Speaking Of Pentecost

Summary

In this episode of Speaking of Faith, Bishop DeDe and Adam explore the significance of Pentecost, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and the personal transformations that can occur through faith. They discuss the uncomfortable aspects of faith, the broader understanding of God, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The conversation invites listeners to engage in dialogue about their beliefs and the love of God that can be experienced in community.


Takeaways

• Pentecost marks the beginning of the church's mission.
• The Holy Spirit empowers us to proclaim God's love.
• Personal transformation is a key aspect of experiencing Pentecost.
• Faith can be uncomfortable, prompting growth and understanding.
• God's presence can be felt in unexpected ways.
• The Holy Spirit continues to work in our lives today.
• Understanding God may require a broader perspective.
• Faith is a journey that invites dialogue and questioning.
• We are called to serve and love all persons.
• The experience of faith can be deeply personal and communal.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Faith and Pentecost
01:02 Understanding Pentecost and Its Significance
03:00 The Empowerment of the Holy Spirit
05:57 Personal Transformation Through Pentecost
08:52 Attuning to the Holy Spirit's Call
11:58 Navigating Uncomfortable Faith Experiences
14:59 The Broader Understanding of God
18:02 The Ongoing Work of the Holy Spirit
23:48 Conclusion and Invitation to Dialogue

AI Disclosure: To support our staff in their limited time, many of our episode summaries are first generated by AI and then edited by the Communications Director to accurately reflect and preview our podcast episodes.

Transcript

Bishop DeDe (00:02.049)
Welcome friends to the podcast, Speaking of Faith. Wherever you are on life's journey, our intent is to speak about our faith, the things that matter most to us. If you're someone who has a very deep sense of faith, or if you're someone who's wondered about it and this is new to you, welcome, this podcast is for you. It is meant to be accessible and an invitation to deeper learning and speaking and witnessing to the love of God that's in our midst.

My name is DeDe Duncan-Probe. I am the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, and we are here today to talk about this Pentecost, this moment, this movement, this time in the early church, and this time today that greets us new in this season. And so first of all, I want to start off by talking about Pentecost. I'm going to assume that you know something about it, that you know the disciples.

since the Feast of the Ascension have been waiting for the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and they are feeling an expectation and probably a little what we all feel when we're waiting, like, okay, you know, we saw you disappear into the clouds, you know, ready to get going here. But with the Feast of the Ascension, it's important to know its setting is in the Jewish Feast of Weeks.

This connects this new revelation to the giving of the law on the Mount Sinai and Pentecost is Greek for 50, thus signifying the 50 days or seven weeks after Passover. Originally an agricultural festival celebrating the end of the spring harvest. This feast of weeks was in Romans and is, you know, associated with various strands of Judaism.

and with the covenant with God. Fire in Pentecost is a symbol of the presence of the divine, whether you have the, you know, the fire with John the Baptist's prophecy that nations will come and will be baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, also the fire at Mount Sinai and the chariot in Daniel. And so this sense of burning of the clear,

Bishop DeDe (02:30.246)
of burning, God's burning away of those things that keep us from God. And so with Pentecost, this moment with the disciples, they're gathered together, tongues of fire appear over their heads and this flame, the divine is present. And scripture tells us that this moment enables the disciples to preach God's word and to be understood by people out in the street. Sometimes this passage has been misunderstood.

that, that there was just a temporary understanding or, there've been a lot of things down through history for our, we're are speaking today about our faith. want to stay within the confines of sort of a bigger narrative for all of us. This understanding that, that with the baptism of fire, the spirit empowers us, illuminates within us, guides us and calls us.

that this is about the community of God being enlivened to give witness in all places and all times. And to recognize that in the Hebrew scriptures, in the canon of scripture, that there are many voices and many understandings of the Spirit of God. So in this season of Pentecost, this proclamation of the Holy Spirit's work is to baptize us that we may be able to proclaim.

