Covenant Presbyterian Church of Athens, GA

06/14/2026

A warm welcome to Covenant’s newest members - Charles & Linda Jean Jay, Ela Nichols, Marge Striggow, and John Knox!

06/14/2026

A Coat of Many Colors
A sermon preached by the Rev. J. Thomas Buchanan on June 14, 2026
Covenant Presbyterian Church

We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia, 2 for during a severe ordeal of affliction their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means and even beyond their means, 4 begging us earnestly for the favor of partnering in this ministry to the saints, 5 and not as we expected. Instead, they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us, 6 so that we might urge Titus that, as he had already made a beginning, so he should also complete this generous undertaking[b] among you. 7 Now as you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you — so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.

8 I do not say this as a command, but I am, by mentioning the eagerness of others, testing the genuineness of your love. 9 For you know the generous act[e] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. 10 And in this matter I am giving my opinion: it is beneficial for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something. 11 Now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. 12 For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have. 13 For I do not mean that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality between 14 your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may also supply your need, in order that there may be equality. 15 As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.”
(II Corinthians 8:1–15, NRSVue)

As you all know, this summer we are spending time with the lives of some people who help us speak about the gospel in fresh ways. We are calling them “summer saints,” but not because they’re flawless, or because the church has somehow placed halos over their heads. That would be missing the point. The question is much more human and much more interesting than that. How might a particular life — gifted, complicated, limited, generous, unfinished — help us see something of the grace of God?

And today, we start things off right – with Dolly Parton! Now there are many reasons Dolly is beloved. There is her voice, of course – unmistakable from the first note! There’s the humor, too, sharp and self-aware. There are the rhinestones and wigs and high heels, all worn with such confidence that they become less costume than a kind of proclamation. And of course, there are the songs, so many of them, full of heartache and tenderness and wit.

But for our purposes this morning, what matters most is not celebrity. What matters is the shape of a life in which humble beginnings have been remembered without shame, in which faith has taken the form of a wide and loving welcome, in which gifts have again and again become generosity.

Dolly Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, and grew up in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains. Her own official biography describes her life as a “rags-to-rhinestones” story, which may be as perfect a phrase as anyone could invent for her. We know the rhinestones. They sparkle. They announce themselves. But the rags matter too. In fact, the rags may carry the deeper gospel.

That’s where one of her signature songs, “Coat of Many Colors,” begins. As you’ll see, we will hear that song after the sermon today, and it’s worth letting it become more than only a musical offering. It can become an image through which to hear Paul’s words to the Corinthians.

The story behind the song is simple and powerful. When Dolly was a child, her mother, Avie Lee, made her a coat out of fabric scraps because the family could afford little else. As she sewed, she told Dolly the biblical story of Joseph and his “coat of many colors.” Dolly went to school proud of what her mother had made, only to be laughed at by children who saw the coat as a sign of poverty. But Dolly saw something else. She saw love. She saw beauty. She saw a gift. What others called rags, her mother’s hands had turned into something beyond any price.

That’s a good place to stand when we come to Paul. In II Corinthians, Paul is writing about money, which means he is also writing about far more than money. He is encouraging the church in Corinth to participate in a collection for the struggling believers in Jerusalem. This offering is not merely a charitable project. It’s a sign of communion across distance and difference. Gentile Christians are being asked to share materially with Jewish Christians. People who might otherwise have remained strangers are being woven together into one body.

And so, to encourage the Corinthians, Paul points them to the churches of Macedonia. He says that during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty overflowed in a wealth of generosity. It’s one of those strange gospel equations that refuses to balance on the world’s terms: affliction and poverty, plus joy, equals generosity.

Now, we should be careful here. Paul is not romanticizing poverty. Poverty in itself is not holy. Poverty can wound the body and narrow the future. It can humiliate and exhaust. It can deprive people of choices God surely intends them to have. Paul is not telling the poor to be content with injustice, nor is he using their hardship to shame the Corinthians into opening their wallets and pocketbooks.

