The Pentecostal Jubilee as a Redistribution of Cultural and Economic Power (Acts 2)
by Ched Myers

Azusa Street today is a garbage-strewn lane tucked away in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. The teeming tourists and transients are ignorant about the historical significance in the history of multiculturalism. There is no indication that this back alley was once the place where the first African American Methodist Episcopal Church was located, founded by Biddie Mason, who was the first black slave to win her freedom in California courts. Later on, Azusa Street was an immigrant neighborhood and a Jewish neighborhood, before becoming a Japanese American neighborhood, and home to the Japanese Cultural Center.

But Azusa Street should be remembered most as the birthplace of one of the most radical moments in the history of the North American Christianity. On April 18^th, 1906–the day on which residents of San Francisco awoke to the great earthquake that devastated that city–here in Los Angeles the Daily Times published a front-page report that read:

The story went on: "They never dismiss church… An old colored exhort, blind in one eye, is the major-domo of the company… The old man yells his defiance and challenges an answer…"

Another local news report reflected disgust at the "disgraceful intermingling of the races, they cry and make howling noises all day and into the night. They run, jump, shake all over, shout to the top of their voice, spin in circles… They claim to be filled with the spirit. They have a one-eyed, illiterate Negro as their preacher… and colored mammys evangelize on street corners and trolley cars …" This media maligning, as racist as the times were, was unwittingly witnessing the inauguration of modern Pentecostalism.

Vinson Synan summarizes the story as follows. The preacher they were derogating was William Joseph Seymour, born in Louisiana in 1870 to former slaves. Raised as a Baptist, Seymour was given to dreams and visions as a youth. At age 25, he moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a railroad porter and waited tables, and then contracted smallpox and went blind in his left eye. In 1900 Seymour became steeped in radical Holiness theology in Cincinnati, then moved to Houston where he joined a small Holiness church pastored by a black woman who was the governess for an increasingly prominent Kansas Holiness evangelist, Charles Fox Parham. Seymour went to Parham’s Bible school to train. Texas law forbade blacks to sit in classrooms with whites, and although Parham himself believed in the separation of the races and the superiority of Anglo Saxons, he allowed Seymour to sit in a hallway and listen to the lectures through the doorway.

In early 1906, Seymour was invited to help pastor a Holiness church in Los Angeles. Seymour ministered from a home on Bonnie Brae Street, often preaching on the front porch to crowds gathered in the street where, once the jostling crowd grew so large the porch floor caved in. It was at that point that Seymour moved to an old abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church on Azusa Street, an "undesirable" part of town populated by immigrants, prostitutes and the poor. The building, which had recently been used as a warehouse and stable, was a shambles, but Seymour and his small band of black washerwomen, maids, and laborers cleaned the building, set up board plank seats, and made a pulpit out of old shoebox shipping crates.

There was no order of service, since "the Holy Ghost was in control." No offerings were taken, although a box hung on the wall proclaimed, "Settle with the Lord." It was a noisy place, and services lasted into the night–and it earned the scorn of local polite society and its press.

Over the next three years as many as 600 persons jammed inside the tiny building, while hundreds more looked in through the windows. Speaking in tongues peppered more traditional black worship styles such as shouting, trances, and the holy dance. There was no order of service, since "the Holy Ghost was in control." No offerings were taken, although a box hung on the wall proclaimed, "Settle with the Lord." It was a noisy place, and services lasted into the night–and it earned the scorn of local polite society and its press. But others in the church took more positive notice. "Pentecost has come to Los Angeles, the American Jerusalem," a rescue mission worker wrote to colleagues back east. The Azusa Street movement, led by uneducated blacks and whites, spread rapidly around the country: to North Carolina, from where it influenced southern Holiness churches; to Memphis, where the Church of God in Christ joined the Pentecostal fold; and to Chicago, where later the Assemblies of God were born.

