Sunday, June 8, 2025, The Day of Pentecost

“Blessed to Have a Tongue”

Psalm 143; Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:23-31

Divine Service III, no Communion

Hymns: #913 “O Holy Spirit, Enter In”; #700 “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”; #811 “O That I Had a Thousand Voices”; #528 “Oh, for A Thousand Tongues to Sing”

Dear Friends in Christ, 

     Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

     I’d like to begin today with all of us praying the Lord’s Prayer together. But as we pray the prayer, I’d like you all to consciously think about your tongue, your teeth, your lips, and your breath as you use them to form the words…

     Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

     How blessed we are to have these wonderful tongues. Other animals and creatures have tongues too; but only humans have the gift of intelligible speech. (Some of us, anyway!) There’s the incredible tongue of the hummingbird, the impossibly long tongue of the giraffe, the sticky tongue of the frog, the water-lapping, friendly tongue of the dog… But only we humans have that blessed combination of breath and tongue and teeth and intellect that allows us to form words, and to speak to one another and make ourselves understood.

     These tongues of ours are a gift from God, yet we’re also free to use them as we will. We can use our tongues to praise God - to speak words of love and kindness and truth, words that soothe and comfort and lift people up - or we can use them to curse and swear and slander and tell lies. St. James says, “Out of the same mouth come praises and cursing; my brothers, this should not be.”

     The Day of Pentecost that we celebrate today is all about tongues, but not so much about the “speaking in tongues” that everyone associates with the day. It’s not so much about the “tongues of fire” that appeared over the disciple’s heads, but about those tongues of theirs that the Holy Spirit touched. It wasn’t about the wind and the fire, but about the fire God lit in the hearts and tongues of those good men. And it’s about the fire He wants to light in you and me.

     The word “Pentecost” means “fifty.” For the Jews, it was called the Feast of Weeks, the Feast God instructed them to celebrate fifty days after the Passover. It was a feast to celebrate the beginning of the harvest season, and a time to pray to the Lord that the rest of the harvest would be blessed. For the first disciples, this Pentecost would mark fifty days after the Resurrection of Jesus, and would mark the beginning of the harvest of the world - which is what Jesus sent His “workers in the harvest field” out into the world to do. And all they were given to accomplish the task was the Word of God, and those blessed tongues of theirs to speak it.

     And Jesus had promised, just before He left them, that He’d send them His Holy Spirit, to touch their tongues and help them to speak. “When you have opportunity to testify,” He told them, “it will not be you speaking, but the Holy Spirit speaking through you.” And here on the Day of Pentecost, that promise was kept.

     Pentecost, so I read, was the best attended of all the Jewish feasts, and drew more pilgrims and visitors to Jerusalem than any other feast. (It was the time of the year when the weather was good and travel was easier). The disciples themselves had come back from Galilee to Jerusalem to be there for the Feast. So the city was crowded and full of people who’d come from everywhere. (I’m certain the Lord had planned it that way).

     So when the Day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one house. (The account in Acts says there were about 120 of them by this time). And “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” It doesn’t say there was an actual violent wind, like a tornado or something. It wasn’t a destructive kind of wind, only the mighty sound of one. (“The Holy Spirit is like the wind,” Jesus had said). 

     And then, “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.” Not physical tongues, but fire with the appearance of a tongue, like a candle flame looks like a tongue. And these tongues of “Holy Spirit fire” divided and came to rest on each of them. (Not just on the eleven disciples, but on all of them). And then, “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” This was the point where the Spirit touched their tongues and enabled them to speak in the language of heaven.

     Can we talk about Genesis 11 for a minute? This story in Genesis takes place sometime after the Great Flood. God had told Noah and his family to “go forth and multiply,” and they were doing just that, rapidly, and spreading out to the east. That Plain of Shinar they found to settle in would come to be known as the land of Babylon.

Everyone in the world still had one language and one common speech. They all spoke the same tongue, which was to their great advantage. (Imagine what we could accomplish in the world today, if there were no language barriers to divide us). Those people put their heads – and their tongues – together, and decided to make bricks.

(That part of the world still has fine clay and bitumen for mortar; they still make bricks there the same way).

     Now the trouble is that those people were still sinners, still people of sinful tongues and sinful inclinations. “Every inclination of his heart is sinful from his earliest youth,” God said about them. They decided, in their pride, to build a city for themselves, and a tower to reach up to heaven, and to name the whole works after themselves. They began to use their hands, and their brains, and their God-given tongues, to defy God, instead of being obedient to Him. As they were multiplying, so was their sin. So God took from them that precious gift of universal language.

