Pentecost 2026: Year A – Waiting for Wind – Acts 2:1-21

(This sermon was first preached on Pentecost Sunday at the 8th Street Church, Oklahoma City, OK USA)

Acts 2:1-21

I talked with another pastor this week. She’s brilliant. Earned a doctorate. Is well respected. Capable. Gifted. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Deeply faithful.

The kind of preacher who can hold a room together with intelligence, honesty, and tenderness at the same time.

But she’s tired. Really tired.

She has spent the last several years trying to hold together a congregation filled with very different people.

Some are immigrants and undocumented families living with fear and uncertainty every single day.

Others are white, wealthy, privileged, deeply conservative people whose politics and faith have become almost impossible to separate. Every conversation feels loaded. Every disagreement feels explosive. Every sermon feels dangerous.

After we talked for a while, I sent her a message that simply said, “Is it irony or providence that this weekend is Pentecost?”

Because the story of Pentecost begins with frightened people.

We tend to forget that part because we’ve heard the story before and we tell it every year.

Like the kid who has to hear about his dad’s high school football glory story, so the pastor stands up here and repeats the “when-the-church-was-at-her-best” glory story.

But before any of the wind and fire and preaching and baptisms happen, they are just 120 frightened people sitting in a locked room trying to figure out how to go about their lives.

Jesus has died, risen, and ascended. The faith statement they made was “Jesus is Lord.”

But the reality set in place was this: Rome still rules the world.

The religious leaders are still hostile.

Their lives are at stake.

The disciples are still confused.

And I imagine that is why they were gathered there in hiding.

Peter still has to live with denying Jesus.

Thomas still has questions.

Some of them are probably wondering if their lives are at risk.

So there they are, upstairs, waiting.

Waiting for what?

I don’t think they know for sure.

I’ve been thinking about that room all week.

Luke says they were there praying. What were they praying for? What were they asking God to do?

Protection maybe.

Clarity.

Safety.

Relief.

Maybe they were praying for their old lives back.

Maybe they were praying that Rome would finally leave them alone.

Maybe they were praying for certainty.

I bet there were those in there just pretending to pray.

Because that’s what I do when I don’t know what to ask for.

What do people pray for when the world they trusted is falling apart?

Most Pentecost sermons are fiery and ecstatic, calling and even driving people into some sort of energetic, euphoric response so they can worship God with more fervency and excitement.

But this is not that kind of sermon.

This is not a sermon where I am saying, “Look what happened back then.”

This is a sermon which confesses: we are still waiting for the wind.

Honestly, I wonder if that room feels familiar to anyone else.

We are waiting people.

Trying to pray.

Trying to believe.

Trying to remain open.

Trying not to barricade ourselves emotionally, politically, spiritually.

Many Pentecost sermons accidentally shame people by assuming they should already be “on fire.”

But I think the most pastoral thing I can do today is honor the upper room before trying to rush out into the street.

Because I think many of us know what it feels like to live in locked rooms.

Some of us came in this morning carrying marriages that are cracking under pressure.

Some are carrying loneliness that nobody else knows about.

Some are exhausted from caring for aging parents or sick children.

Some are trying to hold together relationships that feel one hard conversation away from collapse.

Some are carrying addictions and shame.

Some are carrying anger.

Some are carrying fear about the future of this country, fear about the future of the church, fear about the future of their family.

And if I’m honest, I know that Upper Room feeling too.

Lately my own prayers have felt thin. My soul has felt dry. Even after Easter, I’ve had moments where I’ve wondered why prayer feels difficult.

But maybe the most important thing to notice in this story is that before Pentecost became proclamation, it was waiting.

Before there was wind, there was silence.

Before there was boldness, there was fear.

And maybe that matters because some of us are still there.

Maybe we are the 120 before the interruption.

And maybe that’s holy too.

Because maybe the goal of Pentecost is not to make us Spirit-filled heroes.

Maybe the goal is simply to stay in the room long enough to remain open.

