Scripture: Acts 2:1-21
I want to ask you to bear with me for a bit today, because I want to take a little time to talk about some things that will seem rather distant from us here at Sojourners and unrelated to anything we are about. I don’t usually like to do this, because it feels a bit more like a speech or a lecture as opposed to a sermon, but I’m moved to do this anyway today, and I do have some reasons for doing it, and I do intend to connect this back to us eventually this morning, so as I say please bear with me.
On April 18, 1906, a hundred years ago, San Francisco was struck by a major earthquake. Many of you are probably aware of this anniversary because, if you weren’t already aware, there have been a number of reminders around in the last few months, various news stories recalling the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake. But that is not what I want to talk about this morning.
Just a few days earlier, April 9, 1906 a man at a worship service in East Los Angeles suddenly began to make noises that seemed like he was speaking in some other language, but not an earthly language, a strange spiritual language, the language of the holy spirit. People who heard him understood that he had received the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues, a gift that people believed the apostles had received on the day of Pentecost that is described in the Bible in the second chapter of Acts that we heard this morning. “They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the spirit gave them utterance.” This man was not the first person ever to have spoken in tongues since the Biblical times, but soon in Los Angeles in 1906 other people were receiving the same gift, including the pastor who was leading these services, a man named William Seymour, and the word spread and the small services that had been held in a house had to move to a nearby church and the crowds got larger and larger, and some people saw this outbreak of speaking in tongues as a sign that the last days were arriving, and then the San Francisco earthquake came, which seemed to some people like another, rather dramatic, sign from God, and for that and other reasons the crowds got much larger, and what became known as the Azusa Street revival lasted for three years, attracting a thousand or more people to services that were held in very humble surroundings, not your typical mega-church of recent years, in what had once been an AME church but then had been used as a livery stable. By the time the revival was through many thousands had passed through this poor neighborhood of Los Angeles, had experienced the Pentecostal fire, knew what it was like to speak in tongues, or be around those who did, and took the experience back to their own churches or started new ones. It is generally considered the beginning of the modern Pentecostal movement in the United States, and just a few weeks ago, in April, many thousands of people again came to East Los Angeles to observe the anniversary. The original building on Azusa St. is no longer there, but people came anyway to celebrate the origins of their movement. But other than Pentecostals, fewer people may be aware of this anniversary because there have been fewer stories about it, I think, but there have been some, and I at least wanted to mention it on this day of Pentecost. The Azusa Street revival was also a kind of an earthquake in the Christian world, and the Pentecostal movement is now a major force in the United States and even more in other parts of the world—Africa and Latin America especially. It is a movement, it is true, that has given us Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson, but it is a movement that also includes hundereds of millions of other Christians, and it seems right to acknowledge them, which is one reason I bring all this up today. On this day of Pentecost, it seems right to acknowledge this important event in the modern Pentecostal movement, the 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival, and thereby to acknowledge our Pentecostal sisters and brothers, for better or for worse, for better and for worse, as is the case with most of us, as part of the Christian family.
But now let me tell this story again in a slightly different way. The way I just told you the story is pretty much the way I remember first reading about the Azusa Street revival and it’s role in the beginnings of the Pentecostal movement. I later learned that there were a lot of things left out in that way of telling the story so let me try it again.
William Seymour, the man who led the Azusa Street revival, the hero of the story, was an African American man, the son of former slaves, who was not highly educated but who became a minister in a group called the Church of God, which didn’t demand that its ministers be highly educated. The Church of God was a movement that in its early years emphasized a strict code of Christian behavior, but not just that you weren’t supposed to dance or drink but that if you were a true Christian, your behavior would reflect that everyone was a child of God. In a time when segregation ruled the day, the Church of God created interracial churches, an almost unheard of thing. William Seymour traveled on behalf of the Church of God, trying to spread its message throughout the country, and in the course of his travels he ran across a man, name of Charles Parham, who was attracting something of a following by teaching about the possibility and necessity of Christians speaking in tongues. Seymour heard about this and was intrigued by it and decided to enroll in a ten week training session for evangelists that Parham was conducting. Charles Parham was white and was unambiguously a bigot. When Seymour arrived, Parham allowed as how Seymour could probably learn something from him, Parham, but he would not consider having an integrated classroom. He would leave the door open so Seymour could sit outside the room and listen to what was going on inside—but not participate or even see. Parham may have talked a lot about the holy spirit during his training. There may have even been some occasions when he or others spoke in tongues. I have no hesitance in saying that whatever else may have happened there, the holy spirit, the real holy spirit, was nowhere to be found.
