Drunk on New Wine: The Audacity of Celebrating Pentecost
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, May 24, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Acts of the Apostles, the 2nd chapter, verses 1 to 13.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 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. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”1
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Movement One: Happy Pentecost
Happy Pentecost, my friends!
Today we celebrate several important moments in the life of the communal church and the history of the Jesus movement or what we’ve come to call Christianity. First, Pentecost is the birthday of the church. Pentecost is the beginning of what we used to call the church militant, the church on earth. For us, it’s the beginning of the Jesus Movement. Whatever we call it, along with the Ascension or the moment when Jesus returned to Heaven, Pentecost is when the followers of Jesus began to put his teachings into practice without his physical presence among them.
Second, Pentecost is the redemption of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) in a similar way to how the Cross is a redemption of the Garden of Eden. At Babel, God confused the common language of humans because of the power God saw in humanity. And while it’s a sermon and discussion for another day, Genesis 11 is unclear if the confusion of language is because the people at Babel had sinned or if God was scared of God’s creation or if it’s just a good story to explain why there are many languages on Earth.
Third, the story of Pentecost we heard in our scripture tonight is the first demonstration of speaking in tongues and it establishes both of the requirements for genuine and legitimate tongues: the speaker uses a language they’ve never spoken or studied and at least one other person is able to interpret what they’re saying. Indeed, Pentecost even goes further. Not only do the disciples speak in many languages and not only do people from many regions hear their own languages among the cacophony of voices, but when Peter stands up and addresses the crowd, every person in the crowd hears Peter in their own language.
Movement Two: The Cost of the Commission
Before we get too far into the celebration and the miracle of Pentecost, I think we have to sit for a moment with what this day actually cost the people in that room.
Tradition and the history of the Early Church reveal that the majority of the people present at Pentecost, who received the Holy Spirit that day would meet violent and tragic ends.
Peter will be crucified upside down, because he didn’t think himself worthy to die the same way as his Lord. James, the brother of John, will be beheaded on the orders of one of Herodian puppet kings, the first of the twelve disciples to be martyred. Though accounts vary somewhat, among the other ten disciples one will be stoned to death, five crucified, one beheaded, two will be stabbed, and only one, John, will die of natural causes and then while in exile and fleeing people who wanted him dead.
Two of the best-known early preachers, who weren’t even involved in Pentecost, Stephen and Paul, will meet similarly gruesome ends.
These people weren’t celebrating a comfortable religion and they knew it. They knew they weren’t receiving a Spirit that would make their lives easier, safer, or more respectable in the eyes of the people who held power.
No, they were celebrating the beginning of their own ends, and they still did it with joy. In the musical 1776, having approved the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin remarks with dark humor, “If we don’t hang together, we share surely hang separately.”
There’s something in that audacity that I think we need to recover. Pentecost isn’t a celebration of comfort. It’s a celebration of a Spirit that arrives with wind and fire and says: you’re going to go everywhere and say everything, and it’s going to cost you, but we’re empowering you to go anyway.
Movement Three: Drunk on the Spirit
Let’s talk about new wine. There are two important dynamics we need to remember which would have been obvious to first century listeners and readers. First, new wine is just that, it’s new. It doesn’t necessarily need to be of a higher quality than any other wine, it’s simply newer and likely comes from containers which have just been opened. Second, as we hear elsewhere in the Bible, one doesn’t put new wine in old wineskins. It’s a practical instruction because putting in new wine will cause the old wine skins to burst destroying both the skins and the wine. The instruction has also become a metaphor for people who are changed and can’t return to their former circumstances. The disciples have received the Holy Spirit and now they can’t do anything other than move forward.
When we look at this group gathered for Pentecost, we see our distant ancestors in faith; the earliest Christians and Christian leaders. But the crowd sees a bunch of Galilean fishers, tax collectors, and women who clearly had started partying too early in the morning. It’s easy to dismiss them as drunk, as improper, as embarrassing.
But here’s the important part neither the Spirit nor the disciples seem to care.
