The Day the Wind Came Inside

For ten days after the cloud took Jesus, his friends stayed in Jerusalem and did what he had told them to do. "The Holy Spirit is coming to you," Jesus had said, "in just a few days." So they waited.

They prayed together. They chose a man named Matthias to take the place Judas had left empty, so that there were twelve apostles again. And they waited some more. Then came the feast of Pentecost, and the city filled up with visitors. (Pentecost means "fiftieth." It came fifty days after the Passover when Jesus died, at the time of the wheat harvest, and Jewish families travelled from all over the world to keep it in Jerusalem.) That morning Jesus' friends were all together in one house.

Suddenly a sound came down from heaven, like a mighty wind roaring across the sky. It did not stay outside. It filled the whole house where they were sitting, every room, floor to rafters.

Then they saw something like fire. Flames appeared, split apart, and came to rest on each one of them, a flame over every head.

Every one of them was filled with the Holy Spirit. They opened their mouths and began to speak in other languages, words they had never learned, as the Spirit gave them the words to say.

The roar had carried out into the streets. People came running from every direction until a crowd was packed around the house, and then they stopped and stared, because every one of them could understand what those men were saying.

"Aren't these men all from Galilee?" someone asked. (Galilee was fishing and farming country. Its people knew nets and goats, not the languages of faraway kingdoms.) "Then how can every one of us hear them speaking the words of our own home?"

A grandmother from Libya heard God praised in the words she used to sing to her babies. A trader from Arabia heard his own desert language.

There were Parthians and Medes and Elamites. There were people from Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, Pontus and Phrygia and Pamphylia, from Libya and Crete and Arabia. (Pamphylia sounds like something you would order for dessert, but it was a real place by the sea.) Each one heard the good news in the language of his own home.

"They are telling the great things God has done," the people said, "in our own words!"

"What does this mean?" they asked one another.

But some in the crowd only laughed. "Oh, they've had too much wine!"

(Wine has made plenty of people talk nonsense. It has never once taught a fisherman to speak Arabic.)

Peter was already making his way out to the crowd. He knew exactly what it meant, and he was about to tell them.

Nobody in that crowd ever saw the wind. They only heard it. Jesus had once told a teacher named Nicodemus that God's Spirit is like that. "The wind blows wherever it wants," he said. "You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going."

Now his friends knew exactly where this wind had come from. Jesus had gone up into the cloud, but he had promised, "I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you." From his Father's side he had kept that promise, and sent his own Spirit to live inside them.

The wind did not stay in that house. It went out through the door with them, and it is blowing still. Each time someone comes to belong to Jesus, his Spirit comes to live inside that person too, just as he promised, and not one of his friends is left an orphan.