Paul is talking about grace. It runs all though this chapter: The grace of God given to the Macedonians … the gracious work of sharing in the ministry to the saints … the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who though he was rich, yet for our sake became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. For Paul, generosity is not first a strategy, or an obligation, or a fundraising technique. Generosity is what happens when grace runs loose in human lives!

Grace changes our sense of what we have. Grace changes our sense of what we need. Grace changes our sense of who belongs to us. The Macedonians don’t give because they’ve calculated that they have plenty to spare. They give because joy has opened them outward. They know need from the inside, and perhaps that’s precisely why they can recognize the need of others. Their generosity is not the generosity of those looking down from above. It is the generosity of kinship, of family.

That’s a big part of what makes Dolly’s life such an interesting conversation partner for this passage. She has never seemed embarrassed by where she came from. She has not hidden Locust Ridge behind the bright lights. She has carried it with her. Again and again, she has taken the scraps of memory — poverty, family, faith, mountain music, and creativity — and made something life-changingly generous from them.

I think of the Imagination Library that she launched in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was born and raised. It was inspired by her father, whom she loved deeply, and who could not read or write. What could have remained only a private ache became a public gift. Month by month, books began arriving in the homes of children, from birth to age five. The program has since spread far beyond that one county, sending free books to children in multiple countries.

That’s not generosity as performance. That’s memory turned into mercy. She remembered a father who could not read, and imagined children whose lives might open differently if books arrived with their names on them. She remembered what it was to be poor and made a gift that doesn’t ask whether a child or a family “deserves” it. The book comes because the child matters, and because imagination is sacred, and because a whole new future can be opened by something as ordinary and miraculous as pages in the mail.

This is so very close to Paul’s own vision. Christian generosity is not simply the transfer of resources from those who have to those who lack. It’s the creation of a community in which gifts circulate for the sake of life. Paul says he does not mean for there to be relief for others, and pressure on the Corinthians, but “a fair balance.” Then he reaches back to the story of manna in the wilderness: “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

That is one of the Bible’s most beautiful descriptions of enough. In the wilderness, manna could not be hoarded. Each gathered what was needed. Some gathered more, some gathered less, but when all was measured, by the grace of God, everyone had enough. The miracle was not only that bread appeared in the wilderness, but that God formed a people around enough. Enough for today. Enough for each household. Enough that one person’s abundance did not become another person’s going without.

That’s the gospel economy Paul is inviting the Corinthians to inhabit. And it’s still a hard economy for us to trust, because all of lives we have been trained by a different one. We are trained only to ask what we can protect, what we can store up, what we can secure against an uncertain future. Of course, in themselves, those are not foolish concerns. Prudence is not faithlessness. But fear can so easily become the architect of our lives. Fear tells us that there will never be enough, and that generosity is dangerous, and that if someone else receives more – more help, more attention, more welcome – then, somehow, we will have less.

But grace tells another story. Grace says that life is not diminished by being shared. Grace says that gifts become more truly themselves when they are given away. Grace says that the scraps we might have dismissed — the memory, the wound, the skill, the story, the song, the quiet capacity to care — may become part of something beautiful when love gets hold of them.

That’s why the coat is such a powerful image. The children at school saw rags. Dolly saw her mother’s love. They saw lack. She saw a story that gave her dignity. Now, the gospel doesn’t ask us to pretend that rags are the same as riches. It doesn’t ask us to spiritualize poverty until we no longer feel the urgency of hunger, housing, wages, medical care, literacy, and all the material conditions that shape human life. Paul’s whole project in this passage assumes that material need is real and that faithful people should respond to it materially.

Still, the gospel does tell us that shame is a liar. The world doesn’t get to measure the worth of a child by the cost of her coat. The world doesn’t get to decide that a person’s value rises and falls with income, polish, education, status, beauty, accent, paperwork, or productivity. The world doesn’t get to call a life poor because it arrives in scraps.

That may be the greatest gift Dolly’s story gives us. She stands as someone who has been extravagantly herself — rooted in a particular place, shaped by a particular family, carrying a particular voice — and has turned that particularity outward in blessing. She has not had to become generic in order to be generous. She has not had to escape her story in order for her story to become gift.

