On the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, everything was amazing.

During a perfectly ordinary prayer meeting, people heard the sound of a train engine, which would have told them that there was a tornado, if they had known what a train sounded like. Instead, they sat still and the sound of the wind filled the room. No wind, just that overwhelming sound. Then fire appeared and spread, not in sheets of flame but into individual, personalized candle flames. The pieces of flame didn’t follow the path of least resistance, jumping from lamp to papyrus to wood. Instead, as if each piece knew where a person was, flames formed only above people like halos in a medieval painting. And then everyone began to talk, which makes sense, but the words were in different languages. For each person it was as if someone was giving them the words to say and the phonetic pronunciation for those words.

The loud noise attracted a crowd, like subwoofers turned way up are wont to do, though no one knew what subwoofers sounded like. These people who gathered were not from Jerusalem, they were from everywhere Judaism had spread. They spoke enough Greek or Aramaic to get by, but when they wanted to be private, when they wanted to be at home, they spoke the language of birth, the language of their heart.

And on this day, from the house at the center of the train-engine noise, all of these people heard people talking in their heart language. At the same time.

It is amusing that the first reaction on this birth day of the church was to assume that Peter and the rest of the gathered followers of Jesus were drunk. What else would explain the babbling? Perhaps other than a Spirit-inspired undoing of Babel.

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