The Day the Wind Came Inside

Acts 2:1-13

Upstairs in a house in Jerusalem, behind a door with the bolt pulled across it, Jesus' friends sat together and waited. He had gone back to heaven. The room felt too big now, and too still, and nobody knew quite what to say. They only knew they felt small, and a little afraid, and they missed him so much it hurt.

But before he left, Jesus had made them a promise.

"I will not leave you all alone," he said. "I am going to send you a Helper. Just wait for him."

So they waited. Morning came, and then another morning, and then the feast day called Pentecost.

Then a sound came. Far away at first, then closer, then everywhere at once, a sound like a great rushing wind, and it did not stay outside the window. It came in through the walls and filled the house, every corner of it, every breath.

And little flames appeared, soft and bright, like tiny lights, and one came to rest on each person in the room. Every head. Every heart. The shy ones and the bold ones, all the same.

It was the Spirit of God.

The very same Spirit who had been with Jesus, the one who came down on him at the river, gentle as a dove. Now that same Spirit filled his whole frightened family and warmed them from the inside out.

Long before, a prophet named Joel had written down what God said he would do one day. I will pour out my Spirit on everyone, God said, on sons and daughters, on old men and on servant girls. That day had come at last, in an upstairs room, to a handful of people nobody important had ever heard of.

Then the door opened.

The friends who had been hiding came pouring out into the street, and their fear had gone out of them. They began to tell about Jesus, loud and glad. As they spoke, people from faraway lands stood in the crowd, and each one heard the words in his own language. The way his own mother said them. The way home sounded.

Every person heard "God loves you" in the words closest to his heart.

The crowd was amazed. "How can this be?" they asked. "These are ordinary people. How do we each understand them?" Some of them did not understand at all, and they laughed, and said the friends had had too much wine.

What they were really watching was God keeping his word. Jesus said he would send the Helper, and he sent him. He always does what he says. The room that had felt so empty was suddenly full, full of wind and fire and the nearness of God, and those friends would never be alone again.

That was the day the family began to grow. From one small room the good news went out into the street, and it has been walking ever since, gathering people in, language by language, heart by heart, until none are missing.

The Spirit who came through that door has not left. He is still gathering, still saying, in the words closest to your own heart, "You are mine, and what I have begun in you I will surely finish."

And out in that street stood travelers from Egypt and Rome and Arabia, standing very still, hearing home in a stranger's mouth. Turn the page and hear what they heard.