May 24, 2026 - Pentecost Sunday: The Sovereign God of Creation is Speaking - Is the Church Listening?

May 24, 2026Pentecost Sunday
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Acts 2:1-13 and Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b
The Sovereign God of Creation is Speaking –
Is the Church Listening?
Deborah Krause, Eden Theological Seminary


Move 1 Origin Stories – More Benchmarks than History
Anniversaries and holidays are often anchored with stories of how it all began. Anthropologists call these “origin stories.” For marriages we focus on the stories of how we met, the day we were married. For holidays and festivals, we focus on stories that mark how this special day bears character, qualities, events, and details that mark it distinctively as the beginning of our family, organization, community, or nation.

In my family, my parent’s wedding day is a great example of an origin story. My mom and dad were married at Summit United Presbyterian Church in Mt. Airy PA, outside of Philadelphia on a Friday afternoon, June 13, 1952. The distinctive element of that day, other than being Friday 13, which held my mother’s verve both to tempt fate and look for a bargain in the reception hall fee, was that it poured rain all day – a non-stop gully washer. Those seemingly gloomy details, Friday the 13th and rain, in my family lore were not used to cast a pall over my parent’s marriage, which went on to create four children, 7 grandchildren, and lasted for 64 years, up until my father’s death, but to illumine my parent’s charmed ability to always turn a frown upside down, and enjoy life, and more so at a bargain, even when the sun wasn’t shining.
 
Origin stories, more than a record of beginnings, bear the values, commitments, and virtues of what they commemorate. In telling the story of how we began, we are grounded in our shared identity and purpose.

Pentecost Sunday is an annual festival of the church. It too has an origin story.

Move 2 – Church’s Origins as told by Luke in Acts 2 informed by Ps 104
Unlike the story of Jesus’ birth for which the gospels of Matthew and Luke give us different origin stories, the New Testament writings record only one distinctive story of the origin of the church. That story is found in Luke’s second volume to his Gospel, a writing we call the Acts of the Apostles.

As an origin story, Luke’s commemoration of the birth of the church is highly programmatic. None of its features are merely accidents of history – they are iconic elements of ecclesiology – that outline Luke’s particular theology of the church.

Firstly, Luke grounds his story of the birth of the church in the celebration of Pentecost – the Jewish festival commemorating another origin story about the giving of the Law to Moses and Israel on Mt. Sinai 50 days following Passover. In this beginning, Luke defines that the church is tied to the larger story of the sovereign God of creation and the people of Israel. In this, Luke casts the origins of the church as a part of God’s larger creative and redemptive work in the world. As the Psalmist in Ps. 104 celebrates, the Lord is the creator of all and provider of all resources for living. Luke is bold to imagine that the church in its mission is an agent of this very same redemptive and creative work of God.

Secondly, Luke casts the story of the birth of the church in Jerusalem on Pentecost as a global event. Yes, the event itself happens in Jerusalem on the festival of Pentecost, but Luke highlights in an extensive list of geographical regions how that celebration has assembled Jewish people of the diaspora from all over what Luke and other ancient writers would have considered the world. As such, the festival of Pentecost in Jerusalem as recounted by Luke sets the stage for an event of global impact that takes place among a gathered people assembled in one place.

With all these significant elements in place, the stage is set in Luke’s origin story for the sovereign God of all creation to reveal God’s self. This is what Biblical scholars call a theophany – a sonic, visual, multi-sensory immersive experience in which God is specially and powerfully present.

The Pentecost story is not the only theophany in the Bible. Think of Moses’ call at the burning bush, the liberation of Israel from Pharoah at the parting of the Red Sea, the tearing of the curtain of the temple from top to bottom at Jesus’
crucifixion. You get the picture. Theophanies are stories not only steeped in dramatic events, but also in the significance of God’s presence and purpose.

After Luke has established the revelatory nature of the Pentecost story – the theophany plays out.

• From heaven there comes a sound, like a rush of violent wind – filling the space where the people are gathered. 
• Then, divided tongues of fire appear among and above the people gathered.
• Finally, the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in other languages (in other words, in languages not their own) as the Spirit gives them the ability. 

To underscore the miraculous nature of the story– Luke, illumining the global character of the event, enumerates just who is present. The regions, ethnicities, and nationalities might sound like a checklist: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phyrgia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Crete, Arabia – but what these geographical touch points dramatize is nothing short of a cartographical compass rose -- North, South, East, West -- of what for Luke would be a map of the entire world.