What the Spirit does at Pentecost is fundamentally subversive. Think about what actually happens in that crowd. The Roman Empire, the most powerful military and political machine the world had produced to that point. A culture whose titular city still exists and whose engineering and technology continue to command admiration today, ran on the logic of uniformity. It had one emperor. It had one legal code. It’s language, Latin, was the language of power. It co-opted and expanded Greek as the language of culture. Every other language was provincial, backward, beneath serious consideration. In enlightened and learned conversations of the 21st century we still discuss “barbarians” even though they were sophisticated cultures and almost all of us here tonight are descended from those barbarians. The prejudices of the Roman Empire still dictate our semantics.
This is how empire works. Empire makes its language, its culture, its values not just superior, but the standard through which and by which everything else is judged. What the Roman Empire improved upon not only existed before their rise, it continues to this day. As we approach Pride Month a week from tomorrow, we should recall that still one of the most difficult spaces for LGBTQIA+ people are churches with majority people of color, including the Black Church. Yet, many cultures indigenous to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, have long and proud histories of not only affirming, but celebrating people we would today call Queer. But those traditions and even the memory of them were violently stamped out by White Europeans citing the supposed “word of God.” So sure were those colonialists and white supremacists that as recently as today, there are white Christian ministers expounding about how Jesus spoke Jacobite English as conveyed in the King James Version of the Bible.
And still into this mess of languages—indigenous, cultural, and those of empire—the Spirit shows up and immediately starts speaking every language. Parthian. Median. Aramaic. Egyptian. Arabic. Amharic. Hebrew. Latin. Greek. The languages of people the empire had conquered, colonized, and dismissed as well as the languages it promoted. The Spirit doesn’t establish a proper theological language that everyone has to learn before they can understand the Gospel. The Spirit meets every person in the sound of their own native tongue.
By using native languages and totally democratizing who as access to God, the Spirit devastates every theology and system that wants to claim God for itself.
The Holy Spirit makes it clear that God doesn’t belong to any one people.
God doesn’t belong to any one culture.
God doesn’t belong to any one empire, and God isn’t in the business of supporting empire—Roman, Greek, European, or American.
The Holy Spirit reveals and reminds the community, the people who will come to be called Christian that the gospel isn’t meant to be managed, translated down from on high, or made available only to those who’ve learned the right language and adopted the right customs. Though the institutional church has long struggled with its thirst for control through dictating who should preach and teach in the church, at Pentecost the Spirit poured out her gifts on all people.
That’s what “drunk on new wine” means theologically. It means losing your inhibitions about speaking truth in ways that make power uncomfortable. It means being so full of something that you stop performing respectability for people who were never going to respect you anyway. It means the Spirit makes you reckless enough to preach like Jesus preached, to live like Jesus lived, and to love like Jesus loved.
New wine doesn’t stay in old wineskins. It ferments. It expands. It breaks containers that were never designed to hold it. Pentecost is the moment when the Spirit says: your containers were too small, and you can’t go back to them again.
Movement Four: What We Did with the Fire
Pentecost deserves an honest reckoning. Because the disciples’ audacity at celebrating even though they already knew that their paths wouldn’t be comfortable or peaceful, is perhaps overshadowed by how quickly the movement Jesus started and these disciples put into practice joyfully even as they were hunted and killed; how quickly that movement fell victim to institutionalization and eventually to empire itself.
It didn’t take long. Within only a few years, Paul, Timothy, Peter, John, James, Jude, and others were creating theologies and deciding who could become a Christian. Less than 300 years later, the faith that began with a group of occupied Jewish people speaking in the languages of the colonized had become the official religion of the very empire that executed its founder. Christianity and its ministers became the chaplains of empire. The cross was planted in soil soaked with the blood of indigenous people who never asked for it. The same Spirit that spoke Parthian and Median was enrolled in the project of teaching everyone to speak Latin, then Spanish and English, and calling it evangelism. We shouldn’t forget that Spanish itself, once the language of conquest and empire is now in the United States regarded as a token of poverty, crime, and otherness with politicians calling for English as the official language of states and the nation.