Pentecost tells the story of miracles, and we tend to focus on the spectacle.

Wind.

Fire.

Tongues.

And yes, those things matter.

But maybe the bigger miracle is staying, waiting, trusting until God does something new in us, even when the evidence of God’s activity in our lives seems to be the opposite.

What if the miracle is that the Spirit comes not to the triumphant, but to the waiting?

What if God is not angry that we are in the upper room?

What if the miracle of Pentecost begins before the wind?

The first miracle might just be that they stayed together.

Despite failure.

Despite betrayal.

Despite confusion.

And maybe this sort of staying together is itself evidence of grace.

Because perhaps before there was wind, there was simply a people who miraculously had not yet left the room.

And this is a bigger deal than you might think.

In Genesis 11, humanity gathered together and decided to build a tower that reaches to heaven. But listen carefully to why they build it. They said, “Let us build this tower lest we be scattered.”

That’s the key to the whole story.

Fear is driving the project.

They are afraid of vulnerability.

Afraid of dependence.

Afraid of losing identity.

Afraid of scattering.

So they centralize.

Consolidate.

Build upward.

Everyone speaks one language.

Everyone shares one vision.

Everyone participates in the same project.

But have you ever noticed the irony of Babel?

Everyone speaks the same language and still cannot become fully human together.

Because Babel is not fundamentally about a shared language.

It is not about a shared intention.

It is not even about a shared religion.

Babel is about frightened humanity trying to save itself through uniformity and control.

It is humanity constructing an identity rooted in fear.

And we still build Babels all the time.

We build political Babels and ideological Babels and religious Babels.

We build emotional Babels in our relationships.

We build personal Babels in our own hearts.

Anything that helps us feel protected from vulnerability.

Anything that allows us to avoid “the other.”

Anything that helps us feel secure and in control.

And this is what my pastor friend is experiencing.

Fear always pushes us toward tribes.

Fear searches for enemies.

Fear reduces people into categories and labels.

Fear turns neighbors into threats.

Babel is a story about a shared identity, whether that be linguistic, ethnic, nationalistic, or political.

And maybe that’s why Pentecost matters so much right now.

Because we need to realize our identity is shared humanity.

Because when the Spirit comes in Acts 2, God does not reverse Babel by making everybody the same again.

God does the opposite.

The Spirit descends and suddenly Parthians, Medes, Egyptians, Arabs, Romans, Libyans—all these different people—begin hearing the good news in their own languages.

Difference remains.

Languages remain.

Cultures remain.

Distinctives remain.

But somehow hostility has been arrested.

That’s the miracle.

Pentecost is the Spirit of God dismantling every identity rooted in fear and leading frightened people out of their locked rooms into a new way of belonging to one another.

That’s why I think Pentecost is one of the most politically and spiritually subversive stories in the Bible.

Because the Spirit does not create a new tribe that wins over all the others.

The Spirit creates neighbors.

I took notice of what happened in Minneapolis after Renee Good and Alex Pereti were shot and people poured into the streets.

While their language of origin stayed the same, the way they used it changed.

Instead of referring to people as illegals, undocumented, refugees, or immigrants, they started to speak of their neighbors.

How do we treat our neighbors?

When he was just a scoundrel or a Samaritan, the rich man had no problem.

But things broke bad for him when Jesus revealed his true identity: neighbor.

We cannot ignore our shared humanity when we see the other as our neighbor.

This week I posted that I was praying for my pastor friend and that she hopes for the Christian Nationalists of her congregation more than what they hope for themselves.

Someone responded by asking what I meant by “Christian nationalist,” concerned that the label itself continued to perpetuate tribalism.

Honestly, it was a fair question because labels can become weapons very quickly.

They can become ways of dismissing people instead of understanding them.

And the truth is, neither she nor I long for another tribe.

We don’t want another ideological war.

We don’t want more demonizing language from either side.

What we long for is Pentecost.

We long for churches where frightened people learn how to become neighbors again.

