May 24, 2026
The Feast of Pentecost
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Acts 2:1-21 ~ Psalm 104:25-35, 37~ 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 ~ John 7:37-39
My mother was an artist. It might be more accurate to say that, with six children underfoot, she was a frustrated artist. She could paint in any medium as well as sketch, she did needlework and sewed a lot of our clothing, including doll clothes for her grandchildren’s dolls. She taught herself the art of creating Ukrainian Easter Eggs, also known as Pysanki. In her later years, this woman who could do anything with pencils or a paintbrush or a sewing needle took to creating crafts for the local Vacation Bible School at her Episcopal Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC.
While my mother never got to pursue making art as a profession, she did teach high school art for a few years, and she taught my siblings and me the value of art even if only one of us shared her talent (and that most assuredly was not me). Whenever we visited family in a city large enough to have an art museum, we usually took a spin through it whether we wanted to or not.
There was a particular trip on a visit to see my grandmother in Dallas. A museum was built there in the late 60s called the Museum of Biblical Art, and initially it was established solely to house a massive oil painting, 124 feet long by 20 feet high, called Miracle at Pentecost. It was not, I think, what you might call great art. However, I was quite young when we went to see this painting, and I had no idea what Pentecost was. I thought it was a Jewish painting since it was a painting of the Jerusalem temple (or so I was told), but I had no idea why everyone had what looked like a fuzzy fireball on top of their head. Mostly, my memories are quite vague, but when I went to refresh my memory on this earlier this week, I discovered that the painting was destroyed in a fire in 2005, and there really aren’t any good reproductions of it.
However, what I did find refreshed my memory enough to remind me of a few interesting details other than the fuzzy fireballs.
It is clear that the painting represents people gathered in the Temple which had not yet been destroyed because the columns of the portico provide the backdrop. Pentecost was a Jewish festival before it was a Christian one. It is also known as Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, a harvest festival which took place on the fiftieth day after Passover and one to which every observant Jew who possibly could was required to attend. So, you have all these pilgrims milling around the Jerusalem temple, and, in the painting, they’re doing what one might expect them to be doing.
A couple of guys over here are haggling over the price of oxen for the sacrifice.
Another couple of men over there are arguing over the exchange rate for coins into shekels.
And there’s a boy with loaves and fishes.
Many of the people Jesus healed are presented: Blind Bartimaeus and the guy whose friends lowered him through a roof on his mat.
In short, everyone is just going about their business.
But then those tongues of flame, that rush of wind, interrupt the course of business. People in the center of the painting are pointing and gesticulating and running about. It must have thrown everyone and everything into chaos. And yet no one was on the outside of this. Everyone’s language was understood; they were included in the anointing of wind and flame. They became, in short, The Church. And that is probably why this painting is called the Miracle of Pentecost.
Imagine for moment that we’ve all gathered here this morning, each of us bringing our own thoughts and burdens, our joys and sorrows. Maybe we aren’t sure why we came this morning other than out of habit. And just imagine that the doors suddenly blew open, a gale-force wind scattered leaflets and swept up anything not nailed down. Puffballs of fire started dancing above our heads. Everyone starts speaking in a language not their own, and yet we all understand each other. All of us – young and old – begin to prophecy, maybe even speak in tongues, and we all rush out of here to tell the world what we have seen and heard.
Imagine that.
Writer Annie Dillard has a bit of a warning for us if we are having trouble imagining this. She wrote:
Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”[1]
We read in John a little while ago: “On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37-38). This did not happen at Pentecost or Shavuot, it took place during Sukkot, but the sentiment is the same. We come here thirsty. We come to this table and drink and are filled and then we are sent. In one of St. Augustine’s sermons on the Eucharist, he said “one of the deep truths of Christian faith [is]through our participation in the sacraments (particularly baptism and Eucharist), we are transformed into the Body of Christ, given for the world.” He further claims that we behold what we are and become what we have received.
We are transformed. We need to buckle up the chinstraps on our crash helmets, because on this day, we are sent into the world to transform the world, not on our own but through the transforming love of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Like those figures in the painting I saw so long ago in Dallas, here we are going about our business, oblivious to what God is about to do in our midst.
Imagine that.
Miracle at Pentecost, by Torger G. Thompson & Alvin H. Barnes, 1969, Dallas Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas.
[1] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.