We are now in the season of Pentecost, remembering what it was like that day in Jerusalem when tongues of fire rested on the disciples, and ‘devout Jews from every nation under heaven and living in Jerusalem’ created a clash of languages. Out of the many, however, there came forth one that each understood. Peter then aroused the crowd even more to a feverish pitch with his preaching. So moved, the people then asked: “What should we do?” Here is Peter’s answer:
37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers,[a] what should we do?” 38 Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Act 2: 37-42, NRSV)
Three thousand were baptized that day! An auspicious and wildly successful launch!
At a time of pervasive cynicism and grievance over the crumbling institutions in our lives, including the church, Molly Worthen, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Spellbound: How Charismas Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, has recently published an insightful piece in The Atlantic. (June 2, 2025) Her title is: What the Fastest-Growing Christian Group Reveals about America.
Part of the article recounts her experience at Catch the Fire Church in Durham, North Carolina, A Toronto -based evangelist named Carol Arnott was pointing her finger and calling on Jesus: ‘Fire on them Lord!” Knees buckled and bodies collapsed; others spoke in tongues, and it was a loud experience with the “moans and guffaws and burst of holy laughter.” Does it sound like something we imagine that first Pentecost in Jerusalem was like?
Worthen makes the following claim about what contemporary charismas are like:
Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest -growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal and prophesy, just as Jesus’s first disciples did 2000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves “born-again.” This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion’s most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements.
Americans in large numbers are newly open to a Holy Spirit set free among us and across the globe!
As exciting as this may be, however, there are concerns being raised. David French, in an article published in the New York Times on June 5, 2025: Selfishness Is Not a Virtue, writes:
America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.
If charismatic Christianity is the fastest growing group within the Christian faith, it is because of its selfish emphasis upon personal salvation, the vertical faith of which French speaks, at the expense of the horizontal reach toward our neighbors and people in need. The uncompromising parable of the Good Samaritan comes to mind. The query, who is my neighbor? is answered with undeniable clarity. This reality is the scandal of our era, the Trump era. The nation’s behavior is abhorrent as it relates to the neighbors among us. Selfishness is not a virtue. I am composing this blog on June 14, 2025. Troops have deployed to Los Angeles to deal militarily with protests over the administration’s immigration policies and their blatantly inhuman treatment of migrants, while Washington prepares for its dictator-like militaristic parade. Thousands of other protests are set to be staged under the banner of “No Kings Day. The Rev. William Barber II and eight other progressive activists were arrested inside the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Moral Monday, for holding a prayer rally against the Republican-backed budget bill going through Congress and its cruel treatment of the poor and marginalized. Before being arrested, he (Barber) quoted the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
As Dr [Martin Luther] King once said, we’re not talking about over yonder. We’re talking about over here and people need healthcare over here. People need food over here. For her (Senator Joni Ernst) to bring up religion and bring up Jesus – if Jesus did anything, he provided everybody he met free healthcare. He never charged a leper, or a sick person, or a blind person, for their healing.
We had friends visiting us from Florida this week. David insisted that I read an article from a recent issue of The New Yorker. The article was titled: Was the Civil War Inevitable? by Adam Gopnik, April 21, 2025. One of the probing questions in the article was: Given the level of savagery and sacrifice the war inflicted upon the nation, both North and South, Blue and Grey, was it worth it? Not a simple question to confront and to any measure, resolve. Gopnik’s final paragraph, haunting and humbling, remains with me and I share it with all of you.
Lincoln’s elegiac words about the dead soldiers at Gettysburg remain true: from their sacrifice, we still can take renewed commitment to their cause, that of liberty against tyranny. But we should also remember that the purpose of the struggle of liberty against tyranny is not to carry on the fight but not to have to. We can’t forget these soldiers’ lives, but neither should we forget the manner of their dying. Even if we return to the original proposition—that the Civil War was unavoidable, or that of all the bad choices war was not the worst—it doesn’t alter what happened at Bull Run or Antietam. Remaining alive to other people’s pain, in the face of heroic rhetoric, retrospective rationalization, and two-sided tribal terror, is perhaps the hardest moral task we face—and one at which we almost always fail. Sometimes the only people who can see the sky are the soldiers who die beneath it.
The above quote reminds me of another, one attributed to the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy. (1828-1910) Perhaps Gopnik had it in mind while writing his piece.
If you feel pain, you’re alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.
As we face the chaos and cruelty of these conflicted and frightening days, as we pick up anew the sometimes costly cause of liberty against tyranny, as we keep vigilant in our opposition to the “One Big Beautiful” ugly, horrible bill, our faith, requiring that we be both vertical and horizontal in our orientation and commitment, forces us to grapple with the “hardest moral task we face in life, namely, remailing alive to other people’s pain.
Are we up to this task, no matter how hard it may be? I hope so.
Let us not falter or fail. Paul’s words of encouragement for this task are these:
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord[a] has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3: 12-14;; NRSVU)