To Seymour, the message was about Jesus and about racial and gender reconciliation. At Azusa blacks and whites and men and women were in leadership under Seymour’s direction, unprecedented in the days of Jim Crow. "No instrument that God can use," he wrote, "is rejected on account of color or dress or lack of education." But Seymour's dream was shattered when his mentor Charles Parham visited Azusa Street in October of 1906. The educated, white Parham was appalled at what he called "darky camp meeting stunts" and the "fits and spasms of spiritualists," and denounced the meetings. Two years later, two white female co-workers absconded to Portland with the mailing list of 50,000 for Seymour’s free Apostolic Faith magazine, effectively ending his leadership of the emerging movement. And two years after that, a white colleague split the Azusa Street church, separating it off as a white church that focused on speaking in tongues as the exclusive sign of the Holy Spirit–thus beginning the long history of white Pentecostalism that ignored its founder’s social practices and message. Seymour remained pastor of his now small, interracial congregation until his death in 1922 of a heart attack, or what his followers called a broken heart.

Social groups and persons vary according to many factors: age, cultural or linguistic background, physical ability or "beauty," sexual expression, religious belief, economic practice, and so on. But we must not confuse how groups are DIFFERENT with what DIVIDES them. It is when differences are used by some to exercise domination over others that they become divisions. In capitalist modernity, social divisions have been constructed according to many different differences: gender, race, and/or class (or some combination of the three) are perhaps the most persistent and structural, but gays and lesbians, youth and the elderly, the mentally or physically disabled persons, and other minorities have also suffered discrimination and oppression. It is this architecture of inequality that the Holy Spirit forever seeks to overcome through the raising up of an alternative "social body" called ecclesia–which simply means a gathering of folk. This is what she did in the brief season of the Azusa Street revival, and this is what she did 2000 years ago to start a movement called "the Way."

Today the debate about what it means to be "Spirit-filled" usually focuses on individual charismatic gifts, rather on the church as an alternative social model. I would like to suggest that whatever else Pentecost was, it was portrayed as a public insurrection of multicultural re-constitution…

On the feast of Pentecost, Christians re-narrate the "birth" of the church in the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet what SORT of practice the Spirit empowered at Pentecost, and continues to empower, has been a divisive issue in the life of the church ever since. Today the debate about what it means to be "Spirit-filled" usually focuses on individual charismatic gifts, rather on the church as an alternative social model. I would like to suggest that whatever else Pentecost was, it was portrayed as a public insurrection of multicultural re-constitution, a radical resurgence of the old ways of tribal diversity and confederation, that was intended to illustrate how centrifugal faith can challenge imperial centrifugality, right in the heart of the most cosmopolitan city in Palestine, and right in the face of the Roman imperium. Pentecost is, in other words, Luke’s midrash on the old tale we looked at yesterday of how God deconstructed Babel, and freed the people to be themselves again.

Luke's story of the Spirit's descent on the disciples at Pentecost consists of three parts:

Robert Tannehill notes that the scene commences abruptly with the unusual phrase: "When the day of Pentecost was being fulfilled..." (v 1). In order to understand that allusion, we must revisit the roots of Pentecost as an agricultural -- and thus unavoidably SOCIAL and ECONOMIC -- festival.

Pentecost was a Hebrew observance called the "Feast of Weeks" (Shavuot). Coming between Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles, Shavuot was originally a celebration of the firstfruits of the harvest (Exodus 23:14-17; Deuteronomy 16:9-12), in which the community dances before the Lord in a grace-filled ritual of returning the gifts of the land to the Giver. However, after the Hellenistic period and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the festival became a commemoration of the giving of Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and this is how it continues to be celebrated in synagogue today.

But the original symbolism of the Feast of Weeks referenced more than harvest thanksgiving. It is interesting to note the similarity in "liturgical calculations" concerning the timing of the Levitical Feast of Weeks and that of the famous Jubilee pronouncement:

This suggests that the feast of Pentecost was meant to remind Israel that the redistributive ethic of the Jubilee applied not just every fiftieth year, but at EACH AND EVERY harvest.

This stands to reason, because the Israelite ethic was one of gift and grace. The Great Giver provides the produce through the gift of seed, soil, sun and water. What is given must be shared, with the Giver getting the symbolic first fruits as a return of thanks. The rest circulates through the community like the common wealth it is. If the gift is ever claimed as an exclusive possession, it stops circulating, and begins to atrophy and die, like brackish water, or stale air, or dried blood. The only ones who have "rights" to the gift are those in need. The gift is meant to flow, like the healing waters from the cosmic mountain, down to the lowest places. Indigenous peoples have always understood the cardinal property of the gift, writes Lewis Hyde in his brilliant book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property: "Whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept… The essential is this: the gift must always move… ‘One man’s gift,’ they say, ‘must not be another man’s capital.’"