It is understood as the beginning of the church, it's understood to be the moment when the church's mission is made clear that we are to go out in all languages and all people in the world and proclaim the love of God known in Jesus, the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus being proclaimed by those who are part of this proclamation. And I want to put a little

a little caveat there. This is also not a, this baptism in fire is different from what is sometimes talked about in Pentecostal churches with the tongues of fire. This I understand of glossolalia, the ability to speak a prayer language or a language of God. In this passage in scripture, in Acts, the apostles, the disciples of Jesus are speaking in the languages of

Bishop DeDe (04:57.752)
people, their birth languages, you hear people saying, how did they know there? hear them speaking in the tongue of my youth. So this is, I want to separate that out because sometimes that's a place where it is put together that when you're baptized by fire, you suddenly have a prayer language. That is for another podcast. This for another time. Today we're talking about Pentecost, this moment that the church is born, the tongues of fire on the disciples heads and this power.

that is so transformative. And I wanna open up just a little bit the mystery of it. We don't exactly know what happened. We have the account in scripture and we bring to it our imagination of what the tongues of fire would have looked like. We bring it to it our imagination of what this interaction with people in the street would have been like. We have an understanding that at times, you know, they're thinking that, they've had too much wine. We can kind of imagine these things.

But what really happens is really interesting here because somehow through the Ascension and Pentecost, Peter, who denies Jesus at the crucifixion, doesn't even know who he is, never met the man. After these two events becomes absolutely literally on fire for Jesus, is willing to die, is willing to go, is willing to take risks, is willing to confront

things in his belief system that have been uncomfortable for him. Like thinking Jesus is just for Judaism and not for all people. His encounters with Paul that come after this. So for Peter, if we look at him as a person in scripture, Pentecost is really this transformation that is alive in him. So now, contemporarily, for you and for me, what does Pentecost mean?

We're not in an upper room with the disciples. We're where we are. Have we experienced that fire of feeling something that happens in us? Where we want to be courageous in speaking about our faith, where we want to go out and to help people, where we can no longer live as we did before this moment, but now feel part of a narrative that compels us to help and to speak and to go to people.

Bishop DeDe (07:26.11)
in our lives to share the love of Jesus. And I want to highlight that for you, dear listener, you may not have experienced this in your life. This may be something that sounds very foreign or scary, or I wish that would happen, but I just haven't had that happen in my life. To know that that's fine. You know, if you had talked to Peter the week before this, he would have been like, I don't know. mean, Jesus, I kept thinking he'd bring back a new Israel. And what do I know?

and he told me to get behind him and I'm still confused. All of us have these moments in our faith that we're on the journey we're on and we may be confused. We may feel like it hasn't quite happened to us. But part of our faith is knowing that God is alive in us, to us, through us. And we too are invited to be part of this narrative, to see in this movement between the resurrection of Jesus

the ascension of Jesus and now the Pentecost, the Holy Spirit coming and acting in and through and upon the apostles that God is about a movement in us too. And we're invited into the narrative in the ways that we can experience now and to maybe attune our listening in our ears that maybe God is showing up in ways we aren't seeing. And so

Our invitation for all of us is to be part of Pentecost for the Holy Spirit to be alive in us and act in us that we have this ability for our ministry to be guided by and informed by a God who shows up, transforms us, heals us, renews us and empowers us. So I've tried to take a very big topic, which is we could probably spend, you know, a year on it, but I'm

Adam Eichelberger (09:18.952)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (09:22.592)
you know, 10 minutes, here we go. What speaks to your heart, Adam, in all of this and what questions may come to mind for us to discuss?

Adam Eichelberger (09:34.44)
Well, listeners, wanted to first and foremost, reassure you that if when you heard the word glossolalia, you got a little confused or perplexed or a little worried about where we were going today, don't worry about it. It's a big word for all of us. And I was like, my gosh, what? So I hit the bishop was not talking in tongues there. That's a bad joke. I apologize. but it, you know, for me, Bishop, what really stands out about this?

Bishop DeDe (09:42.445)
Yes.

