Acts 2:1-21
Drunk on the Spirit
James Sledge June
4, 2017 – Pentecost
How
many of you have ever seen someone speak in tongues? If so, I’m guessing it
probably wasn’t at a Presbyterian church. I’ve only seen it once. I was
visiting a service with a group of other seminary students. It was a huge
service, with hundreds of worshipers, and it happened a good ways away from me.
To my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like an odd combination of worship
hand-waving and a seizure. I couldn’t hear it well, but what I could was
unintelligible.
When
the subject of speaking in tongues comes up in the New Testament, it usually
speaks of something similar to what I saw. There’s even a technical name for it,
glossolalia, from the Greek words for
“tongue” and “speak.”
You
could attend hundreds of Presbyterian churches and never see anyone speak in
tongues or do anything labeled Pentecostal. For me, Pentecost has little to do
with the glossolalia version of speaking in tongues. It’s about our reading
from the book of Acts, where tongues instead refers to speaking in other
languages.
This
is a version of Pentecostal that a Presbyterian can handle. The Spirit gives
the disciples abilities they hadn’t had before. I’m perfectly fine with being
Pentecostal if it means the Spirit unearths some previously unknown talent. I’m
happy with the idea of the Spirit empowering us to do things we didn’t know we
were capable of. I could be that sort of Pentecostal. Thank you, Luke, or
whoever writes the book of Acts, for giving us this tamer, more palatable
version of speaking in tongues.
But
there is something odd in the story. After telling us that people from all over
could hear the disciples speaking in their native languages and that everyone
was amazed, the story adds, But others sneered and said, “They are
filled with new wine.” Even Peter seems
to accept that reasonable people might think the disciples are drunk. His
defense is, “We may look drunk, but hey, it’s only nine in the morning.”