There is a word for us here, as the church, for we too are something like a coat of many colors. A community is not made from one perfect bolt of cloth, but from many pieces: different histories, different griefs, different gifts, different questions, different capacities for hope on any given day. Some pieces are bright and obvious. Some are worn soft by years of use. Some carry stories of being overlooked or laughed at. Some have been patched more than once. Yet in the hands of God, these pieces can become more than a pile of scraps. They can become a covering of grace.

Our life together is meant to be that kind of witness. Worship and care, learning and service, welcome and justice — these are not separate scraps competing for space. They are pieces of one garment. They are ways the love of Christ takes shape among us. When food is shared, when children are taught, when the grieving are accompanied, when the lonely are remembered, when neighbors are treated with dignity, when the church refuses to shame the people the world has already wounded, the coat is being sewn – and the thread is grace.

Paul’s invitation to the Corinthians remains an invitation to us: let your abundance become someone else’s enough. Let your gifts move. Let your life be loosened from fear. Let the grace you have received become tangible in the life of another human being.

My friends, the good news is that God has always been making riches out of what the world calls scraps: A manger in Bethlehem … a Galilean teacher with no place to lay his head … a cross outside the city … a frightened group of disciples … a little bread, a little wine … ordinary people, ordinary gifts, ordinary lives … all gathered into the extraordinary mercy of God.

And maybe that’s what we’ll hear, in a few moments, when the song is sung. More than nostalgia, more than a sweet childhood memory. Maybe we’ll hear the gospel in it: that love can be sewn into what seems small; that generosity can arise from unlikely places; that no one’s poverty defines their worth; and that in the economy of grace, even what looks like scraps can become part of God’s enough.

For when God truly moves among us, what we have is no longer purposed only for what it can secure for us. It is gathered into the larger mercy of Christ, where gifts move, needs are met, and no one is left with too much while another is left with too little.

May God make us such a people. May God sew us together in love. And may the grace of Christ make of our many colors something warm enough, strong enough, and generous enough for the world at our doorstep, and beyond.

To the glory of God! Amen.

For more information, check out our website! https://www.covpresat...

06/07/2026

Join us, starting next Sunday at 10 AM, for our Summer Saints Worship series!

06/07/2026

Covenant Church was well-represented at the Athens PrideFest & Parade yesterday afternoon and evening! Thanks to all who helped, whether at our tent or in the parade!

06/07/2026

One Truth, Many Voices
A sermon preached by the Rev. J. Thomas Buchanan on June 7, 2026
Covenant Presbyterian Church

22 “Fellow Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— 23 this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. 24 But God raised him up, having released him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. 25 For David says concerning him,

‘I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken;
26 therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
moreover, my flesh will live in hope.
27 For you will not abandon my soul to Hades
or let your Holy One experience corruption.
28 You have made known to me the ways of life;
you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’

29 “Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30 Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. 31 Foreseeing this, David[d] spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying,

‘He was not abandoned to Hades,
nor did his flesh experience corruption.’

32 “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.33 Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you see and hear.”
(Acts 2:22-33, NRSV)

When the Church tells the story of Pentecost, we usually begin – as we did! – with the spectacle of it all: the sound like the rush of a violent wind, the divided tongues as of fire, the bewildered crowd hearing the mighty works of God in the languages of far-flung places. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Egypt and Libya, Rome and Crete and Arabia — all of them hearing, in their own native tongues, the good news of God.

As we experienced two weeks ago, it’s a scene of holy bewilderment – the people don’t know what to make of it. Some are amazed. Some are perplexed. Some are dismissive. Some assume the whole morning can be explained away by saying that the disciples have simply declared that it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!

And the truth is, even the disciples themselves are wondering, as surprised as anyone else by what has come over them. They had been waiting, as Jesus told them to wait. They had been praying. But I doubt any of them had a strategic plan for this. I doubt Peter woke up that morning and said, “Well, by lunchtime, I’ll be preaching my first sermon.”

But then Peter does stand. The same Peter who had denied Jesus and run away … the same Peter whose courage had collapsed under pressure, now raises his voice and speaks. And from within this great explosion of sound and difference, one clear witness begins to take shape.