Adam Eichelberger (10:04.406)
is there's a key line in the story, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, that those who were around the disciples as they were preaching, and this profound moment happens where they are speaking and people from all over the world known to Jesus's time and place are there and they're hearing them speak in their own tongues and they are experiencing something miraculous, this outp-

Bishop DeDe (10:12.897)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (10:18.574)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (10:32.19)
pouring of the Holy Spirit and they are willing to say, yeah, they're drunk. And they're willing to take a look at the situation and say, clearly they've had too much to drink. And they are willing to look past something miraculous that's happening in their midst. And it just started making me wonder, like, what are the things that we are willing to look past?

Bishop DeDe (10:58.85)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (10:59.068)
when it comes to our relationship with God. I think that for me personally, I know that I get to do this work with our diocese and I have a ministry and a calling that I do and mine is different than yours. You are a member of the clergy, you are ordained and your ministry looks very different than mine and mine is in this realm of how we tell these stories about our faith as Episcopalians. But at the same time, I think that sometimes I even

get too comfortable or are willing to explain away God because I'm not willing to be uncomfortable with what God is trying to show to me. So I guess what I'm asking you Bishop is how can we really in the spirit of Pentecost attune ourselves to what it is God is calling us to do and

Bishop DeDe (11:37.678)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (11:53.872)
Especially when it's not these big miraculous things, you know, I'm never gonna be Peter I'm never gonna raise someone from the dead. At least I don't think I am that's a little daunting But like how do we really dial into what it is that God is asking us to do? with the power of the Holy Spirit

Bishop DeDe (11:58.742)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (12:03.47)
Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (12:10.638)
such a good question. And listener, you may have had thoughts about this or things that you would answer this in your way. I will say that one of the things that I think is helpful in scripture to always recognize is people are trying to describe something that's beyond them. I think if our faith isn't making us uncomfortable, then we probably aren't paying attention to it enough because loving your neighbors yourself is uncomfortable.

Adam Eichelberger (12:38.994)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (12:39.564)
We're really good at holding grudges or, you know, you're sort of sticking it to people when they've made us mad. The idea of forgiving or turning the other cheek, these are vulnerable things for us to make us, we don't really, aren't very keen on them. So today's passage to really be aware that at times when we hear or see something that makes us uncomfortable, well, maybe it's our turn to yield to the spirit.

I remember years ago, and this is a long time ago, I was in a Pentecostal church. I affirm the power of the spirit to heal and do things that are beyond my understanding or comprehension. But I was in a church and the woman next to me, she fainted and the people around me were like, she fainted in the spirit. And I thought, I wasn't so sure that I was.

You know, really picking up what they were laying down. If you understand my drift and you know, but for them, it was very real and very powerful. And for them, it was something they could touch and say, I feel that I've seen God because I've seen this for me. I just felt like I didn't totally feel the same way as the people around me, but I also had respect for the fact that they did feel this way.

Adam Eichelberger (13:37.918)
Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (14:03.136)
And I didn't need to decide if I approved or rejected or anything like that. I could just be present to it and be and realize that sometimes God does things that I cannot comprehend all the time. God does things I cannot comprehend. I also think of when I was in Jerusalem and at the Holy Sepulcher, and there's so many expressions of faith in that space, so many beliefs about Jesus and to recognize that how I envision believe.

may be very different from how someone else believes and to have the humility to say, hmm, maybe there are times when I can't receive what God is doing. Maybe there are times when I can. For the people in the streets, some of them were able to receive and say, my goodness, they're speaking to me about this in my native language. Something that, how did they learn to speak the language of my youth?

For other people, they're like, I'm not really ready for that. I don't really get it, but we don't know that later on in their existence, there weren't moments where they thought back to that and thought, you know, maybe I misjudged that the first time. Maybe I just wasn't open to what God is calling us to. I think for all of us who've had, have callings and I think God is calling all of us. I think all of our ministries are in some ways the same. mean, yes.