     The word Babel means “confusion”, because from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the earth - each scattered group with their own particular language and tongue, each group fearing and mistrusting one another, because they weren’t able to communicate with each other anymore. (The world is in much the same terrible fix today).

     Now, at Pentecost, “there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.” They were all Jews, but all with their different languages and idioms and accents, the Parthians and Elamites and Medes and Cappadocians, all separated into their own different camps. When they heard that Spirit-sound, like a mighty rushing wind, they all came together, bewildered and confounded - because there were the followers of Jesus, speaking in languages everyone there could understand. It was what God had done at Babel, now by some miracle come undone.

     They were asking each other, “Aren’t all these men speaking Galileans? With their Galilean way of talking, and their funny Galilean accents? How is it that each of us hears them in our native tongue, in the language of our birth, declaring the wonders of God?

What does this mean? (That good old Catechism question!)

     Some there made fun of them, as some people will always do, especially when there’s something going on they don’t understand. They accused the apostles of being drunk - which is kind of funny, since alcohol most often has the opposite effect on a tongue.

     I don’t know, by the way, exactly how this miracle worked on the day of Pentecost; only God and the Spirit know. Was the miracle in the tongues of the apostles, that they could suddenly speak in languages they didn’t know? Or was the miracle in the ears of the hearers, that they could suddenly hear a different language and understand it?

Or does it really matter? What really matters is that the “wonders of God” were heard and understood (which is really all that matters still!)

     Peter, using than newly Spirit-filled tongue of his, stood up to try to explain. “We’re not drunk,” Peter told them; “It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what God promised all those years ago by the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days’ (it was the last days at Pentecost, and the days are even “laster” now) ‘I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophecy.’ (To “prophecy” means to receive a message from God, and to tell everyone, with your blessed tongue, “This is what the Lord says.”)

‘Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. On all My servants, both men and women, I will pour out My Spirit in those days, and they will prophecy.’”

     And that prophesying, that telling the Word of God, will go on, with men and woman and all God’s people using their tongues to tell the world about the Lord - until time winds down at last, and the earth is full of blood and fire and billows of smoke at the end of all things, and the sun goes dark and the moon turns to blood, and Jesus comes in glory at last.

     “And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” What does it take to call on the Lord? Only a believing tongue! “Believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, and you will be saved.” To bring the Word of God from your believing heart, and your Spirit-filled tongue, to a waiting ear, is what all of us are here for.

     Jesus said to His disciples, just before He was crucified and raised from the dead and taken back into heaven: “If anyone loves Me, he will obey My teaching.” How is teaching done? With the tongue! The disciples got to hear the wonders of God from the tongue of God’s own holy Son. His own tongue told them that the Father in heaven loved them, and wanted to make a home with them. “All this I have spoken while I was with you,” Jesus told them - knowing a time was coming soon when they wouldn’t see Him anymore.

     So He gave them the promise of Pentecost. “The Counselor, the soul-filling, tongue-touching Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” How? How has the Good News about Jesus been carried into the world for all these years? By the tongues of the prophets and patriarchs and apostles; by the tongues of teachers and preachers and faithful pastors; by these tongues the Spirit has gotten a hold of; and by the voices of people who are willing to use their blessed tongues to praise and glorify God.

     In an on-going, everlasting, holy Pentecost, God has given us back a universal language, the language of grace and hope and peace through the love of Christ - and that’s a language anyone can understand. My prayer is that God will “open our lips to declare His praise,” and that God will open the ears of those who hear us, and open their hearts to understand and believe and be saved.

     Jesus, at the end of today’s Gospel, gives wonderful words of grace to His disciples.

If you’ll take a look with me at verse 27… And as we did with the Lord’s Prayer, let’s read this promise of His together, again while consciously think about our teeth, our lips, our breath, and our God-given tongues, as we use them to form the words: 

     “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

     Father in Heaven, your servant prophet Isaiah says in Isaiah chapter 50: “The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.” O Lord, we ask You to instruct these tongues of ours as well, that we may also speak Your saving Word to the sad and weary people of this world. Morning by morning, help us to listen and be willing to be taught; and day by day, help us to use our tongues to praise Your name, that everyone we know and everyone we meet may call upon Your name and be saved. We pray in Jesus’ name; Amen.