Tongues of fireside, in all places. In this loud and furious age, a time of protests and counter-protests, words come burning, singeing, scalding, stinging.
“Everyone ought to be quick to listen, slow to talk and slow to turn into indignant,” James wrote, “because human anger doesn’t produce the righteousness that God desires” (1:19–20). But few of us—even those of us who follow Christ—appear to consider that listening greater than we speak could possibly meet the truth of as of late.
We give into the temptation of “considering the times require using the tools of the enemy,” as Michael Wear says in The Spirit of Our Politics. We justify our tongues of fireside as “just the way in which you play the sport,” disregarding our trail of destruction—great forests put to waste by the sparks from our lips (3:5–8).
Of course, there’s nothing recent under the sun. Rage travels more quickly by gigahertz than messenger, but our era shouldn’t be uniquely chaotic or tumultuous. The church has lived through worse, not least the harmful early days after Christ’s resurrection and ascension.
“[I’ve] been jailed … beaten up more times than I can count, and at death’s door time after time,” recounted the apostle Paul of his ministry in that point. “I’ve been flogged five times with the Jews’ thirty-nine lashes, beaten by Roman rods thrice, pummeled with rocks once. … I’ve needed to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I’ve been in danger in town, in danger within the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I believed were my brothers” (2 Cor. 11:23–27, MSG).
That was the cultural moment wherein the Holy Spirit had come to the disciples in Acts 2 and unleashed a special form of fiery tongue upon the world—one which brought connection, edification, and clarity as an alternative of division, destruction, and confusion. This is the spiritual inheritance we remember and have fun on Pentecost Sunday. And it’s an inheritance we want to understand anew, for our moment is just as desperate for these gracious tongues of fireside and the miracle of understanding that attended them.
In the churches of my youth, any discussion of the “rushing mighty wind” (Acts 2:2, KJV) blowing into that room of gathered disciples focused on tongues in a single sense or one other. At my charismatic youth group, church elders—believing within the second blessing or second baptism of the Holy Spirit—said teens couldn’t serve on the youth leadership team if we didn’t speak in a glossolalia prayer language, also called tongues. (I didn’t.)
Meanwhile, the decidedly not charismatic church I attended on Sunday mornings didn’t talk concerning the Holy Spirit much in any respect. We made Pentecost a pleasant memory, turning the Holy Spirit’s appearance right into a museum exhibit complete with Renaissance-style art of dainty flames dancing over calm, saintly heads. Maybe things were somewhat strange in those early days, but we were orderly. Reasonable. Normal and predictable. (This interpretation had the added perk of soothing my ego, reassuring me that I wasn’t less spiritual than my youth group peers.)
Despite their very different conclusions, each churches began with the identical query: How can we make sense of Pentecost’s miracle of the tongue? The focus was so singular that it wasn’t until maturity that I learned there was a second miracle at Pentecost: Alongside the miracle of the tongue was the miracle of the ear.
In a world beset with the confusion of Babel, God sent his Spirit to revive mutual understanding. Pentecost Sunday marks a miracle of listening as much as a miracle of speaking. And in our day—when everyone seems to be shouting and nobody is listening, after we know rather more of James’s blistering tongues of fireside than the healing tongues from Acts—Pentecost’s miracle of reciprocal communication is what a scorched world needs the church to embody once more.
In The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb, a small book on leadership in multicultural contexts published in 1993, the Chinese-American Episcopalian priest Eric H. F. Law unpacks this “miracle of communication” by framing the Acts 2 account with the social, economic, and political power dynamics of the day.
In Acts 2, Law writes, we see two groups of individuals gathered. The first is the disciples, mostly fishermen and laborers from Galilee—roughnecks and rednecks, we would say today, with country accents in addition. As we learn later in Acts, early Christian leaders like Peter and John were known to Jewish elders and scribes to be “uneducated and untrained” (Acts 4:13, NASB), while to the Roman occupiers, Law says, they “were just one other sect of Judaism whose leader had been executed.”
