Emmanuel Lutheran Church

June 2022

As you know, I use this space in a variety of ways: to provide church news, for devotion, for encouragement in faith and for educational purposes to name a few. June 5th is the Day of Pentecost. It is on this day that God chose to pour out the Holy Spirit upon God’s people and we celebrate the “birthday” of Christ’s church. But Pentecost is much older than the church.

Acts 2:1 states “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Pentecost comes from the Greek “Pentekoste (pen-tay-kos-tay)” and means “fiftieth.” In Jewish history, Pentecost is a more modern name for the “Feast of Weeks” that has been celebrated since ancient times. Reference to it can be found in Exodus 34:22 among other places in scripture. It is a festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest.

The Feast of Weeks or “Shavuot” in Hebrew, is celebrated seven weeks after the first evening of Passover, thus fifty days. As Jewish people adopted Greek culture and took up the Greek language, it became known also to them as Pentecost. This day was also associated with the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai (viewed by Israel as God entering into covenant with them) seven weeks after the exodus from Egypt. Shavuot was one of three pilgrim festivals in ancient Israel, thus the “gathering together in one place” on the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2.

Christians have celebrated Pentecost as a festival since the late fourth century, and it comes fifty days after Easter, concluding the Easter season. Acts 2 describes the promised Holy Spirit coming upon those gathered for the Shavuot worship that day as the sound of a rush of violent wind and as tongues of fire resting on each of them. They began to speak in other languages so that all were able to understand.

The significance of this? As God often does, God chose a familiar setting with particular meaning to build upon that understanding and usher in something new. As the people were gathered to celebrate the gift of the law to Moses, an act seen as the establishment of a covenant between God and God’s people sealed by the giving of the ten commandments, God now uses this celebration to establish Christ’s church sealed by the gift of the Spirit. Peter recognizes what is going on as the fulfilment of scripture and testifies to the risen and ascended Jesus as Lord and Messiah in what could be considered the very first Christian sermon.

On this day, after hearing the testimony of Peter to the resurrected and ascended Lord, about three thousand people were baptized and the church was born. Pentecost may not receive as much attention by the masses as Christmas and Easter do, but it is just as significant a holy day, not so much because of the birth of the church, but more so because God kept a promise to pour out upon God’s people the Holy Spirit which (as Martin Luther explains) continues to “call, gather, enlighten, and make holy the whole Christian church on earth and keep it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith.”

Pastor Alan