This is the vision of what I call "Sabbath economics."The noun "Sabbath" first appears in the Hebrew Bible in the Exodus story of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:23). This archetypal story was more than a lesson about God's sustaining love. It served as a reminder that the purpose of economic organization was for there to be enough for everyone, NOT for surplus accumulation that benefited the few (see Exodus 16:15-26 and 31:12-17). In this context Moses first prescribes weekly Sabbath rest for both the land and human labor, an alternative rhythm that sought to disrupt human attempts to "control" the forces of production. Torah's Sabbath regulations represented a strategy for teaching the people about their dependence upon the land and upon the divine economy of grace. The earth belongs to God, and its fruits are given to people as a gift (Leviticus 25:23). Thus the people should freely and justly distribute those fruits, instead of seeking to own and hoard them. It is an ethic of centrifugality, forged in the wake of the experience of centripetal oppression in Egypt's "store cities."

Deuteronomy 15 extends the weekly Sabbath logic to a periodic structural adjustment: "Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts... If a member of your community...is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free" (Deuteronomy 15:1,12). In agrarian societies such as biblical Israel (or parts of the Third World today), the cycle of poverty began when a family had to sell off its land in order to service a debt, and reached its conclusion when landless peasants could only sell their labor, becoming bond-slaves. Sabbath debt-remission was to be Israel's hedge against the centripetal tendency of "advanced" societies to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few and to create a class hierarchy with the poor at the bottom.

And this practice is ultimately intensified in Leviticus 25, where this cycle culminates in a Jubilee, or "Sabbath’s Sabbath." The Jubilee sought to dismantle inequality by:

The rationale for restructuring the community's assets, which includes a prohibition against lending money at interest (vv 36f), was to remind Israel of its identity as an Exodus people who must never return to a system of slavery (v 55).

Now, the extent to which biblical Israel abided by the Jubilee code is a matter of much scholarly debate (and in capitalist religion, much skepticism). Yet Sabbath economics remains at the heart of Torah — and the rest of the scripture, as I’ve tried to show in my booklet, The Vision of Sabbath Economics (2001). And the feast of Shavuot is a ritual of Sabbath economics, a celebration of gift and grace in which the community dances before the Lord with the first fruits of the land.

We are justified, then, in looking to see whether Luke's Pentecost narrative might sound any echoes of the Feast of Weeks and its Jubilee implications. And it turns out that it is precisely this old tradition that is about to be "fulfilled" in Acts 2. The narrative opens with "tongues of fire DISTRIBUTED among the disciples" (v 3). This is one of only two appearances of the Greek verb diamerizoo in Acts. The other occurrence? It is at the conclusion of Acts 2, in which the church is gathered and members are selling their possessions and "DISTRIBUTING them to whoever had need" (v 45).

…Luke’s Pentecost has far more to do with the Jubilee vision of redistributive justice than with the ecstatic spectacle of glossolalia. This is what the poor black man William Seymour understood and practiced, and what his Victorian-era middle-class white colleagues quickly tried to suppress before things got "out of hand."

In between these remarkable "signs" Peter is proclaiming that the "gift" of the Spirit will be given to whoever so desire, and that all debts have been unilaterally cancelled in Jesus Christ (v 38), a formula that echoes the Jubilee pronouncement of Jesus' in Luke’s account of the inaugural sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:18ff). All of this suggests that Luke’s Pentecost has far more to do with the Jubilee vision of redistributive justice than with the ecstatic spectacle of glossolalia. This is what the poor black man William Seymour understood and practiced, and what his Victorian-era middle-class white colleagues quickly tried to suppress before things got "out of hand."

The setting of Luke’s story is also significant. The house in which the disciples are gathered (v 2) is presumably the same place as the "upper room" of 1:13. As co-conspirators with someone who had just been executed as a political dissident, Jesus’ disciples are probably hiding from the authorities. Whatever else the "great wind" of the Spirit did, it transformed fearful fugitives into "bold" public witnesses (v 29). What begins in a safe-house attic ends in the streets of Jerusalem, as the Galileans return to the very place where their leader was tried and strung up just weeks before. Would YOU have dared go?

