Fire in Our Bones: What Pentecost Still Burns Into Us
It didn’t arrive with warning. There were no trumpets or processions, no dignified robes, no prelude or call to worship. Pentecost descended like a storm through an open window, wild and disobedient to structure. Wind that couldn’t be charted. Fire that didn’t consume but kindled. Language erupting from throats untrained. No one was ready for it. No one was in control.
And that’s exactly the point.
This is not a gentle commemoration. Pentecost isn’t polite. It is not a holiday for the spiritually timid. It is the day the Spirit tore through fear like a curtain ripped from top to bottom, scattering the Church into being with force and holy disarray. It’s the day everything changed and nothing could go back to how it was.
The Original Pentecost Wasn’t Christian
Long before tongues of fire danced on the heads of Galilean fishermen, Pentecost already held sacred ground. The Jewish festival of Shavuot—also called the Feast of Weeks—was observed fifty days after Passover, a harvest festival that had evolved to also commemorate the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. A double feast: fruit of the earth and fruit of divine wisdom.
This wasn’t an incidental backdrop. God chose the day deliberately. Because the God who gives bread in the wilderness and instruction on the mountain doesn’t discard the old covenants but fulfills them with fire and breath.
On that festival day in Jerusalem, devout Jews from all over the known world gathered—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Egypt, Libya, Rome. They spoke different languages. They carried different customs. They worshiped the same God, but not in the same ways. Jerusalem was teeming with tension and translation.
And that’s where God plants the flag for this new movement. Not in the safe space of cultural homogeneity. Not in the upper room where the disciples might have been tempted to stay. But in the public square, in the middle of theological diversity, in the middle of the crowd.
The Spirit doesn’t just speak. The Spirit speaks into difference—and doesn’t erase it.
Don’t Call It a Birthday Party
The Church has often nicknamed Pentecost the “birthday of the Church.” And while the phrase has a certain usefulness, it risks domesticating what happened. Pentecost is no toddler’s party with cake and polite applause. Pentecost is a jailbreak.
Before Pentecost, the followers of Jesus were a fragile remnant. Confused. Still afraid of the authorities. Still unsure what resurrection meant, unsure what to do next. The Ascension had come and gone, and they had been told to wait—but waiting can rot the soul if you don’t know what you’re waiting for.
Then, suddenly—Acts says this word with intention—the heavens break open.
Not with divine vengeance, not with thunder and condemnation, but with Spirit. With breath. With life. With disruptive speech and impossible fire. And just like that, the people of God are no longer an idea. They are a body.
This wasn’t a doctrinal debate. It wasn’t a committee report. It wasn’t a theological treatise on ecclesiology. The Church began with people transformed—people made bold, made multilingual, made mobile. Not an institution, but an eruption.
Spirit and Speech: The Theology of Breath
What happened at Pentecost is more than a spiritual high. It is a theological revolution.
When the Spirit descends, the first gift is not comfort. It is language. And not a heavenly, angelic language—earthly ones. Human ones. Languages of empire and trade, of the colonized and the conquerors alike.
This is critical. God doesn’t ask the people to learn a new language to hear the Gospel. God speaks to them in their own. It is divine accommodation. It is incarnational communication. And it is radical.
The Church is not called to preserve a single cultural form of the Gospel. We are called to speak into the world as it is, in the language of the people, in the dialects of pain and protest, of hope and hunger. The Spirit doesn’t demand translation. The Spirit is translation.
And the medium is the message: the Church was born speaking.
We were not born to be silent.
The Subversive Power of “All Flesh”
Peter’s impromptu sermon on Pentecost quotes Joel: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” Not some. Not a chosen few. All.
This is dangerous. It’s an announcement of divine egalitarianism. The Spirit will not be rationed by gender, age, status, or nationality. Sons and daughters will prophesy. The young will see visions. The old will dream dreams. Even the enslaved—the ones considered voiceless and disposable—will speak for God.
It is a direct challenge to every hierarchy humanity has constructed. A divine dismantling of patriarchal privilege. A slap in the face to clerical elitism. A disruption of any system that says only certain people get to carry the Word.
If your theology leaves someone out, Pentecost will burn it down.
If your church policies silence the dreamers, the Spirit will find a microphone elsewhere.
If your ecclesiology can’t make room for the foreigner, the poor, the queer, the neurodivergent, the traumatized, the ones who smell like cigarettes and carry eviction notices in their pockets—the Spirit will bypass you.
Because the Spirit has already decided: all flesh.
What Pentecost Demands from Trinity, Moundsville
At Trinity Episcopal Church, we wear red on Pentecost. It’s tradition. But the real question is this: do we burn?
Do we let the Spirit interrupt us? Or do we treat Pentecost like liturgical pageantry, fire extinguished by form?
Are we open to the wildness of God, or are we too in love with being decent and orderly?
Pentecost didn’t come to make us feel spiritual. It came to send us. To scatter us like seeds into this town, this region, this hurting world. It came to break the doors off the church and push us into the streets.
Are we listening to the new languages the Spirit is speaking through our neighbors? Through those who don’t walk through our red doors but are preaching good news with their lives? Through addicts in recovery who testify to resurrection every day? Through kids who haven’t learned shame yet, and ask holy questions? Through people who’ve been told by other churches that they are too much or not enough?
God is still speaking. And not just in English. Not just in proper grammar. Not just from pulpits.
So Now What?
If we take Pentecost seriously, then we stop asking, “How do we keep our church alive?” and start asking, “What is the Spirit birthing among us?”
We stop worrying about preservation and start chasing presence.
We stop fearing decline and start welcoming disruption.
Because here’s the truth Pentecost will not let us ignore: a church afraid of change has already lost the Spirit.
But a church that trusts the Spirit to blow where it will—to set fire to our comfort, to call new prophets, to resurrect old bones—is a church that will not die.
We don’t need more strategy. We need more wind.
We don’t need more marketing. We need more fire.
We don’t need more consensus. We need more courage.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Don’t whisper. Roar.
Don’t politely suggest. Command.
Don’t knock. Break in.
Let Trinity Church be a furnace.
Let Moundsville hear the crackle of prophecy.
Let our mouths catch flame.
Let our lives translate grace in every language love knows how to speak.
And when the people ask, “What does this mean?”
let us answer, not with slogans or safe answers,
but with bold lives and burning hearts.
Amen. And amen again.