But Seymour stayed, and listened. And eventually became convinced himself that there was such a thing as a baptism of the holy spirit and that the sign of being baptized in the spirit was to speak in tongues and that Christians should be praying to receive this gift. He left the service of the Church of God, was invited to Los Angeles by some friends where he started a house church. It was in one of those worship services, in a house in a poor, black section of Los Angeles, in a worship service made up equally of white and black worshipers, at a time when such gatherings had to be held underground as it were, it was in this setting that the man I referred to earlier had the experience of speaking in tongues. In a few days Seymour himself spoke in tongues, and in a few more days the revival was in full swing. They worshiped in the round in makeshift surroundings. And “they” consistently consisted of about equal numbers of blacks and whites as well as significant numbers of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans. Seymour was at the center of it, and he recruited men and women from all ethnic groups to be additional leaders. I don’t have any trouble thinking of what happened as a miracle, but miraculous not because people spoke in tongues or because of the reports of faith healings. For three years men and women, black, white, red, and brown came together on an equal footing in an environment where in the rest of the culture segregation ruled the day and white supremacy was taken for granted. Because of that, I don’t have any trouble thinking of Azusa Street as a miracle.
But racism is never far away. No doubt racism was present in subtle ways at Azusa Street all along, but there was an incident that signaled what was happening. Seymour went out of town and when he came back he found that one of the white leaders had left to form his own church, an all white Pentecostal church, and had taken hundreds of white worshipers with him. They may have taken people with them. They may have taken the practice of speaking in tongues with them. They may have still worshiped with lots of spirited singing and clapping and dancing, but they didn’t take anything of the Holy Spirit with them. And gradually the Pentecostal movement became just another racially divided part of American society.
There is one more part of the story I have to add. After the revival started to wane, and more and more white people went off to start all white churches, Seymour continued to pastor the church he had started on Azusa Street. It gradually became an all black church, not because it intended to be but because fewer and fewer white people stuck around. Seymour eventually found himself on the outs with other leaders of the Pentecostal movement because he came to believe that speaking in tongues was not after all such a great sign of the Holy Spirit. He had seen people speaking in tongues who also spoke the language of bigotry. He had seen people destroy what he considered to be the real Pentecostal movement but continue to speak in tongues. He came to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit must be about something else and something more. For that he was shunned by many others in the movement.
Well, I’ve spent a good bit of time talking about something that happened a hundred years ago and that has to do with a branch of Christianity very different from us. As I say, I wouldn’t ordinarily do this. It’s our job to attend to our own spiritual life, not someone else’s. But as I have been reading about the Azusa Street anniversary recently, I found that as distant as those events are from me, they were also speaking to me.
They spoke to me again of the persistence and pervasiveness of racism in this country, something we should not forget and cannot pretend was only present 100 years ago.
They spoke to me very clearly about how people misunderstood the Holy Spirit—and how we may misunderstand the Holy Spirit. They thought it was all about speaking in tongues and healing and excitement. But that wasn’t it. To the extent the Holy Spirit was present it was present in the breaking down of barriers between people, all kinds of barriers. And when white people walked out, it was a mortal blow to the Holy Spirit on Azusa Street. People identified the Holy Spirit with the wrong things.
And I am not immune, we are not immune, from doing the same. As much as I ought to know better, and as much as I do know better, and as often as I have preached about this in different ways at different times, I can still fall in to thinking about the social justice dimension of our life on the one hand and the spiritual dimension of our life on the other hand, how we need to strike a balance between the two, not emphasize one at the expense of the other. It’s not just that you need both, or that the two approaches belong together, or that they complement one another. It’s that that whole way of thinking in wrong, wrong, wrong, all wrong. If we look for evidence of the Holy Spirit in the fervency or frequency of our prayer life, in the liveliness of our worship, or in the quiet warmth of something that makes us feel close to God, we are looking in the wrong place, just as surely as people who identified the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues and not with the breaking down of barriers between people. Sometimes you need to look at someone else to discover something about yourself. It is easy for us mainline Protestants who have been known to celebrate Pentecost by wearing red or putting a red tablecloth on the communion table, it’s easy for us to say that speaking in tongues is no special sign of the Holy Spirit, but that’s not what I want to say. What I want to say is that neither is fervent prayer, lively worship, or warm feelings any special sign of the Holy Spirit, with social justice being something different altogether. The Holy Spirit is all about social justice and the breaking down of barriers. It is all about that. The rest is a minor matter.
Of course the passage in Acts actually says that. It talks about speaking not in ways that no one can understand but in ways that miraculously people can understand, people speaking each others languages so that the barriers between them begin to break down. It is also what Paul speaks of in First Corinthians 13. I copped my sermon title from the first verse of that passage that is famous for being read at weddings. “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” I don’t want to say that this passage should not be read at weddings or that it can’t be read as a kind of an ode to love. But Paul wasn’t really writing just for people getting married. He was speaking to situations in churches, and could have been writing to Azusa Street or to Sojourners. And it’s not a celebration of romantic love. It is in a very real way a social justice text. You can do all sorts of so-called spiritual things, he says, but if you don’t have love, then all those spiritual things don’t amount to very much. And I should add that when he says this he does not mean that you should say your prayers with love in your heart as opposed to just repeating words. That may be true, but that’s not all Paul is aiming for. He’s aiming for a loving world, not just a bunch of loving hearts.
The language of angels I believe is language that speaks of a new creation where all people are recognized and respected as children of God. Where that language is spoken, the Holy Spirit is present. On this Pentecost I rededicate myself to speaking that language as best I am able. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 4, 2006