The second group is a big gathering of “God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). Relative to the disciples, lots of these people were members of the Jewish elite. Some had managed to make very long and expensive journeys to Jerusalem. Probably some were Sadducees, the religious aristocrats with seats on the Sanhedrin council, political influence, and connections to powerful people within the Roman government. Some may even have joined in demanding that Pilate crucify Jesus just a number of weeks before.
In short, Law argues, this second group could have made trouble for followers of Jesus, and maybe a few of them already had. Yet it’s to this group that the Holy Spirit gave “the gift of listening and understanding despite the fact that what was said by the disciples was in one other language.” Not everyone in the gang looked as if it would accept the gift—some thought the disciples were drunk, in spite of everything (v. 13)—but many did understand and were amazed at what they heard (v. 7).
At Pentecost, “God selected the silly things of the world to shame the sensible” and brought “righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:27–30). The weak, ignorant, and powerless were understood by the strong, educated, and powerful. The unusual way of the world was upended by Christ’s upside-down kingdom. The Spirit’s tongues of fireside brought illumination, not harm.
Where can we—American evangelicals—find ourselves on this story today? Are we powerful or powerless? That query is complicated by aspects of race, education, and sophistication, and it’s central to so lots of our culture war battles, as the identical behaviors and fears play very in a different way in the event that they come from an embattled minority quite than a paranoid majority.
My own background is white, rural, and working-class. Today my husband and I are solidly middle-class, but I used to be the primary person in my family to go to school—and I barely fumbled my way there, neglecting to join the SAT because I didn’t understand its importance for admissions. My hometown isn’t Galilee, nevertheless it’s arguably an American equivalent.
Most people I do know and love are white working-class evangelicals carving out a life in dying towns, attempting to imagine what future their children have in hollowed-out communities. None of them feel privileged or powerful, but all of them resent being told they’re. And depending in your news source, these people—my people—are either aggrieved, forgotten, and rightfully resentful or ignorant puppet fascists who pose an existential threat to American democracy.
Those dueling characterizations are, partially, a communication problem. We talk and talk but don’t listen, and because of this we don’t understand each other, even throughout the church. We name others’ sins and fall silent about our own (Matt. 7:3). We ignore the complex nuances at play in others’ communities and return bitterness for bitterness, joining the chorus of clanging cymbals (1 Cor. 13:1).
This is the stifling space wherein the church needs a fresh wind from the Holy Spirit. We must repent of all of the ways we’ve turn into “a church that fears the facility of cultural and political circumstances greater than it fears the facility of God,” as Wear contends. And we must ask God to assist us, by the Spirit, seek each miracles of Pentecost.
This is what our moment requires of us—and that’s true whether we most easily see ourselves because the Galileans or their more sophisticated hearers. I think I’m not alone in seeing myself in each groups: In some situations, considerable advantage is afforded to me by the colour of my skin or the sound of my speech; and in others, I’m a rustic bumpkin unsure of the best way to navigate the halls of power. But in every case, I’m a follower of Jesus, and my identity is present in him, in humble submission to Christ’s call to contemplate others more highly than myself (Phil. 2:3). In every case, I’m to hope for God to present me what I would like.
I feel that’s true for all of us followers of Jesus. Sometimes we want the gift of the tongue: a resolve that empowers us to face where we want to face, resist what we must resist, and say what must be said. But sometimes we want the gift of the ear, as God asks us to settle down, listen, and tame our tongues.
Sometimes we’ll have power. Sometimes we’ll have none. Sometimes we’ll be in need. Sometimes we’ll have plenty. Sometimes we’ll be privileged and revered. Sometimes we’ll be reviled and scorned. Sometimes we are going to must defend what we hold dear. Sometimes we are going to must lay down our lives. But in all seasons, we could have the Holy Spirit, at all times wanting to work in and thru us to supply the righteousness that God desires.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