That’s where our scripture text begins today. Peter turns to the crowd and says, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs … this man, handed over according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up.”

That’s the center. That’s the claim from which everything else flows. Jesus lived among us as the presence and power of God. Human violence did what human violence does. The powers of this world tried to silence him, shame him, and bury him. But God raised him up. Death could not hold him. The crucified one is risen. The rejected one is Lord of all.

Now, it’s important for us to say with care that Peter’s words are not permission for Christians to turn accusation outward, as though the cross were the fault of some other people over there, long ago. Peter is speaking from within his own people, and the cross exposes something much wider and deeper than one crowd or one people. The cross tells the truth about what the world does when love grows too free, when mercy reaches too far, when truth becomes too dangerous, when God’s reign threatens the arrangements we have come to accept as normal.

But the resurrection tells the still greater truth: that God is not finished when the world has done its worst. This is the great truth at the heart of the Church’s witness. Before all our denominations, before all our confessions, before all our buildings and committees and hymnals and seminaries, there’s this: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is Lord. In him, God has acted for the life of the world. In him, love has gone all the way down into death and come back bearing life. In him, the future of God has broken into the present.

That’s the truth those first disciples declared, and lived, and ultimately died for. And it’s the truth in which we walk now. But as we’ve seen, Pentecost insists that this one truth does not come to us in one voice only. It comes in many voices, many accents, many languages, many histories, many songs. The Spirit does not erase difference in order to create unity. The Spirit creates a unity large enough to hold difference, and still is creating and re-creating that unity today.

From the outside, the rich diversity of Christian traditions and theologies and rituals can make this global faith of ours look like a chaotic mess. There are Catholics and Orthodox, Baptists and Methodists, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, Episcopalians and Mennonites, contemplatives and revivalists, people who cross themselves and people who raise their hands, people who chant ancient prayers and people who sing praise choruses with a drum set and fog machine.

It can be dizzying to consider that the Catholic contemplative, the “frozen chosen” Presbyterian, and the holy roller Pentecostal all confess Jesus as Lord, though no one would ever confuse one with the other!

And naturally, when we talk about Christian unity, we emphasize what we hold in common. We say, rightly, that Jesus is the center. But as we have come to know, Pentecost does something more daring than that. Pentecost also teaches us to honor the differences — not to treat as threats to be managed, but as varied gifts through which the Spirit may speak.

This is not a lazy tolerance that flattens everything out and pretends all distinctions are unimportant. Real generosity of spirit does not require us to stop caring about truth. It asks us to care deeply enough about truth to recognize that none of us possesses the whole of it by ourselves.

We need voices other than our own. We need traditions other than our own. We need witnesses who have seen what we have not seen, suffered what we have not suffered, cherished what we have neglected, and learned to speak of God in a language that may at first sound strange to our ears.

Look, few people enjoy being Presbyterian as much as I do. I love the breadth and seriousness of our tradition. I love its insistence that faith is not opposed to reason, that loving God includes loving God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind. I love its grand vision of the sovereignty of God, its deep trust that grace is prior to all our striving, and its conviction that Christian faith is never merely private. At our best, we have long understood discipleship as public, communal, and transformative, a life lived before God for the sake of the world.

But my own faith has been stretched and enriched by sojourns among Christians whose languages of faith were different from the one into which I was born. From the evangelicals of my childhood and youth, I learned a passionate love and reverence for Scripture. Among Lutherans, I came to understand why so many cherish the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In Pentecostal spaces, I encountered a Spirit-driven passion that could melt some of my icier instincts, and among the Charismatics, I saw with my own eyes a deep trust that God still heals, still moves in the Church with power. Among Episcopalians, I came to appreciate the grammar of worship, and the dignity and richness of an ancient liturgy. And through the Catholic monastic tradition, I have learned something of the volumes that can be spoken in silence.

All these traditions, of course, have blind spots. But so does ours. And the gifts of all of them are real. And when we receive them with humility, they don’t make us less Presbyterian, or less rooted, or less clear about what we believe. They make us more generous, more attentive, more alive to the wideness of God’s work.

