**sermon art: Pentecost by Mark Wiggin

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on May 24, 2026

[sermon begins after two Bible readings; see the other two at the end of the sermon]

John 20:19-23 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹ Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²² When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Acts 2:1-12 When the day of Pentecost had come, [the apostles] were all together in one place. ² And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
⁵ Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷ Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹ Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹² All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³ But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
¹⁴ But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵ Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶ No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
¹⁷ ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
¹⁸ Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy.
¹⁹ And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
²⁰ The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
²¹ Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ ”

[sermon begins]

Three weeks ago, it was standing room only in The Basilica-Cathedral of Our Lady of Altagracia, known by the locals as Basílica Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia. Omar, our cabbie, had dropped me off at mass and took Rob and the Trussell sprouts to the local market. The first Sunday of the month is a pilgrimage day, so Dominicans came from all over the country. Cars, vans, and coach buses filled the parking lot. Amid the heat and humidity, I stood packed in the sanctuary entrance, sharing air with the folks who’d also missed out on getting a seat among the over 3,000 of us there. My Spanish is as rudimentary as it is earnest, but the liturgy was comforting and familiar. Some of the responses I was able to say in broken Spanish and the rest of it I quietly spoke in English when I could tell where we were.

Very few times in my life has my skin color not been the main one in the group around me. I can count those situations on two hands, including my high school that was 89% Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). During the Basilica mass, I saw two other people that looked like me. Mostly, I was left to my own thoughts and experience except for during the sharing of the peace—el compartir la paz. The elderly gentleman in front of me turned, took my upper arms as I held his elbows and we said, “Paz.” His friends then shared it with me, clasping my arms and I theirs. Turning to my right, the young people and I did the same. I was moved to tears during this timeless, intimate ritual of reconciliation and Christian friendship as we shared Christ’s peace.

In John’s gospel, Jesus announced peace to his friends and showed them his wounds on his hands and his side. They rejoiced as had the women at the tomb who were the first witnesses of the resurrection. There was a lot to be relieved and happy about. Jesus was alive! Then he gave them the Spirit in a deeply intimate exchange of breath.

The disciples were locked in a room in Jerusalem in the three days after their friend and teacher was executed on a cross. Of course, they were afraid and hiding, not knowing who to trust. Jesus showed up in the midst of their fear. We all know what it’s like to feel afraid as the disciples did. Some of us more than others feel the fear of letting go of this life. Some of us feel the fear of political events beyond our control and wonder who to trust. Some of us feel fear closer to home as we simply survive. It’s into this fear and the way that it holds us captive that Jesus announces his peace and breathes the Spirit into us to send us out in peace. He said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus simultaneously comforts with a word of peace and challenges as he sends them on their way to serve others as he served in his earthly ministry.

The John reading is as intimate and personal as the Acts reading is wondrous and communal while both stories are extraordinary experiences of the Spirit. In Acts, the first century church received the Spirit in a blaze of glory. The long list of peoples pronounced for us during the reading spoke languages from lands across the Mediterranean Sea, east of the Caspian Sea, and south of the Persian Gulf. Places we know today as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Spirit of Jesus poured out in a new way over this multiethnic group of folks without regard for position and rank.[1] The Spirit moved through the young, the old, the men, the women, and the slaves. The Spirit lit them up with prophesies, visions, and dreams.

No wonder other people thought they were drunk. Pentecost fire had a moment with the people and left them changed to become the church they were sent to be. They are part of who we are because we exist as a congregation, a small corner of God’s whole church, the meaning of the church catholic with a little “c.” But their ecstatic moment was not forever. Their euphoria and wonder quieted.

Life in the faith became challenging almost immediately as the twists and turns of history subdued their Pentecostal fervor through the twists and turns of history. But, for a moment, there was an experience of unity that amazed and perplexed the people. They heard their own language and couldn’t fathom how it could be, so they wrote it off as drunken babble. And then Peter began to preach.

Preaching is an act that has little to do with the preacher and everything to do with the Holy Spirit – a stark and humbling truth for a preacher. Many a preacher has had the experience of people hearing something in the sermon that the preacher didn’t say but was something that that person dearly needed to hear. Lutheran Christians believe that through preaching the Holy Spirit calls us by the gospel, the good news of Jesus, and fills us with faith. I had that experience through the words of a preacher and the power of the Holy Spirit. I was amazed and perplexed week after week hearing about grace, forgiveness, mercy, beauty, and hope while receiving faith through that same preaching. The message of being unconditionally beloved and created good as the first act of God was new to my adult ears. That God’s breath of the Spirit created wonder and life and, as we heard in the Psalm today, even joy as the Leviathan of the sea sported in chaos of the deep.[2]

God does not leave us swirling in the chaos but brings us to new life – to the life of the Spirit’s imagination and, thankfully, not our own. Often, what we can imagine fits into specific limits of good and bad, order and chaos, black and white, and so on. What we can imagine is limited by the languages we speak and the kinds of people we know. From those limits we make decisions both conscious and unconscious about how we think the world works.

Someone who is fluent in eight different languages recently said that when you speak another language you are a slightly different version of yourself in that language because language strongly impacts our thinking and interactions. It’s astonishing to watch as we did our daughter’s bilingual fluency in Spanish. She was our translator in the Dominican Republic. Watching someone respond to her with either relief or respect as she crossed the barrier of language, culture, and thinking, added to my own experience of how language works across difference. And led me to wonder what it means to understand and be understood as a feature of the gospel by the power of the Spirit.

Thankfully, the Spirit blows through our assumptions and sends us into the world with something different. We’re sent as specific individuals with what makes us ourselves and we’re sent with something quite global that is deeper than color, culture, or protocol and builds multiethnic community unified by the Spirit over and against the uniformity of our limited experience. Unity is not uniform. As on the first Pentecost, unity functions through difference to amaze and perplex us as well as to challenge our assumptions about meaning by pausing long enough to ask the question, “What does this mean?” More than an academic question, this is a faithful question to ask ourselves.

The earliest Christians were led by the Holy Spirit to cross culturally defined boundaries including ethnicities. Their experience makes we wonder how we attain fluencies to be aware of ourselves and others so that channels are opened between us. This isn’t about learning Spanish. Although by all means go for it. This is about the Spirit opening us to an understanding greater than ourselves for the good of each other and for the sake of the world. Ecstatic experience of the Spirit inspires and deepens our peace to encounter the other as connected to us by the gospel and love of God. May the Spirit fill us with the fire of faith as we share Christ’s peace among us and as we’re sent out to do the same. Alleluia and amen.

_________________________________________________

[1] Matthew Skinner, Professor of New Testament, Luther Seminary. Sermon Brainwave for Pentecost, May 31, 2020. https://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=1267

[2] Rolf Jacobson, Professor of Old Testament, Luther Seminary. Sermon Brainwave for Pentecost, May 31, 2020. https://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=1267

____________________________________________________

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
²⁵ There is the sea, great and wide;
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
²⁶ There go the ships
and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.
²⁷ These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
²⁸ when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
²⁹ When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
³⁰ When you send forth your spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.
³¹ May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
³² who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke.
³³ I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
³⁴ May my meditation be pleasing to him,
for I rejoice in the Lord.
³⁵ Let sinners be consumed from the earth,
and let the wicked be no more.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Praise the Lord!

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13