Pentecost Never Happened

by

Elevate the Discourse | June 4, 2025

I’m going to say the quiet part out loud:

Pentecost, as it is described in Acts 2, didn’t happen.

It’s not a journalist’s account of a 1st-century miracle. It’s not history in the way we mean when we say, “This really happened.” It is, instead, a parable told in the language of miracle, a story burning with metaphor. Like most good metaphors, it was never meant to reassure. It was meant to unsettle.

We have tried, year after year, to tame Pentecost. We’ve dressed it in liturgical red and assigned it to one Sunday in late spring. We’ve read it with calm voices: the mighty wind, fire tongues, and sudden linguistic fluency. We’ve listened to scripture readers butcher the names of the many nationalities gathered in Jerusalem. We’ve turned it into a therapy hour, a “check-in” moment emphasizing listening and mutual understanding. Everyone gets to hear each other’s truth. We’ve said, “Wasn’t that beautiful? God helping us understand one another.”

This is not what Pentecost is about.

Pentecost is not a tidy story about divine communication. It is an allegory of confusion, a holy, disorienting metaphor for what it means to encounter the Spirit of God in a world of difference.

In the original story, what the people experienced was not clarity. It was astonishment. Dissonance. “How is it that we hear these Galileans speaking in our languages?” the crowd asks. Some marvel. Some mock. Some accuse them of being drunk. (If the disciples were drunk, it wasn’t from the Holy Spirit.)

This is not a moment of calm comprehension. It’s a narrative upheaval that resembles Babel more than any multicultural utopia.

Maybe that’s the point.

Pentecost is Babel again, but this time, God doesn't scatter. God stays in the confusion. God speaks through it. The Spirit doesn’t smooth over the divisions. She ignites them.

The language, noise, clashing accents, and untranslatable phrases are the message. It’s a metaphor for the Church’s real work: learning to live among voices we do not understand, in cultures we have not mastered, and within stories that do not center us.

We want Pentecost to be about unity. But what if it’s about dislocation?

We want it to be about spiritual fluency. But what if it’s about losing our bearings?

We want it to be a miracle we can preach about with clarity and control. But what if the miracle is that God speaks in ways we cannot contain?

The Church has misread Pentecost because we’ve insisted on treating it like a miracle of understanding. The real miracle is that people stayed in the confusion long enough to hear something holy in the noise. Not a clear message. Not a perfect translation. Instead, they heard something divine and bewildering. When was the last time our churches embraced “bewildering” and “confusing” as aspects of our mission and ministry?

Reading Pentecost as a parable becomes far more potent than a one-time historical event. It becomes a way of living in a fractured, multilingual world.

The fire still falls. The wind still blows. The voices still rise in languages we don’t speak. Our task is not to master them, but to be mastered by them. We want to be changed by our listening.

Pentecost wasn’t a Spirit-inspired press conference. It was not.

Pentecost is an allegory for what it means to be the Church in the world: confused, outnumbered, interrupted by other people’s languages, humbled by the limits of our own, and called to stay in the dissonance long enough to be transformed.

The Spirit doesn’t make us fluent. The Spirit makes us faithful.

Faithful enough to sit in the noise.

Faithful enough to learn slowly.

Faithful enough to stop needing everything to be clear before we believe it is sacred.

The Spirit still falls. The fire still burns. Voices are still rising.

Our job is not to master the noise. Our job is to be mastered by it.

*If this reflection spoke to you or challenged you, I’d love to hear how the idea of Pentecost lives in your story. What does it mean to stand in the presence of a God who speaks in voices you don’t understand? Leave a comment or share this with someone who’s learning how to listen in a new tongue.

The Rev. Richard Bryant is an elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his Substack blog, Elevate the Discourse.