This is not ancient history. In many parts of the world, including the United States, it’s not even history. It’s current events.
Christian missionaries traveled to Africa, Asia, and the Americas as the advance guard of colonial extraction. Children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools designed, in the words of their sadistic architects, to “civilize” and “Christianize” them.
And the same church that received Pentecost’s fire has, in far too many of its expressions, used that fire to figuratively and literally burn people.
The church and people acting in its name used scripture to construct the theological scaffolding of chattel slavery and the white supremacy that propped up that system for centuries. When widespread, public slavery ended, that theology was repackaged as white supremacy, the war on drugs, and the prison industrial complex.
The church became the primary institution through which LGBTQIA+ people have been told that who we are is an abomination, that the God who made us is ashamed of us.
The church continues to weaponize the language of faith to bless and anoint political power. And it has become, in too many places, the institutional home of Christian nationalism. Parts of the church have become so corrupted that they have ordained the error and sin that God favors the United States above all other nations and that the US needs to be governed by people who look and believe a certain way.
The church has failed not just as an institution. Institutions fail. But the church failed with the wind and flame of the Holy Spirit. It didn’t just forget it had that fire, it put that fire to work for sinful and evil purposes.
We had wind and flame. We had a Spirit who showed up speaking the language of every marginalized people and we used that gift to build borders. We had a commission that ran toward the outsider, the overlooked, the other, and instead we spent centuries deciding who was too outside, too overlooked, too other to belong.
We took new wine and poured it back into the oldest, most brittle wineskins. Despite everything the Spirit told us, we retreated back inside those wineskins even though they were too small, too old, too beyond repair for us to flourish.
Movement Five: The Audacity of Celebrating Anyway
And yet.
And yet, here we are. On Pentecost Sunday. Gathered to celebrate.
This celebration, our celebration, is itself an act of defiance.
When the crowd called the disciples drunk, they were trying to make the whole thing go away. They were trying to use embarrassment as a tool of containment. If you can make people feel ridiculous for what they believe, if you can make the Spirit seem like foolishness, you don’t have to take it seriously. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to face the reality that your encounter with the Holy Spirit has fundamentally changed you.
We celebrate Pentecost because we believe the Spirit isn’t finished.
We believe that the same wind that filled that house is still moving.
The Spirit who acted at Pentecost and is still acting today is anti-nationalist by nature. The Spirit speaks every tongue. The Spirit honors every people. The Spirit’s arrival is the beginning of a movement that will cross every border empire drew, honor every culture empire dismissed, and refuse to be the property of any nation that tries to claim divine sanction for its power. You can’t wrap the Holy Spirit in a flag. You can’t draft the Spirit into your culture war. You can’t put the fire of Pentecost in a wineskin stitched with nationalism and expect it to hold.
The Spirit that was poured out on all flesh is still being poured out on all flesh.
The Spirit has been poured out on Queer people and immigrants and people fleeing violence and people who don’t believe the same thing and people who white Christian nationalism wants to exclude.
If it feels like the Pentecost fire went out, know that it’s always been here among the marginalized, among the disposed, and those with their backs against the wall. The fire’s been among people leaving their home states for legitimate medical purposes. The fire’s been among people shot in schools and mosques while their leaders offer “thoughts and prayers.” The fire didn’t go out it just went underground, into the margins, into the movements, into the bodies of people who were told they weren’t worth the Spirit’s time and kept prophesying anyway.
We celebrate Pentecost knowing it cost the first disciples everything. We celebrate knowing that the church has too often been faithless to its commission. We celebrate knowing there’s still so much work ahead.
We celebrate because despair isn’t the Spirit’s last word.
We celebrate because new wine can’t be put into old wineskins.
We celebrate because they called those disciples drunk and, yet, those disciples changed the world.
Go ahead. Be full of something that makes you reckless enough to speak the truth. Generous enough to throw open doors. Joyful enough to celebrate what God is doing even when you can’t yet see where it leads.
Pentecost isn’t a memory. It’s a commission. And the Spirit is still moving.
Amen.
Acts 2:1-13 NRSVUE