How my ministry is lived out as the Bishop of the diocese is going to be different than yours, Adam, as the director of communications. And yet fundamentally, it's the same ministry, which is proclaiming Jesus, loving God, seeking to serve God through justice and the things God's calling us to and in the reality of our lives to exercise our faith. So this podcast listener for you, wherever you are,

Adam Eichelberger (15:38.462)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (15:56.686)
receiving the spirit of Pentecost, maybe when you're at the grocery store and you feel that sharp sort of moment of a fire in your heart to do something for someone, to buy milk for the person in need or to buy some extra cans of food and take them by the food pantry or you feel a spark of inspiration in you.

to call someone and say, I've been thinking about you, you've been on my heart, just want you to know I'm thinking of you and I love you and I'm praying for you. To allow ourselves to believe those moments. And even if we're wrong, if we call our friends and say, was thinking of you and I'm praying for you and they say, well, that's great, I'm just having a normal old day here. That's fine, it doesn't mean that there was a miscue there. Because we may be praying for something that hasn't happened or has happened or who knows.

But there will be those moments that when we live by the spirit and we're attuned to the spirit, that when those moments of inspiration happens, we'll call someone and say, you know, I don't know why, but you're on my mind. That person responds and says, my gosh, I can't believe you called. I was just praying that I feel so alone and need someone to hear me. There are times when we can miss the Holy Spirit because we get caught up in our brilliance. We want to sort of arbit whether it's true or not true.

rather than having the humility and the grace to say, know, who knows? And there are boundaries, there are things that we can know that are right and wrong, there are things that we can have better clarity about. But when it comes to the inspiration of Holy Spirit, to allow ourselves not to always know. We said in a podcast, or I said in the podcast a few weeks ago, that we're always gonna be Hamlet trying to describe Shakespeare.

Adam Eichelberger (17:48.103)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (17:48.556)
or pick your favorite character from a Shakespearean play. I think that is part of the humility in this. The disciples, we don't hear some of the disciples maybe, what the heck is going on? Get this flame off my head. This is not what I signed up for. But the Holy Spirit is always calling us, always working in us, always healing us. So we never quite know. We take it by faith that God is at work.

Adam Eichelberger (18:02.194)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (18:11.966)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (18:16.31)
And when you have those moments of inspiration, sometimes it burns within us. Sometimes we're like the people on the road to Emmaus where we resent something, it burns within us. And then we realize that that burning in us is the purification of God helping us to lay down our sinful perfectionism or our obsession with being right about everything.

Adam Eichelberger (18:39.144)
yeah. And this is me kind of gleaning my own, like opinions or theology or whatever you want to call it into that passage of scripture. But for so long, my understanding of the Pentecost story when it comes to the Bible is the disciples go out and they feel emboldened and they start to preach and talk about Jesus to everyone who's gathered. And in my head, if there are a thousand, let's say there's a thousand people.

who were standing there listening, all thousands of them were like, meh, and they just kind of walk it off. And to me, as I have really tried to wrestle with this and pray with it, I see that, that there are many who like hear it and they try and write it off. But to me, it also is a reminder that there were probably some who were there, that it stirred up something in them that they had not expected. And

Bishop DeDe (19:11.694)
Yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (19:37.534)
First of all, I say that as an encouragement. guess I'm kind of encouraging myself here, but hopefully listener if you're the type of person, because I think sometimes when we talk about faith, it's really easy for me to try and put on the mind of somebody who is skeptical or doubting or doesn't believe because I've gone through my own as John of the Cross would call it dark nights of the soul where I struggle with belief. But there's also a lot of beautiful room for people who

Bishop DeDe (19:53.038)
you

Bishop DeDe (19:58.656)
Right. Right.

Adam Eichelberger (20:05.522)
when they hear about the goodness of God, and when they hear about the love of Jesus, and what the Holy Spirit desires, then it does stir up something in them. And I think that that's again, a beautiful thing about our faith, especially as Episcopalians, that there's room for all of it. And Bishop, I'm gonna butcher the words, but you use this all the time when you celebrate, is come to the table, all of you who have faith or who have little or none. I cannot remember the words. Again, I'm a baby Episcopalian.

Bishop DeDe (20:08.142)
Mm.

Bishop DeDe (20:28.216)
Thank you.