According to Luke, Jewish people are gathered in Jerusalem from all over the world. Jesus’ followers – the disciples (now become apostles) are also Jewish residents of Galilee. How would they be able to communicate with people across so many cultures and languages? And yet, as the crowd exclaims, “in our own languages, we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

The theophany, so intentionally described by Luke, is an event of the sovereign God of creation, in the power of the Holy Spirit, communicating universally across differences of language, culture, nation, and ethnicity.

The church, according to Luke, is born from an event in which all the barriers of division in the world dissolve and everyone, despite our differences, can join in a common hearing and understanding of the sovereign God of creation’s deeds of power.

Move 3 – A Story about Speaking or Listening?
Historically, the church in retelling the story of Pentecost has focused on the element of language and speaking.

Visual Art of the story – understandably – emphasizes the confounding specter of the tongues of fire. Educational materials have picked up on this. Sunday School curricula have resourced crafts for making tongues of fire headbands, although no Sunday School instructor ever has felt sufficiently prepared to explain to children, let alone adults, exactly what a tongue of fire is or what it means.

If we attend closely to Luke’s telling, however, the visual elements of fire and the dramatic elements of multiple languages are not really the focus of the story. Instead, Luke emphasizes the elements of hearing and listening. In the text he employs verbs and nouns related to hearing and listening twice as many times as those related to language and speaking.

Understood this way, the miracle of Pentecost is not about speaking in different tongues. The miracle of Pentecost is about people of diverse cultures and countries all hearing one another, each in their respective languages. Pentecost, according to Luke, is a miracle of listening and a miracle of shared understanding across all that divides us.

Move 4 – The Difference between a talking church and a listening church
According to Luke’s origin story of Pentecost, the Church was born to listen and understand, overcoming divisions of nationality, language, and culture to be a diverse but unified agent of God’s redemptive work in the world.

Think of it, if the church in the power of the Holy Spirit could truly live into this calling, just what a powerful agent of God’s mission of love in Jesus Christ we could be!

The problem is – we in the church have largely missed the memo. We have been quick to take up the work of proclaiming and professing, which of course is part of our purpose, but have too often neglected the call to listen and hear.

What this neglect begins to look like is local congregations more invested in our practices of worship, fellowship, and the maintenance of our buildings than we are in our community engagement and mission. We focus on rehearsing our story and confessing our creeds, but miss the work of listening to God’s people in our communities. Our theological schools have focused on the formation of preachers and teachers but have neglected skills in community leadership and mission.

What this also looks like are national denominations more ordered toward conserving our forms, structures, and resources and less committed to global ecumenical and interfaith partnerships in mission.

A glaring illustration of this can be seen in the 2025 decision in the national structures of the PCUSA to drastically cut global mission workers – thereby dramatically reducing our capacity to listen for testimony to God’s redemptive work as it is happening in different parts of the world. In light of Acts 2, this decision seems to be a reckless dereliction of our calling to be a globally engaged and listening church. As General Assembly approaches this summer in Milwaukee, let us pray for the discernment of our delegates in their deliberation of stewarding our denomination’s resources to be faithful to who God has called the church in the power of the Holy Spirit to be in the world.

Move 5 – Re-engaging our Origin Story – Becoming God’s Listening church in the world
As we celebrate the story of Pentecost today, and as we embark upon the season following Pentecost, Luke’s origin story grounds the church to our calling – to be a diverse and globally engaged community listening for testimonies of God’s deeds of power in the world.

As we focus on this posture of being a listening agent of God’s redemptive work, we have a powerful model of how to move in the world – the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ. Jesus, who moved across boundaries of class, caste, nationality, ethnicity, ability, and gender,  as an agent of God’s redemptive work by listening with compassion -- to the woman who had a hemorrhage from whom he heard her whole story, and the Samaritan woman whom he engaged in dialogue about her life,  by hearing the anguished cries of the Gerasene Demoniac who was cast aside among the tombs, by listening to the sadness of the rich man devoted more to his belongings than to God, and to the anger and grief of his dear friend Mary when her brother Lazarus died.

God has given the church this listening and compassionate Jesus to follow.

Our world, much like Luke’s world, and Jesus’ world before it is one crying out for the compassion of God. The gift and challenge of Pentecost as Luke tells the story of its origin, is that we – the church in the Holy Spirit, following in the ministry and faith of Jesus Christ, are called to be bearers of God’s compassion in the world. We are called to listen for testimonies of God’s presence in the stories of those we meet in the world – across differences of identity, age, nationality, class, ethnicity, and culture.

The promise of Pentecost is that as we do so we are nothing less than agents of God’s redemptive work in the world.

For this high calling and for this holy purpose, let the church say, thanks be to God! Amen!