The Holy Spirit came upon them like a wind, like a wildfire, like an overwhelming, elemental power beyond any earthly power. It swept through and surrounded them and filled them and poured through them. In the rushing of the torrent, they had to sing out, their bodies as instruments, open and humming with the sound that pulsed around them and through them and beyond them.

All who heard them singing heard them singing out with words clear and true, words that moved their minds and opened their hearts and stirred their souls in awe before the glory of God. They heard these words in a language beyond language, no matter their native tongue, they all heard the clear, bright truth, they all felt the force of the overwhelming holy reality that was sweeping the disciples into its song.

Well, not everyone. Not everyone who witnessed the disciples on the day of Pentecost heard them speaking the universal language of the soul. Some just heard them blathering like drunken idiots. And they didn’t hesitate to mock them for it.

Why?

Why did some listen and hear and know the reality of the glory of God and join in the chorus, while others just heard ridiculous baby babble?

The miracles relating to the Jesus and his disciples aren’t just arbitrary acts of magic to show that there’s something supernatural at work; they all have meaning that conveys something about the holy mystery of what Jesus embodied, the reality of the realm of heaven on earth.

In this story of the Pentecost, what’s happening here is not just that some of the foreign folks in Jerusalem who encountered the Jesus people were miraculously like 21st Century tourists sticking their phones out and reading what Google translate gave them. These high-tech devices can seem pretty miraculous, but they don’t bring us any closer to the Holy Spirit, or to true communion with one another and with God. The meaning of the miracle in this story is not just that the Holy Spirit can somehow sometimes perform astonishing spontaneous translation.

Instead, this is what I believe was happening with the cosmopolitan crowd hearing the Good News in their mother tongues on the day of Pentecost:

The inspiration of the Holy Spirit led the disciples to share the deepest level of communication: Communion.

Their experience of the Holy swept them into expressing with every fiber of their beings something so universal in its scope and power and reality that the people around them could feel it and know it and come awake to it and join in it, regardless of what corner of the earth they were from and what languages they understood. The disciples were giving voice to something simply true about the human experience of the universal God, something that can unite all of us, in our essence, in the midst of our blessed and bewildering differences … something that Jesus revealed and embodied:

God is the Holy Creator of each and all … God is beyond us …. and God is with us … because God is love.

But not everyone is ready to know this and accept this.

In the case of the Pentecost story, some folks were just too cynical to let it in. The people who couldn’t understand what the disciples were saying were the people who mocked them – two details which I think are related. They shut out the invitation to genuine human fellow-feeling in the embrace of the cosmic Creator. They shut it out for the sake of sustaining their sense of superior separateness.

I say this not out of judgment, but observation. I say this as someone myself who has struggled with cynicism, on the one hand, and superiority, on the other. I say this also knowing we live in a very cynical age, and an age where many folks are desperate to prove their superiority over others.

Here’s what I mean that we are living in a cynical age: Lying has become the norm. Deception has become expected. What is “true” is just what is in one’s self-interest, (or at least seems to be in the moment). Words are weapons sharpened with judgmentalism and propelled with the hissing force of superiority. Endless layers of irony mask and armor true self and true motive. All expression is self-promotion. The private becomes public for the sake of display. Image is everything.

This cynical use of communication can turn us all into cynics, right? Because, really, whom can you trust? What can you trust is true?

So, of course, more and more folks in our society suffer from an epidemic of isolation, disconnection, loneliness.

And it should not be surprising that life has become cheap … or at least some people’s lives. There is terrible violence and neglect. A merciless erasure of personhood. A quiet desperation that sometimes gets very, very loud.

How deeply we yearn for something better.

We can be better than this, right? This bleak picture is not the whole truth about us humans, so help me God.

We are still, yet and ever, human beings, humble creations of the Holy Creator of the cosmos, set, deep in our souls, with flaming reflections of our Living God. All people – each and every one – are broken and beautiful, all are in need of mercy, whether they realize it or not, whether we realize it or not.

The antidote to our cynical age, I’m realizing, is radical sincerity.

Genuine earnestness.

Defiant honesty.

A desire and a willingness to come from the heart.

A desire and a willingness to witness the hearts and the humanity of others.

A sincere pursuit of the holy moments of heart-to-heart connection, those holy moments when communication deepens into communion.

This takes some faith. It takes a lot of faith.

I’m reminded of the man in the Gospels who cried out “I believe … help my disbelief!” I sincerely wish to overcome my cynicism. I genuinely wish to become more genuine.

“Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus taught, “for they will see God.”

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right relations, for they will be fulfilled.”

It is a risk, especially with such ruthlessness and mercilessness and sadistic evil. When Jesus empowered his disciples to out and share the Good News, to be agents of healing and agents of peace, Jesus was clear to them it is risky: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves; so be as savvy as serpents and as innocent as doves.”

It’s all about that balance, between savviness and innocence, toughness and tenderness. Our society is way out of balance – and so many yearn for a return to purity of heart, but in a way that is not naïve about the reality of evil that cuts through this world and through all of our hearts.

We can share this in little ways, in little holy moments that risk genuine connection with those who are close to us, and those who are strangers.

It takes a surrender to the power of God’s love beyond us, to dissolve our masks and layers of self-protection, to find safety and support in the sacred source of our very beings, for us to be able to stand face-to-face with each other and witness, simply witness our beautiful, broken, and beloved souls in the Spirit that embraces our shared humanity.

Then we can speak and hear with language beyond language. Then we can join in the music of the Holy Spirit blowing through us and among us and beyond us.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, May 24, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.