Pentecost tells us that the Spirit loves translation. The Spirit takes the one truth of Jesus Christ and lets it be spoken in all the tongues of the earth. And in a way, that’s part of what we will be exploring this summer in the 2026 edition of a worship series we call “Summer Saints.”

Now, let me be clear again about what we mean by that. We’re not saying that every person covered in this series is a Christian “saint” in the formal sense. Some are Christians. Some not so much. Some had complicated relationships with faith. Some were deeply shaped by the Church, while others stood at a distance from it, or saw with painful clarity some of its failures. But each of them, whether intended or not, may help us hear some echo of the truth of the gospel more clearly:

• Dolly Parton will help us think about joy, generosity, dignity, and the grace of turning one’s gifts outward for the good of others.

• Howard Thurman will lead us inward, toward the deep sanctuary of the soul, where prayer becomes strength and silence becomes courage for the work of justice.

• Jane Goodall will invite us into wonder and reverent attention, teaching us to see the living world not as background scenery for human ambition, but as fellow creation held in the care of God.

• John Lewis will remind us that faith sometimes has to put on its shoes and cross the bridge, that love in public may very well look like courage, discipline, and good trouble.

• The Beatles will let us listen again to the longing for love and belonging that runs through so much human life, while asking at the same time to what kind of love the gospel truly calls us.

• Toni Morrison will bring us to memory, belovedness, trauma, and truth, insisting that no community can become whole by forgetting what must be remembered.

• And Flannery O’Connor will close the series by reminding us that grace is not always gentle in the ways we expect. Sometimes it comes as disruption, as judgment, as the strange mercy that breaks open our illusions so that something true can finally begin.

These are some very different voices! Appalachian and English, scientific and contemplative, prophetic and literary, joyful and severe. They don’t say the same thing. They don’t see from the same angle. They don’t all belong neatly together.

But that, really, is exactly the point. If Pentecost is true, then the Church should not be surprised when the Spirit uses many voices to awaken us. We should expect that the truth of Christ, though one, will reach us through a diversity of testimony, song, silence, courage, beauty, lament, laughter, and the hard grace of being told the truth.

The danger, of course, in a series like this is that we make much of the witness to the neglect of the One to whom the witness points. But Peter doesn’t stand at Pentecost to make much of Peter. He stands to proclaim Jesus. The languages are many, but the gospel is one. The voices are many, but the living Christ is the center. And that will be our task this summer: to listen generously, to discern carefully, and to keep looking toward Jesus, the crucified and risen one, in whom all truth finally finds its home.

My friends, the Spirit is still speaking in languages we did not grow up knowing. The Spirit is still widening our hearing. The Spirit is still gathering scattered voices into one great fellowship of love.

And the promise of Pentecost is that, by God’s grace, we may yet learn to hear and live ever more fully into our purpose and destiny – to the glory of God! Amen.

For more information, check out our website! https://www.covpresat...

05/24/2026

Learning a New Song
A sermon preached by the Rev. J. Thomas Buchanan on May 24, 2026
Covenant Presbyterian Church

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” (Acts 2:1-21, NRSV)

One of my earliest experiences of church was singing in the young children’s choir, for kids between about five and seven. There’s even this horrifying picture in my parents’ house to prove it. I don’t remember anything we ever sang, but I certainly remember the name of the choir. It was pretty unforgettable: The Joyful Noise Choir. Have you ever heard of a better name for a young children’s choir?

It was only years later, as I was first starting out in Christian Education leadership, that I truly began to understand and appreciate that name. If you’ve ever taught Sunday School or Vacation Bible School, or led young children through a Bible story or craft or prayer, you already know that it’s quite an experience. But for me, the best of all is teaching kids a new song. I’ve gotten to do that a lot over the years, and every time, I’ve been reminded that learning a new song is a vulnerable thing.

Inevitably, there is some awkwardness at first, as I sing the song out loud for the kids to hear. And I get looks: looks of amusement, embarrassment, befuddlement, and sometimes even derision! But then I ask them to join in as I sing it again. At first there is usually some hesitation, the kids making a kind of low babbling sound, as no one child wishes their voice to stand out or to be heard getting the words wrong. But eventually, with patience and perseverance — and having something to do with their hands helps — the kids begin to get it. They truly start to make a joyful noise, as they forget themselves and just become part of the music. And of course, the real test is whether they take the song home and regale their parents with one round after another of what they learned!

