I have to say that I think Peter’s response in the Pentecost story that the disciples are not drunk as some suppose, because it’s only 9 am is one of my favorite lines of scripture. The way he says it, means we could possibly see him saying, “now if it was three or four, maybe” and thank goodness no one had yet come up with the phrase “it’s five o’clock somewhere.” And the reason why people believe they might be drunk is that many pagan groups, especially mystery cults, used alcohol or other drugs in order to bring about ecstatic or altered states, and so the disciples could certainly be mistaken for that. But what I want to focus on today, at least to start, is the line that begins today’s passage: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” It’s not quite clear if this is just the disciples, including Matthias who was just added to the 12, along with some of the women with them, or the 120 who were followers at the time, although since they are in a house together, it’s probably the smaller number. But there they are all together, and of course this year at Pentecost we are not altogether. We’re not seeing people in wearing red, or singing together the songs of the Spirit. But, like the disciples we sit and wait.
At Easter I talked about living in a liminal time or a liminal space, the in between between what was and what has not yet been. That’s where the disciples found themselves after the crucifixion, in the in-between, and even after they had encountered the risen Christ they were still really in that liminal space because they didn’t know what was going to happen, where the movement was going, what they were going to become. Instead they were still receiving instructions from Jesus and he tells them to stay in Jerusalem, and tells them that soon they will receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which originally had been promised by John the Baptist, at that when the Spirit came upon them they would receive power, and it’s a lot more fun to do that when you can shout power back at me, and they would take that baptism of the Spirit and the power they had received, they would be Jesus’ “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And so they remain in Jerusalem and are there for the festival of weeks, which was a spring harvest festival that took place 50 days after Passover, and thus was also called Pentecost, pente being 50. But here’s where things changed for them, and ended their in-between time.
