Transcript
The Spirit Comes
First Baptist Richmond, June 8, 2025
The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21
When the Day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
I was thirteen years old when it happened, sound asleep in my little bed in the big, upstairs room of our old farmhouse in West Virginia. I heard the back door slam and someone speaking a strange, high-pitched, foreign language. It sounded like my brother Scott, but he’d never sounded like that before. I got out of bed and found my brother Ed ahead of me, already making his way down the stairs. Scott was in the kitchen, heating water on the stove and jabbering away in this unknown tongue with tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. Mom had joined us by that time, and she asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “What happened?” Scott said, “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.”
So we waited as he poured some warm water into a basin, took it into the dining room, took off his socks and shoes, and then put his bare feet into the water—which was perfectly normal. We didn’t have running water in that house so it was part of the evening ritual to wash our feet before going to bed. But on that night Scott’s feet kept flying out of the basin every time he whooped with joy or let out another long string of words in that strange language. It took a while for him to gain his composure. But when he did he looked at us, took a deep breath, and told us that he had received the Holy Spirit.
There’s a place in Acts 19 where Paul meets some believers in Ephesus. He
asks them a simple question: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you were baptized?” They say, “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”i That’s how I felt on that night in December, 1972. I was a good, Presbyterian kid. I knew how to answer questions out of my little, pink paperback catechism, how to recite the Apostle’s Creed and find my place in the Presbyterian Hymnal, but I didn’t know anything about this. So, Scott told us. We knew that he had gone to church with our neighbors. And we knew it seemed odd that they would go on a weeknight. But they explained they were having a revival at their church (some of you may still remember what that is) and invited us to come with them. Scott was the only one who said yes.
He told us about the church. It was nothing special: just a white, clapboard building on the banks of Clear Fork in the little community of Dorothy. It took about 45 minutes to get there but these neighbors had told us it was worth the drive. Scott enjoyed it, said he got a warm welcome from the congregation, and that he sat on the pew with our neighbors and listened to every word the preacher said. But sometimes the preacher would act as if someone had just whacked him between the shoulder blades, and then he would rattle off a few words in some unknown language—“speaking in tongues”—they called it. Scott was fascinated. He was studying German in prep school but these people didn’t look like they had spent a lot of time in any school. They were simple, mountain folk, mostly uneducated. But when the preacher invited them to come forward and pray they did, and Scott went with them. And when our neighbors encouraged him to “ask for the Holy Ghost,” he did. And that’s how he came home speaking in tongues.
That was amazing, but the thing that amazed us even more was the joy.
Scott had always been such a serious, studious boy. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses and always had a book in his hands. But I wouldn’t have described him as joyful, not until that night, and that night he couldn’t contain himself; he was bubbling over. That was enough to convince Ed. When the neighbors came to get Scott the next night Ed went with them, and around midnight those boys burst through the back door in a state of absolute euphoria, both of them babbling incoherently and laughing till the tears ran down their cheeks. If you didn’t know better you would think they were drunk.
And that brings me to our text for this morning, from Acts, chapter 2. Luke tells us that all the believers were gathered together on the Day of Pentecost when, “suddenly, from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability.”ii
Luke explains that, “there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem, and at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that each of us can hear them speaking about the mighty acts of God in our own native language?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine,’” meaning, “They’re drunk!”iii Which is what I might have thought about Ed and Scott, but they didn’t have liquor on their breath and again, they were both so happy. I began to think that whatever it was they had, I wanted. I made up my mind to go with them the next night.
Our neighbor was a woman everybody called Big Shelby because she was. She and her daughter Shawana came over to pick us up and my brothers and I squeezed into the back seat of the car. Big Shelby must have been in a hurry to get to church because she made the 45-minute trip on those twisty, two-lane roads in just under half an hour while Shawana gripped the dashboard and prayed for deliverance. But when we got there (thank you, Jesus), we found everything just as Scott had described it. Those people welcomed me as if I were the Prodigal Son. They patted me on the back. They gave me holy hugs.
I found my place on the pew and stared at the men sitting on the stage playing drums and electric guitars and doing it without ever changing expression. I tried to sing along with the hymns, but they weren’t familiar to me. And then, when Brother Tommy Wingo began to preach, it was just as Scott had said: he acted as if someone had whacked him between the shoulder blades, and then he would let out a string of words in some other language.
And he wasn’t the only one.
Everyone seemed to be speaking in tongues. One woman was walking up and down the aisle with her eyes closed, waving her hand back and forth, prophesying about things to come. Sometimes people would jump up off the pew and start dancing at the front of the church, arms and legs jerking this way and that, their eyes closed. Others would raise their arms and then fall backward onto the floor, “slain in the Spirit,” they called it. They would lie there for a few minutes and then get up and go back to their pew as if nothing had happened.
It was all very exciting, and like nothing I had ever seen in the Presbyterian Church. When Brother Tommy invited people to come up to the front and pray, I went. I remember kneeling on that worn, green carpet and praying for the gift of
tongues, but it wasn’t just because my brothers had received it, and it wasn’t just because it seemed to make them so happy. I wanted to speak in tongues so my mother would believe I was still a Christian.