The church is inaugurated in a remarkable act of "coming out of the closet," as gays and lesbians would say; of speaking truth to power, as nonviolent resisters would say; of refusing to cower before a regime of terror, as the Mothers of the Disappeared would say; of holding vigil despite a public atmosphere of hostility, as Women in Black would say. It is Sojourner Truth declaring "Ain’t I a woman"; it is Martin [Luther King, Jr.] and the Movement praying in the teeth of dogs and firehoses; it is Dorothy [Day] and the Catholic Workers defying the air raid drills in the darkest days of the Cold War; it is Cesar [Chavez] and the UFW chanting "Si se puede" in the fields of wrath; it is the Berrigan brothers burning draft files at Catonsille; it is Witness for Peace in Nicaragua and Christian Peacemaker teams in Hebron and Las Abejas in Chiapas and Mandela walking out of jail with a smile–THAT, sisters and brothers, is how the church was born, and every time we muster the courage to do the same in the Power of the Spirit, the church is born again.

And down come mysterious "tongues as of fire." In Luke’s mind these no doubt correlate to John the Baptist’s allusion to baptism "with the Holy Spirit and with fire" promised back in Luke 3:16 (see Acts 1:5). But these tongues are immediately put to practical use in vv 4ff. We are told that witnessing this insurrectionary irruption are "devout Jews from every nation under heaven" (v 5). What happens next is a sort of inversion of the Babel dispersal: the people of God from the four corners of the empire begin to hear about the "powerful works of God" in their own tongue (v 11). Indeed, there is no indication that the "tongues" in this context are anything other than the vehicle of cross-cultural communication. Keep in mind that there was ALREADY a perfectly good, if imperially sponsored, vehicle for cross cultural communication: Greek, the lingua franca of the Pax Romana. But no, the Spirit is reaching through the imperial veil of cultural regulation, unearthing some of those small, local languages we spoke about yesterday, affirming the people in their ethnicity, their tribality, their grounded identity apart from imperial assimilation.

…boundaries of race, class and gender are being transgressed by a church empowered by the Spirit. This is not an instance of polite, organizational rhetoric about multiculturalism, much less corporate-sponsored "diversity training" from above; this is an inconvenient, in-your-face people’s movement declaring liberation from Babel from below.

But notice: the crowd’s bewilderment is as much about WHO is talking as it is about what they are saying. The audience is, after all, made up of cosmopolitan visitors of high standing, yet they are unaccountably being instructed by rural, uneducated, but suddenly polyglot Galileans (v 7). Later, in one of the many trial scenes in Acts, Luke comments that when the Judean authorities "realized that Peter and John were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and took note that these men had been with Jesus" (see 4:13). Moreover, Luke has already made it clear from the upper room scene in chapter one that WOMEN are part of the discipleship group, and Peter's subsequent defense of this insurgency confirms that women are indeed publicly participating in this prophetic revival (2:17f). In other words, boundaries of race, class and gender are being transgressed by a church empowered by the Spirit. This is not an instance of polite, organizational rhetoric about multiculturalism, much less corporate-sponsored "diversity training" from above; this is an inconvenient, in-your-face people’s movement declaring liberation from Babel from below.

Which brings us to the picket line that this very same Holy Spirit (and Dick Gillett) are inviting every one of you to attend this afternoon at the Radisson-Wyndham hotel. WE in this city have witnessed incredible things over the last couple of years thanks to CLUE’s [Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice] new experiment in reviving the church’s traditional solidarity with labor. If you watched Bread and Roses [a film released in 2001] you got a taste for the amazing story of Justice for Janitors. We’ve seen religious leaders share in a fast declared by laid-off food services workers at USC, camping in the on-campus parking lot of United University Church in defiance of a ban and bar order from USC officials. We’ve seen vigils in support of low-wage workers at LAX, and Seder meals and Good Friday services as public liturgies of solidarity. Here is an opportunity to experience the church of the streets, and to learn from the spirituality and courage of the working poor. As they say in the military, all personnel are hereby invited and WILL attend this afternoon’s vigil!

