Unholy Sh+t: when God did that thing with his tongue

When I was a teenager, my mom drove us down from Nashville to Pensacola to visit my grandmother, but there was a special event she was excited to take as to: the Brownsville Revival. We arrived at the massive church to join the line, hoping to make it into the main sanctuary and not the overflow tent with the projector screens.

After finally being ushered in, we took our seats. I was full of faith and hope that maybe, just maybe, God might meet us here and all our troubles would go away. Could God give us a house or my dad a good job? Just about anything would have bolstered my belief; I wasn’t greedy or being specific.

Toward the end of the service, different ministers walked around laying hands on folks. Almost instantly, upon being touched, people would fall over with laughter and smiles, presumably being filled with the Holy Spirit. I wanted to be happy; maybe the minister would touch my forehead and give me some of this joy. As he approached me, I could feel his clammy hand on my forehead, and I just waited for the happiness to flow through me.

It didn’t. Nothing happened. I wasn’t falling over.

Slowly, I could feel him giving me just a little push. Not enough to knock me over unwillingly but just enough to encourage me to. Now, the minister and I were locked in a battle of wills. He needed me to fall, and I needed him not to be full of sh+t. Eventually, he won, and I lay there on the ground, not smiling, not filled with joy.

“Well, f+ck this.” I thought. That was the day doubt finally crept into my soul.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Pentecost Sunday

Today’s Reading: John 20:19-23

This is when sh+t starts to get really weird. Now, I understand you might be saying, “Nathan, you are talking about the Bible; the whole damn thing is weird.” And that’s fair, but I think we can agree that some stuff is weirder than others when it comes to the scriptures. Like, the Sermon on the Mount is just some dude teaching a philosophy lesson and is in no way comparable to a burning bush or a guy beating his donkey until it screams at him to stop.

So yeah, there are definitely levels of wild when it comes to the Bible, and Pentecost is definitely one of those moments. It’s also strange on multiple levels. There isn’t just one part of this story that is out of whack, but the whole thing is wholly whack.

First, there is the issue of how many times the Holy Spirit seems to descend upon the apostles. You’ve got the time Jesus, post mortem, sends the Dove down on the disciples while they are in the upper room. Then, after Jesus floats away on a cloud, the apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit again but this time with more pyrotechnics.

There are some notable differences between these two moments in biblical history (I understand that statement might be a bit of an oxymoron to some of y’all, but just go with it).

In the Gospel narrative of the events, the apostles are hiding out because they are afraid that they, too, shall be unalived. Jesus does one of those cool cloaking spells (or apperates, the jury is out on this one), and he appears to the eleven. Jesus is all, “Chill out, my guys. I’m going to send you to do the same work Daddy had me doing.” He then breathes on them. Now, what is particularly unique about this telling of the story is that this is when Jesus gives them the ability to forgive sins. He literally says, “Whatever sins you forgive will be forgiven, and whatever sins you retrain will be retained.”

Now, this is how the Church has gotten around the little issue of two different Pentecost stories, and frankly, it’s actually a pretty good justification as far as they go. The argument has become that this wasn’t a full-on Holy Ghost situation with the whole speaking in tongues and snake handling or whatever. This was the ordination of the eleven to the priesthood. That is why they were given special forgive-y powers and stuff. Yes, they were given this power through the Holy Spirit, but Jesus is saving the big show for later.

This is when everything about everything starts to get weird because Jesus leaves these fishermen-turned-televangelists alone.

Jesus has gone to heaven to build his apartment complex for everyone who likes his posts; the apostles are scared sh+tless, the women are rolling their eyes, and everyone is still just hiding in their bunker, afraid that this is the end of the world. Then, BAM, there is a wind, a loud noise, something that looks like a tongue of fire comes down through the ceiling splitting into a gazillion pieces, and now everyone is speaking in different languages.

There is a lot that happens after this, and we will get to that later, but there is a major takeaway for me from this story that I don’t think gets enough attention.

It doesn’t matter if you are Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Non-Denominational (spicy protestant), or whatever brand or flavor of Christian you are; we’ve all got blood on our hands. From First Ecumenical Council to the Crusades to the Puritans and everything in between and after and whatever else is to come, we’ve done a ton of wrong. Yes, we’ve done some pretty cool things too, I’m sure. There are very few things in life that are all bad, minus like fascism and whoever built the design for the ice cream machine at Mcdonald's. But I think a great deal of the massive f+ck ups that we have made as a religion, splintered as we are, is that we missed the whole goddamn point of Pentecost.

If you are Catholic, you just kind of ignore the whole speaking in tongues things and are all, “We should all feel really guilty about the whole killing Jesus thing, which we technically blame on the Jews, but just in case… we should also feel really bad about it too. Oh, and masturbation is basically like you nailing Jesus to the cross, personally. Confession is on Wednesdays and Sundays.”

Then you’ve got the Baptists who are like, “Well, I’m sure the Holy Spirit had its purpose, but now we have the Bible, and that’s all you need. Just the Bible and this book written by our pastor. Nothing else, other than those two things: the Bible, the pastor's book, and also don’t do gay stuff.”

Finally, you’ve got the Pentecostals with, “I can speak in the language of the angels, and you probably can’t understand what I am saying because you aren’t holy enough, but let me help you out with what Gawwwwd is saying, ‘Give me money.’ Hallelujah!”

Every branch of the Church has evangelized at some point in history. They got into a boat, went somewhere they had no business going, and tried to convert the people to believe in their brand of Jesus, a Jesus who is becoming increasingly more pale and bland and flavorless with each spice we stole and land we conquered and people we enslaved in the name of this divine God. We demanded assimilation to our culture, our god, and our language.

How in the actual f+ck was this the takeaway from Pentecost?

The very first miracle, at the moment that is considered the Birth of the Church, is an astounding thing to everyone who hears it. The book of Acts tells us that people have gathered in Jerusalem from all over the world to celebrate the festival of Shavuot. Every known nation is present, and they are shocked to hear the apostles preaching and teaching, and healing in every language.

God has reversed the curse of the Tower of Babel.

The Great Commission was not for us to go out and conquer lands and obliterated their cultures; we were supposed to speak their language. We were supposed to take the gift of understanding each other as a moment to bring peace on earth. Instead, we turned it into a parlor trick, a gimmick, or ignored it altogether. Society didn’t want peace; it wanted another reason to feel superior. Yet, for a few moments in the history of the Church, we begin to see what Heaven on Earth could have looked like. A community of believers that loved their neighbor, choosing to speak their language instead of demanding conformity, and a Christian Church that was more concerned about making sure everyone was healthy, fed, and had somewhere to sleep at night.

That is the message of Pentecost, not the disciples being sent out into the world to conquer it but them finally getting the courage to step out of hiding to say, in every language and to all nations, “God loves you, I love you, and we’ve got some food over here if any of y’all are hungry.”