Because here’s the irony.

My friend’s church actually looks a lot like the early church.

It is very diverse.

Different cultures.

Different backgrounds.

Different experiences gathered together in one room.

On the outside, it already looks Pentecostal.

But internally, it sometimes functions like Babel because fear still governs identity.

People worry they will lose their political identity.

Their ethnic identity.

Their religious identity.

And if we’re honest, that can happen anywhere.

Including here.

It is possible to gather in the same sanctuary, sing the same songs, recite the same creeds, and still remain strangers to one another.

It is possible to speak the same religious language and still fail to love each other.

That’s Babel.

And that’s why we need wind.

That’s why we need fire.

Not better arguments.

Not stronger tribes.

Not more certainty.

Not better politics.

Wind.

Fire.

Because the Spirit does something arguments cannot do.

The Spirit opens locked rooms.

The Spirit loosens clenched identities.

The Spirit teaches us to see one another again.

The Spirit pushes frightened people outside where they are able to embrace the courage that has always been afforded to them.

Be good neighbors by seeing others as neighbors.

I think that’s one of the most overlooked parts of this story.

The Spirit does not come so the disciples can remain upstairs more comfortably.

The Spirit pushes them into the street.

Into encounter.

Into relationships.

Into vulnerability.

Into neighboring.

And maybe that’s what scares us most.

Walls always feel safer than tables.

They protect us from discomfort and disagreement and vulnerability.

But a neighbor doesn’t build walls.

A good neighbor sets tables because tables ask something much riskier of us.

At tables we have to listen.

At tables we have to remain human with one another.

At tables we have to look one another in the eye.

Tables are dangerous.

An African American pastor in town, who has connections all the way up to the Governor’s office, told me last week that a state Senator was invited to an event where they were hosting conversations about faith and race. Because of his busy schedule, the senator could not attend, so instead he sent video greetings affirming the conversation and adding to it by saying something to the effect that the Christian experiment would work if people would have someone over to their house who was of a different race.

He was threatened.

To what degree, I do not know. But enough for it to make a difference.

The Church does not build walls.

The Church sets tables.

That has always been the call.

Maybe that is what Pentecost is ultimately about and why, when we jump to Acts 2:44–46, we hear one of the most remarkable and world-changing things take place: the believers met together and ate together, daily.

A miracle is not necessarily a religious spectacle.

Sometimes the miracle is the realization of our shared humanity under the lordship of Christ.

And when we say the lordship of Christ, what we mean is that he embodied this way and offered it to us as our way too.

Because when Peter finally stands to preach, what he announces is not the triumph of a tribe.

He announces that Jesus is Lord.

Not Caesar.

Not empire.

Not ideology.

Not nationalism.

Jesus.

And if Jesus is Lord, then every lesser identity gets rearranged underneath that truth.

Not erased, but reordered.

As St. Paul says, “the dividing wall of hostility” has been broken down.

As a result, we discover our political identity is no longer ultimate.

Our nationality is no longer ultimate.

Our fears are no longer ultimate.

Even our wounds are no longer ultimate.

The Spirit gathers us into something deeper than all of those things—a new family, a new humanity, a new way of belonging to one another.

Honestly, I think many of us are still waiting for that wind.

Some of us are still upstairs.

Still frightened.

Still exhausted.

Still wondering if God is going to breathe again.

But maybe this story reminds us that Pentecost begins exactly there.

Not with triumphant people, but with waiting people.

Not with certain people, but with open people.

Not with perfect people, but with frightened people who have not yet given up on one another.

Perhaps the invitation this morning is not to manufacture fire or force certainty or pretend we are spiritually stronger than we are.

Perhaps the invitation is simply this: stay in the room long enough to remain open.

And see if the Spirit of God makes something of us.

Because the Spirit still moves among frightened people.

The Spirit still interrupts Babels.

The Spirit still pushes people toward one another.

The Spirit still teaches human beings how to become neighbors again.

And maybe that is where Pentecost always begins.