6/6/6: visions and dreams

While the media lapped up a meaningless numerological coincidence, a truly important holiday in Christendom again passed by unheralded this week. Some fifty days after Easter Sunday, on the liturgical calendar, falls the Feast of the Pentecost. The Pentecost is, in some ways, more historically significant than Easter. The myth of the Pentecost is in so many ways Christianity’s major contribution to the world’s religions. And that is appropriate, because the Pentecost is one of the few areas where Christianity acknowledges a connection to the world.

On the day of the Pentecost, the scriptures tell us, the apostles were gathered all together. They suddenly heard a sound like a West Texas wind that filled the whole house. They saw visions of tongues of fire which came to rest on each of them, and that was when they began to speak in tongues.

As they so spoke, a crowd began to gather. In a kind of reverse Diaspora, Jews from “every nation under heaven” happened to be staying in Jerusalem and all heard apostles speaking in his or her own language. Some cynics assumed the obvious: they must be drunk. Peter, however, explained to the gathered crowd that the apostles couldn’t be drunk because it was only nine in the morning. And the apostles were usually sober at least until noon.

Then, as the Church was born, just before three thousand people were baptized into the new faith, Peter made a grotesque and fateful mistake. It was the same mistake that Joachim of Fiore would later make, that John Nelson Darby would make, that Hal Lindsey would make, that Tim LaHaye would make, and that countless sandwich-boarded Christians would similarly make over and over again, down through the long centuries. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter misinterpreted Biblical prophecy to mean that the world was about to end, anydaynow. He quoted Joel, the prophet, in full apocalyptic mode:

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. ¹⁸Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. ¹⁹I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. ²⁰The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. ²¹And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. (Acts 2)

Peter had been chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be “the rock” on which the church would be built, and J.C.H. must’ve been talking about this speech and the baptism of these three thousand, because Peter did precious little else. Instead, it would fall to Paul—who only met Jesus in a strange dream on the road to Damascus—to write most of the last part of the New Testament and carry Christianity to the world. Paul—despite the many problems I along with many modern Christians have with him—understood the true meaning of the Pentecost.

Here is what fundamentalists don’t get, when they rant about Darwin and fixate on Genesis: much of their beloved Old Testament was inverted by the New. Not simply overturned: inverted. And here’s an example. The Pentecost myth directly inverts the Old Testament myth of the Tower of Babel. In the old myth the peoples of the earth were scattered, their languages made incomprehensible to one another. In the new myth, all the children of God are reunited.

Here is what so-called Pentecostals don’t get when they “speak in tongues” and handle snakes. It ain’t about faith, it’s about communication. The original tongue-speaking enabled disparate people to hear and understand. It wasn’t random and incomprehensible babbling.

And here is what no one seems to get. What even Peter failed to understand while it was happening. At the birth of the church, Christianity was a universal religion. It wasn’t an exclusionary club for right-wing Republicans. The difficult and confusing (and not entirely monotheistic) concept of the Trinity lies at the core of the faith. God the father represents the old-school, rules-driven, for-Hebrews-only, religion of the Old Testament. Jesus, the son, is a transitory figure who took us from the letter of the Law to the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a net-neutral, connecting pipeline that communicates and unifies with infinite bandwidth.

The last words that Jesus said to the apostles included the admonition that “no man knows” the day or hour of the End of the World. But he did specifically tell them to await the Holy Spirit—and that implicit promise was fulfilled at the Pentecost. Await, if you want, some silly Rapture attended by Kirk Cameron. Dream your dreams of cars crashing as fundies float away into the blue sky. And have a bloody nice Nero Day.

But if there is any hope— and there may not be— of rescuing Christianity from the right-wing zealots who have kidnapped it and perverted it and misunderstood its message, that hope lies in the Pentecost.

spacedark