Back to the text. Peter’s defense of this insurrection begins with my favorite line in the whole drama: "These men are not drunk, as you suppose; it’s only nine in the morning!" (2:15). Now if it were happy hour… He then goes on to cite the more sober prophet Joel (Joel 2:28-32a). Joel’s phrase "pouring out the spirit" is notable because in most of the prophetic writings this verb (Heb shaphak) is used in relation to God's WRATH (e.g., Isaiah 42:5; Jeremiah 6:11; Lamentations 4:11; Ezekial 7:8; Hosea 5:10; Zephaniah 3:8), not blessing. It is another indication of the Jubilary abundance being poured out on the streets of downtown Jerusalem on this day. Yet there is plenty of judgment imagery in Peter’s street preaching, too. Indeed, the rest of his speech (vv 22-35, which isn’t shown here) takes aim at the very authorities who have just put Jesus of Nazareth in the electric chair (vv 23,36). "Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus who YOU crucified," shouts Peter in 2:36. He could not have been more politically volatile. His people at the time were firmly under the boot of Caesar's "lordship," and all "messianic" movements were suspect by both the Roman and Judean authorities. Peter is, in other words, challenging his people to transfer their allegiance from executioner to victim (v 38). This kind of speaking truth to power will shortly land Peter in jail (Acts 4), just as it did his predecessors John the Baptist (Luke 3:8ff) and of course Jesus himself. Peter has taken up the baton from his fallen comrades, and the Movement goes on. As [Archbishop Oscar] Romero put it shortly before being murdered at the altar, "I will rise in my people."

Unlike much of our social criticism and protest, however, behind Peter's scathing indictment of the public order is the embodied social alternative of the Spirit-filled church (vv 42-47). By the end of the Pentecost narrative, the cringing little "safehouse" of Acts 1 has been transformed into a dynamic housechurch in which the old vision of Sabbath economics is being rehabilitated. Bread is being broken, the scriptures are being studied, possessions are being transformed back into gifts that circulate around "to whomever had need," and, we are told, it is a nonstop celebration. The doors are open, and folk are being drawn in from the actions in the streets. Sounds strangely like the vision of a "re-peopled, activist, multicultural church" spoken of by Jim Lawson yesterday. Right in the heart of the imperial city. And while that may sound like good news to us, I rather imagine that the reports filed in the Jerusalem Post of old were every bit as skeptical and pejorative as the LA Times was about the Azusa Street revival.

The point of the gift of tongues is to communicate the gospel across linguistic differences, but not to eradicate those differences. That is the difference between true gospel mission and the cross-and-sword kind of Christianity at the service of colonialism that has characterized our history all too often.

"What does this mean?" ask the onlookers (2:12). Indeed! It has often been pointed out that the "sign of tongues" foreshadows the pan-Mediterranean missionary reach of the gospel in Acts. What is usually overlooked, however, is the plain meaning of this story: in this multilingual insurrection Luke is AFFIRMING the diverse cultural contexts in which the new Christian movement will take flesh. Luke's Pentecost "tongues" story is a re-iteration of (and not, as usually preached, a reversal of the alleged "curse" of) the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel. "And at this sound the multitude came together and were confused because each one heard the apostles speaking in their own language" (Acts 2:6). The word for "confusion" (Greek sungcheoo) is the same root word used in the Septuagint text of Genesis 11:7,9. The point of the gift of tongues is to communicate the gospel across linguistic differences, but not to eradicate those differences. That is the difference between true gospel mission and the cross-and-sword kind of Christianity at the service of colonialism that has characterized our history all too often. Unity through the Spirit does NOT mean monoculture — that is the nightmare of imperialism — but a celebration of human diversity.

What a woman, this Holy Spirit! Her presence transforms human life inwardly and outwardly, privately and publicly. She "emboldens" a regular working stiff like Peter, who has known shame and disgrace, to speak the hard truth to his own people in order to bring about change (2:38ff). She empowers the whole gathered church to dance across established (and we should add, judicially enforced!) boundaries of gender, race, and class, building a bridge on her own back across human differences that have become social divisions. And she animates a Movement that embraces "every family, language, and people–to borrow the title of this conference, which is a citation from the vision of the political prisoner John of Patmos–and this Movement, like the Tree of Life, struggles up through the hard soil of history, "whose leaves are for the healing of the nations."

Whenever God's Spirit is poured out on people, our traditions and institutions will be disrupted and disturbed. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God's intervention is always subversive. YHWH is not a domesticated deity, baptizing our way of life, but One who seeks to liberate us from our enslaved condition, to heal us of our wounds and addictions, and to animate us in the practice the justice and compassion. The Acts narrative of Pentecost is a challenge to the entire order of things, personal and political. The Spirit broke out on Azusa Street a century ago and many time since, and she is just waiting to do the same in our own time–if we dare.