We pick up this Pentecost story not in Acts, with tongues of fire, but centuries earlier, at an inflection point during the Exodus.
Moses has led the people from slavery in Egypt out into the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, and, almost from the start, things go wrong. The people grow restless with their travels. They complain to Moses about the lack of food and even begin pining for the creature comforts they left behind in Egypt. And so, famously, God sends manna to the people, described as a kind of flaky substance that appears on the ground in the morning with the dew. The people are instructed to take just enough to eat for the day and trust that more will be there tomorrow. They’re learning new rhythms, trusting that God will provide day after day, after day.
But it’s not enough. They grow tired of the manna and demand meat. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic,” they say, just a few verses before. Now all they have is this manna—manna that means literally in Hebrew, “What is this?”
I.
And at this point, Moses has had enough. His frustration begins to boil over, and, Man of God that he is, he does what we all should hope to do in those circumstances: he turns not on the people, but to God. “Listen,” he says to God, “why have you laid this burden at my feet? I can’t carry all these people alone.”
And God agrees. You’re right, God says. This is too much for you to bear alone. Go gather 70 elders from among the people in the tent of meeting, and I will come down and talk with you all there. And when I do, I will take some of my Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they will bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.
So that’s what Moses does. He gathers the 70 elders and brings them together, and God comes down in a cloud of smoke and takes some of the Spirit that, to that point, had been just on Moses, and puts it upon all of them. This special gift of presence, power, and responsibility has now been dispersed among this group of leaders.
But of course, when it comes to the Spirit, things are never so predictable. We’re told that two other men had remained in the camp, Eldad and Medad, and that even though they had not gathered with the others at that special tent of meeting, the place where Moses and God would commune, the Spirit had nonetheless fallen on them too, which apparently was cause for alarm.
Word comes that these two are filled with the Spirit, prophesying back at the camp, and Joshua, Moses’ right-hand man who would one day take his place and lead the people into the Promised Land, is concerned. He tells Moses to stop them, but Moses isn’t having it. He responds to his young, jumpy apprentice: “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Spirit would rest on all of them.”
II.
This curious and layered story suggests a few important things to us on this Pentecost Sunday, when we remember the gift of the Spirit to the disciples and all those gathered in Jerusalem, and celebrate the continued gift of the Spirit in the church.
First, we’re given a beautiful, if understated, example of what spiritual leadership looks like in the figure of Moses. Moses is the biblical definition of what we might call “charismatic leadership.”1 The words charismatic and charisma come from the Greek word charis, which means gift. It refers to that certain something, that spark that sets them apart, that draws people to them. “They have a gift,” we say.
But while charisma can mobilize people toward a cause, it does not always translate neatly into effectiveness. History is littered with leaders whose outward gifts were not matched with inward depth, and people suffer because of it.
Not so with Moses. Where others might respond to this distress and anxiety by lashing out or consolidating power, Moses asks for help. He knows he can’t bear the burden alone. He shares this Spirit he’s been blessed with freely, and when it moves, spreads, and spills over in ways that make others in the leadership structure nervous, Moses remains secure. He’s secure in himself and his place in the community, and trusts in God’s presence and action among them. But most of all, he knows what is so easy to forget, which is that this Spirit doesn’t belong to him.
The same is true for us in the church. We’re reminded in this story from the Exodus that the Pentecost story in Acts wasn’t the first time God gave the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit is attested to throughout scripture and has moved among God’s people since the beginning. The opening chapter of Genesis tells us how the Spirit hovered over the primordial waters of creation, separating them to create dry land and separating light from dark—it was the breath God used to speak the words that called creation into being.
The Spirit existed long before the disciples gathered in Jerusalem that day, which means the Holy Spirit doesn’t belong exclusively to the church. This is a lesson the fledgling church will learn later in Acts, when, lo and behold, the Spirit starts falling even on Gentiles—something the scriptures and their tradition had said was impossible. But the Spirit said otherwise. We don’t get to decide who has it or doesn’t, who it falls on or who is touched by it, or who speaks from it or works within it, because the Spirit doesn’t belong to us. We’re asked only to pay attention to it when it moves, and to be open to following where it leads.