There is something about that movement — from awkward hesitation to joyful participation — that helps me imagine Pentecost. Because before Pentecost became a festival day with red paraments and vivid readings, before it became “the birthday of the Church,” it was first a room full of ordinary people waiting for a promise they did not yet understand. They had seen the risen Christ. They had heard him tell them to wait in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. They had been told that the Spirit would come. But they could not have known what it would sound like when it did.

And then, suddenly, the room is full of sound. Luke tells us that when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and rested on each one. And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

What had been waiting becomes movement. What had been hidden becomes public, and what had been gathered in one room spills into the streets! The Spirit does not arrive as a private feeling tucked safely inside the soul. The Spirit arrives as wind and flame and speech! The Spirit makes the gospel audible. And at first, it must have sounded like chaos. A rush of wind, and a roomful of Galileans speaking languages they had no business knowing. To those at a distance, perhaps it sounded like nothing more than babbling. To those nearby, it was bewildering enough that some assumed these people must have been drunk awfully early in the morning!

But then someone in the crowd hears something. A pilgrim from Parthia hears the mighty deeds of God in his own tongue. Someone from Egypt hears the praise of God in the language of home. A traveler from Rome hears words that don’t need translating. People, from many different lands, each begin to realize that this strange sound is not meaningless after all. It is a message. It is praise. It is good news, and it has found them where they are.

Notice that the miracle is not that everyone suddenly speaks the same language. The miracle is that the good news of God becomes hearable in many languages at once! The Spirit does not erase Parthian or Egyptian or Arabic or Latin. Rather, the Spirit honors the languages people already carry in their bodies and memories, the words shaped by mothers and grandmothers, by marketplaces and lullabies, by prayers and arguments and ordinary life. Pentecost doesn’t solve the problem of human difference by making everyone sound alike. It’s something far more beautiful. It is the Spirit drawing difference into communion. It is the many-voiced music of God.

And that matters because so much of human history has been driven by the fear of difference. Again and again, people have decided that unity must mean uniformity, that peace requires control, that belonging depends on leaving some essential part of yourself outside the door. Empires have always preferred one official language, one sanctioned story, one approved way of being human.

But Pentecost gives us another vision. The Spirit comes upon the gathered disciples, and the first public act of the Church is not to defend its boundaries. It is to speak in ways others can hear. It is to make room, through the power of God, for the stranger to recognize the sound of home inside the praise of heaven.

That’s where Psalm 98 comes in, so appropriately, for today. “O sing to the Lord a new song,” the psalmist cries, “for God has done marvelous things.” And then the psalm keeps widening the circle of praise. The ends of the earth have seen the victory of God. The whole earth is invited to make a joyful noise. The sea roars, the floods clap their hands, the hills sing together for joy. It is a breathtaking vision: creation itself joining in!

But Psalm 98 is not merely interested in religious enthusiasm. The new song rises because God is coming to judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity. That language can sound severe to us, because judgment has so often been preached as threat. But in the imagination of Scripture, God’s judgment is also hope. It means God sees the truth. It means the world is not finally abandoned to violence, greed, contempt, or lies. God’s judgment is the promise that the world can be set right.

So, the new song of Psalm 98 is the song of creation straining toward healing. It is the song of the poor lifted up, the forgotten remembered, the wounded restored, the stranger welcomed, the earth itself released into praise. It is the song of God’s steadfast love becoming visible in the life of the world!

And on Pentecost, that song finds new voices. Peter, of all people, stands to speak. Peter, who so often misunderstood. Peter, who promised to be brave and then denied Jesus three times. Peter, who knew firsthand what failure tasted like, but who also knew the power of mercy. That Peter stands up with the eleven, raises his voice, and declares that this is what the prophet Joel was talking about: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

All flesh. And that’s where his words begin to stretch beyond anything the crowd could have expected. God says, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young shall see visions. Your old shall dream dreams. Even upon my servants, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.”