Yeah. That's all right. This is an I and it's an I own invitation. It's from the church in Scotland. But yeah, those who have been here often not been for a long time, tried to follow Jesus and those who have failed come is Christ who invites us to meet him here. We need to do another podcast on open invitation because it's very close to open invitation, but I'm not taking a step. I'm very via media on this. It creates a space for us to come as we are.

Adam Eichelberger (20:36.093)
Yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (20:52.136)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (20:58.136)
But I want to go back to something that comes up for me in this, Adam, because I think it's so important that we shouldn't leave this without acknowledging it. In this world, in this moment, having faith is seen as silly. It's seen as being your magic friend or your invisible buddy, or there's a lot of denigration, or conversely,

Adam Eichelberger (20:58.313)
yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (21:14.035)
Mm.

Bishop DeDe (21:25.706)
It's seen through the lens of Christian nationalism or conversely, it's or another lens, not conversely, another convex, maybe concave. Another aspect of the lens is that, you know, all Christians hate gay people or Christians are those people who do this. Those are fallacies. We we in this podcast and in the Episcopal Church and especially in Central New York, affirm the dignity of all persons. We are.

Adam Eichelberger (21:28.466)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (21:55.448)
people who love others because Jesus has loved us. We need to sometimes open up our language to contemporary ways to express it. I was asked recently by a college student who is not a theist, as they put it, but wondered about what faith might mean for someone who's not a theist, for those who might not be familiar with this language, someone who doesn't believe in a God. And I said, well, where do you think creation comes from?

Adam Eichelberger (22:21.15)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (22:24.674)
They talked about forces and what. And I said, what if God's more like gravity than an old man with a beard? What if God is more like the force that pushes the grass up in the asphalt through it and it survives anyway than the things we were taught in our catechesis. What if God is bigger than the verbiage we put on God?

Adam Eichelberger (22:31.443)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (22:51.936)
And we open that language up to allow a broader, bigger, more full understanding that maybe we can't believe in God as a old man with a beard, but we believe in the power of love, or we don't understand this idea of God creating. And yet we see the power of creation all around us and we see how we can help or harm creation. Our understanding of the Pentecostal moment.

can really be diminished and reduced by our desire to try to put it under our thumb and examine it like a Petri dish. The Pentecostal moment is not explainable. We can't say what the tongues of fire looked like. Artists have tried to render it. We can't say what was happening. But what we do know is faith comes as it does. For some of us, it's in a moment. We suddenly root.

Adam Eichelberger (23:34.014)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (23:48.526)
God strikes our heart and we do believe. For some of us, it's over a period of time when we realize that all the science and the other things that are just a little bit insufficient to explain the fullness. If we were to try to say, what does love mean in our lives, to describe how we love our child or love our partner or someone else, we run out of words because we can't get past the limits of our language.

So on this Pentecost as we're talking about Pentecost listener for us all to recognize that we're trying to talk about something that may be a little beyond us, but we do know what it feels like to feel that fire in us when we feel that fire of inspiration, where we wake up one morning and we're like, you know what? I'm doing the thing. I'm going to apply. I'm going to write the article. I'm going to call someone. I'm going to pray with someone.

I don't have to know all the answers, but I can trust that the love I feel in my heart, that that's real. And that the power that I feel when I'm with other people who profess Jesus, that there's a realness there. And so I'm gonna trust that and allow my life to continue to be shaped by it, knowing that the Holy Spirit, that in scripture, that the Holy Spirit continues to move in our lives because we feel it.

Adam Eichelberger (24:53.981)
Hmm.

Bishop DeDe (25:15.18)
that moment when we're with a group and we feel a peace that passes understanding. So, dear listener, this is a big conversation and we'll come back to it over the next podcast talking about what is Pentecost, what is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, how can we know truth and understand it. But for today, I'm passing the baton to you. It is now your turn to speak with others about this.

to question and to engage in dialogue, to wrestle with what is it that you believe and how might we believe more fully in the love of Jesus, the love of God that we meet in scripture and that can be alive in our midst as people who seek to serve Christ and love all persons. May you be blessed and be a blessing and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Take good care.