And we’re also reminded in this story that this kind of freedom of the Spirit to move has always been hard for the people of God to accept.
We want a little Spirit, but not too much. We want to have God’s presence among us, but in a certain way. We want to be sure of when it’s coming, to whom it’s going, and what it looks like. And when it seems to come from places and people beyond what we might expect, we get concerned.
I remember years ago, one morning during worship at the church I came to you from, whose worship and approach are very similar to Northminster’s, we had a guest. She was a college student, new to town, who had come with one of our members, and whose home church was very different than ours in style and expression. She sat there through the service, and stood when everyone stood, sat when they sat, bowed her head, and so forth. And then about halfway through the service, she leaned over to the person who’d brought her and said, “When does the Spirit show up?”
She might still be waiting!
Other than Moses, it seems just about everyone out in the wilderness was concerned that the Spirit was falling willy-nilly on people outside of those officially authorized. When the young man comes to alert Moses and the elders gathered as to what was happening, saying, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp,” in Hebrew it literally says they’re “playing the prophet.” Which I think captures the tone, here. “Who do they think they are? Playing the prophet like that.”
How many people, through the generations of the church and still today, have been dismissed in this way? Those who have felt the Spirit of God rest on them, and have offered themselves to serve God’s people, only to be told their claim is illegitimate or uninformed? That they’re merely “playing the prophet.”
Pentecost is the church’s annual celebration of God’s gift of the Spirit among us. But it’s also our annual reminder that we don’t get to decide where and on whom it lands. It’s when we remember that God loves to complicate our conventions, and that, when it comes to the Spirit and where we look for truth, insight, and wisdom, we should not be surprised or resistant when these things come from unexpected places and unforeseen people. It’s our annual reminder that God is always looking to widen our circle.
Remember, the miracle that morning in Jerusalem wasn’t that everyone suddenly spoke the same language. The miracle was that they all suddenly heard other people speaking in their own language. The gift that morning was not new speech as much as it was new hearing, new understanding. The Spirit doesn’t flatten their differences but reveals the common language of God within them; the language of love, grace, and mercy, which turns out to be our mother tongue.
Since the beginning, the people of God have embodied an image of God that is more complete the more people the Spirit lands on, and the more open we are to hearing the Spirit speaking through others. This is how the children of Israel made a way from slavery to freedom, and it’s how the church was born. It’s how we continue to live, learn, and grow.
III.
I remembered another story from our church in Macon this week, told to me by Ruth Rowell, one of our saints there. It was from a series of conversations the church took up decades ago about the question of whether to ordain women as deacons. On the final Wednesday night just before the congregational vote, there was time for open discussion, with microphones placed around the room. Ruth had brought her children’s choir down to the fellowship hall to listen and participate in the discussion, knowing that at least a few of them had been baptized and were full, voting members of the church. As it turned out, one of them, young Walter Hill, who must have been in the 5th or 6th grade, walked up to a microphone, unprompted, and to the surprise of his parents and his choir director.
He also happened to be in the Sunday school class that Ruth taught, and after collecting himself and looking out over the congregation gathered that evening, he shared that the class had recently memorized a verse from the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where it says that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” And then he quietly walked away from the microphone and took his seat.
Ruth said the room was quiet as they all absorbed the witness they had received—the Spirit spilling over among them. Not much later, the vote was taken, and the old practice of not considering women for deacon leadership was changed by a decisive, though far from unanimous, vote.
IV.
O, that all God’s people would prophecy, Moses says to Joshua and the others there at the tent of meeting, and anyone else through history who needs to hear it—he says to us whenever we might worry about what it would mean for this kind of truth-telling to be on the loose.
O, that all God’s people offer what they have to reveal what God’s future looks like, in all its complexity, all its texture, all its fullness—a truth and a future that is too big for one voice or a couple of voices, or anything short of all voices to proclaim.
O, that we all would bear this holy, joyful burden of being God’s people in the world. Hallelujah! Amen.
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1 Thomas B. Dozeman’s notes on this passage in The New Interpreters Commentary were helpful.