It is the democratizing wonder of Pentecost! The Spirit is not reserved for the spiritual elite, not guarded by gatekeepers of respectability. The Spirit is poured out on sons and daughters, young and old, enslaved and free, the expected and the unexpected. Those who were used to being spoken for now speak. Those who were used to being silenced now dream. Those who were treated as marginal now become the vanguard of God’s future.

Pentecost is the day the microphone gets passed around!

And of course, that can be unsettling. It was unsettling then, and it remains unsettling now. When the Spirit gives voice to people we have not been trained to hear, when the Spirit speaks through accents or bodies or histories the world has dismissed, the first response is often bewilderment. Sometimes derision. Sometimes the quick assumption that this cannot be of God because it doesn’t sound like what we already know. But the Spirit has never promised to protect us from surprise. The Spirit promises to lead us into truth. And truth, in the hands of God, is always larger than the rooms we build to contain it.

This is where Pentecost becomes so much more than a story about long ago. It becomes a question for the Church now: What would it mean for us to become a community shaped by this many-voiced Spirit? What would it mean to believe, down deep in the marrow of our life together, that God’s new song is not a solo performance by the polished and confident, but a chorus in which every voice touched by grace has a place?

It would mean that worship is more than something we attend. It is where we are gathered again and again into the music of God. It would mean that Christian formation is more than learning religious information. It is learning the language of compassion, the grammar of hope, the rhythms of justice, the habits of peace. It would mean that welcome is more than friendliness. It is the holy work of making sure people can hear the good news in a language their lives recognize.

And it would also mean that the Church is a kind of rehearsal space for God’s new world. Week by week, we gather to rehearse the song the Spirit is teaching us. We practice speaking the truth in love. We practice listening across difference. We practice mercy in a culture well-rehearsed in contempt. We practice generosity in an economy that teaches fear. We practice peace in a world addicted to violence. We practice belonging in a time when so many are told, in ways both subtle and overt, that they don’t matter.

And just like children learning a new song, having something to do with our hands helps. Nothing teaches the melody of discipleship quite like embodied love. Feeding neighbors. Visiting the sick. Welcoming children. Standing with those whose dignity is under threat. Caring for creation as a sacred trust. Building tables long enough for people the world keeps trying to push away. These are not distractions from the song. They are how the song gets into us. They are how the melody moves from our mouths into our muscles, from our prayers into our practices, from the sanctuary into the streets.

But we must be honest: we’re still learning. Our practicing often sounds like babbling. We hesitate. We lose the tune. We might come in at the wrong time. We grow self-conscious. We worry that our voices are too small, too uncertain, too flawed to matter. Some days, the song of God’s justice and peace feels almost impossible to sustain beneath the noise of the world.

But Pentecost tells us that the song does not begin with our confidence. It begins with God’s own breath. That is the grace of this day. The disciples don’t conjure up the Spirit by their own spiritual intensity. They don’t manufacture wind or kindle flame by force of will. They are gathered, waiting … available. And then God pours out what God has promised. God gives breath, gives speech, gives courage. God gives the song.

Friends, the Spirit is still being poured out. The wind is still moving through closed rooms and tired hearts. The fire is still resting on ordinary lives. The new song is still rising in places the world overlooks: in classrooms and hospital rooms, in food pantry lines and protest marches, in quiet acts of forgiveness, in courageous words spoken at the right time.

And maybe the real test is still the same as it was with those children learning a song in chapel or choir or Sunday School. The test is whether we take it home – whether it goes with us into our conversations and commitments, our politics and prayers, our spending and serving, our welcome and witness. The test is whether, by the grace of God, the song becomes more than something we sing – and becomes something we live.

So, Come, Holy Spirit! Teach us your new song! Give us courage to sing it in a world that has grown accustomed to weary tunes. Open our ears to the voices we have not yet learned to hear. Loosen our tongues for praise and truth. Set our hands to the work of love. Draw us, in all our difference, into the joyful noise of your coming kingdom. And may the song you place within us rise from here in every tongue, through every life, for the healing of the world you love – to the glory of God! Amen.

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