Some of you have heard this story before, but that night when Scott’s feet were flying out of the water Ed asked him if God had a word for him. And Scott closed his eyes and began to speak in tongues, but in tones that were gentle and reassuring, as if God were telling Ed that he was doing a good job, and just needed to keep it up. Encouraged by that I asked if God had a word for me and Scott closed his eyes again, but this time when he began to speak his voice was choked with sobs and tears started rolling down his cheeks. All I could imagine was that God was brokenhearted, because of me, because of my sin, and when it was over I went back to bed and made promises that no thirteen-year-old boy would be expected to keep.iv
But that’s what took me down the aisle that night at the Dorothy Church of God. My mother had been right there when it happened. She had seen those tears on Scott’s cheeks. I wanted to come home speaking in tongues so she would know that everything was all right between God and me, that we had made our peace. When Brother Tommy found out what I was praying for he came and knelt beside me, laid his hands on my head, said, “Lord, fill this boy with your Holy Spirit!” And he said it as if he believed it would happen right then, right there. He even stepped back and gave me some room in case I needed to jump up and dance. But I didn’t feel anything. If anything I felt emptier than when I had come. On the way home Big Shelby tried to encourage me. She said it didn’t always happen the first time, and that when you start speaking in tongues it might feel like you’re making it up. So, I tried it, right there in the back seat of the car, and
everyone agreed: “Yep. You’re making it up.”
But I didn’t give up. I kept going back to that church and I kept letting people pray for me and I kept taking their advice. I did it for months, but I never did receive the gift of tongues. It was years later that I realized the Spirit gives lots of gifts—tongues is only one of them. Preaching and teaching are among those gifts, but also faith, knowledge, leadership, hospitality, healing, compassion—the list goes on and on.v But if you’ve listened to me preach for a while you know that I spend more time talking about Jesus than the Spirit, and some of that may be left over from the Great Disappointment of 1972.
But last year my friend Russ, a member of my Preacher Camp group, suggested that maybe in the Sundays following Pentecost this year we could look through the lectionary readings and search for some evidence of the Holy Spirit. He said, “I mean, we know it shows up on Pentecost, but where is it the rest of the time? Where is this elusive third person of the Holy Trinity? Maybe it’s hidden in plain view, between every line on every page of sacred Scripture, and maybe we could spend some time next summer trying to find it.” So, that’s what we’re going to do, but I wanted to start here, on the Day of Pentecost, where the Spirit shows up in full force, because I want you to know that it’s real.
And maybe that’s why I’ve been telling the story of my first encounter with the Spirit, because whatever else may have been going on in that little church in West Virginia, the Spirit was there and the Spirit was real. Even as a boy I could see that. And to this day I have never denied the presence or the power of the Holy Spirit; I just haven’t emphasized it as much as I could, or maybe as much as I should. But over the next few weeks I’m going to be searching for the Spirit. I’m going to look at the lectionary readings under a magnifying glass. And I’m going to
look for signs of the Spirit’s presence among us here.
I was telling you recently about the online class I took with a woman named Tania Harris from Australia who was teaching us to listen for the voice of the Spirit. She was doing it because she believes the Spirit was sent to lead and guide the church, to help us remember the things Jesus said and to teach us the things he didn’t. She didn’t talk about speaking in tongues or some of those other things, but she talked about the Spirit’s presence as if it were an everyday thing in the churches she serves, as if people were regularly reporting that the Spirit had said this, or done that, just as it did in the Book of Acts.
But why not?
Jesus said he would ask his Father to send the Holy Spirit and the Father did. Ten days after Jesus ascended the Spirit blew through that upper room like a tornado through a trailer park. It doesn’t always show up with such force, but it is always present, isn’t it? Isn’t it? On the day I was ordained, back in 1986, someone on the examining council asked me, “What do you think about the Holy Spirit?” and I said, “I like the Holy Spirit!” But that night, when people came down the aisle and laid hands on my head, I felt the Holy Spirit. It was everywhere in that room. The pivots on the threshold shook and the house was filled with smoke.vi Afterward a friend I had invited who wasn’t a believer, who might have even described himself as an atheist, said, “That was powerful!” And I said,
“It’s real.”
That’s what I want you to take away from today’s sermon if nothing else: that the Holy Spirit is real. And over the next few months we will be looking for evidence of that Spirit in the Scripture we read on Sunday mornings, in the fellowship of believers, and in our everyday lives as Christians. On Pentecost God
fulfilled his promise to pour out his Spirit on all flesh, but apparently God hasn’t stopped pouring. What if we start searching for the Spirit in this season and discover that the Spirit is already among us? What if our sons and daughters begin to prophesy? What if our young men see visions and our old men dream dreams? What if this church comes alive over the next few months as it never has before, and you can say that you were here when it all began,
On the Day of Pentecost?
—Jim Somerville © 2025
