! But on days when that feels dry, the Holy Spirit reminds me that I’m a lamb. Thanks to the beautiful imagery of The Chosen series, I think back to a scene where Jesus stands a way off, enraptured at the sight of a shepherd corralling his sheep; and the sheep are helpless, and Jesus is as moved as he ever lets on. And this I don’t believe was in the series, but with this image I see him saying his words in John 10, that they know the sound of their shepherd’s voice. 

As I feel the surface of the story for meaning– 120 (what would come to be known as) believers all speaking and understanding in their native tongue, and the drunken ruckus of all them sounding off at once– I see many avenues to many conclusions. 

But I, for one, find that with a story like this, I have to take it out of Sunday school. Hold it in my hand and think about how it feels once I’ve rehearsed the words in my head and pictured the Kid’s Illustrated Adventure Bible. I tend to recount the events at the cost of meaning. But here again, I’ve described a scenario from which the Spirit is specially suited to rescue me. 

[1] The tongues of fire give us an image of the Holy Spirit’s nature. The kind of clothes he puts on in the morning. An overarching thematic message in his ministry is that his time on earth was and will be a wedding banquet. But when the bridegroom is taken from the bride, the image we’re given is often nighttime (Acts 2:20), and waiting. And what we’ll need in that waiting is “a new wine” (Acts 2:13) to sustain and a “fire by night, to give [us] light, so that [we] might travel by day and by night.” (Exodus 13:21).  

Waiting, but evidently, not without fire and not without wine.  

[2] I imagine, too, of the room full of believers and languages, and thereby, cultures and understandings. Early in the Abrahamic covenant, the inheritance of being called God’s possession expands from one Father to his son, down generations, but vertically, and slowly (relative to what we see here). The Holy Spirit now says look here in Acts and remember the Son, sent by the Father, and remember his 12, and now look at this room of 120 odd. Only these 120 carry with them a nation. The family expands once more, bringing the inheritance with it, but this time they go out to the ends of the earth (horizontal relationship) with less a pillar of fire and more a one that burns inside the chest and occasionally above the head (vertical relationship). 

[3] Last, this picture at Pentecost is a room packed-full, with, somehow, me fitting in the shoulder-to-shoulders. In my spirit I see myself speaking, and relieved to be speaking and understanding in my own language. There I am, encountering a Holy Spirit that in this moment demonstrates that He is “no respecter of persons” (Romans 2:11). I tend, with this story, to look at the facade, the surface layer, and to look at the Holy Spirit’s utility. (Make no mistake, the Holy Spirit isn’t known as Helper for no reason.) But so much of his beauty, too, is in all that he can do in the process of layering. What I mean is, the message amongst one another was obvious and vocal: we are not separated by the things we used to be, be it the spirituality of the law or the practicality of language. And even now, as I stand in that image, the Holy Spirit tells me too, in a packed-full room of expectant believers is this, Henry, we can talk now. I am also the closer of distance, not just between you and humankind, but between you and I. I speak your language.

Acts 2 was a bringing together of what was separated, what was physical in language and proximity, and spiritual (and everything else) in relationship. Distances, as felt in chasms between human relationships in a church building, and/or between us and our Father, evaporate like dew in an instant when that breath fills the room “like a mighty rushing wind” (Acts 2:2).

So when I sit in the front or the back row of a church, or on my own knees in the secret place, fully-filled or frustrated with what feels like distance or a no-answer, there’s a new word He’s reminding me with. I come to you as I come to you. When I fell on Pentecost, I said in every voice and every language, that the distance is not for you to close anymore. I am as near as the breath, and I am the Breath.

Henry Erickson is a writer by trade and by calling. His love of the craft comes, as most do, from good teachers, and his love to tell stories, from his dad. After studying English at Abilene Christian University, he and his wife moved to Boston, MA, where they serve in a church, and he writes in times between. 

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