Language brings people together, and sets them apart. It welcomes and excludes, sometimes with the very same words. We often say that Pentecost reversed Babel. There is truth in that, but Acts 2 deserves a slower reading. Luke never says the crowd heard a single language. He says each person heard the mighty works of God in the language they had grown up speaking. The Spirit did not teach the Parthians Aramaic; the Spirit put the nations’ native speech on Galilean lips. Babel’s confusion was undone, but its diversity remained, and more than remained: it was embraced and made holy. Willie James Jennings places this insight at the heart of his reading of Acts, and I think he is right. The first thing the Spirit does to the Church is teach it to speak the stranger's language. The Spirit does not ask the stranger to learn ours. That turns our usual idea of belonging upside down. We tend to think people belong once they have learned our idiom, our ways, our vocabulary. Acts 2 points in the opposite direction: a Spirit-filled community takes on the work of learning your language. That is why worship of the Triune God is universal without becoming uniform. Lamin Sanneh argued that this marks the deepest structural difference between the gospel and religions bound to a sacred tongue. The gospel has no single holy language. It can be translated without remainder, and every vernacular it enters becomes a fitting vessel for the praise of God. John sees the same vision at the throne in Revelation 7: every nation, tribe, people, and tongue is present, and no tongue disappears into another. Unity lies in the One being worshiped, not in the language used to worship Him. Language’s power to divide is real, and so is the cost of crossing that divide. It takes years to learn another people's speech well enough to pray in it, laugh in it, and accept correction in it. That cost is no detour from the Spirit’s work; it is part of the Church’s Pentecostal shape. The Word Himself learned Aramaic as a child before He ever preached in it. Every tribe and kindred speaks a language that reveals the astonishing creative genius of the One who calls each of us by name, and calls us by the name our mothers gave us, in the language they spoke.

Leaders who own their mistakes do an honorable thing. It requires that we humble ourselves in the sight of God and in the sight of those we serve. The alternative is to mask and hide, or to project and shift the blame. The cost of that alternative is steep. When we take the path of least resistance, we produce in others what we have refused to face in ourselves.

If church history teaches us anything, it is that renewal is essential from generation to generation. The Spirit that was poured out on the Day of Pentecost of necessity requires the Pentecost Spirit to be experienced as “kairoi of refreshing from the presence of the Lord” again and again, until the consummation of the kingdom, lest the Church become lifeless, having a form of godliness while bankrupt of its power.

We may sense that inner witness that ever goes beyond ourselves in those moments when we catch ourselves thinking, or become aware of a motive stirring quietly beneath the surface. When this occurs, we often find ourselves confronted by a question we never thought to ask. Scripture reminds us that God searches the heart and knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. The Spirit's witness within us is not a stranger's voice, but the patient, intimate address of God, meeting us in the depths of our being, closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Consciousness presupposes a unity it cannot create. Sights, sounds, memories, and desires all come to us as our own, gathered into a single lived field, yet no one thought brings them together. The unity of awareness comes before every part of what we are aware of. Scripture speaks of the One in whom all things hold together, and the mind's coherence offers, through the practice of beholding, a small daily glimpse, as in a mirror, dimly, of the One whose sustaining work is beyond question.

Consciousness is never without a horizon. Whatever we focus on appears against a background we cannot fully take in; an open field that recedes as we move toward it. Read in the light of Christ, the ultimate Horizon, what we experience as boundless is not a flaw in perception but a witness of the Spirit in our depths: the mind is made to live before the Infinite One it cannot contain. The restlessness Augustine named, ‘our heart is restless until it rests in you’, is the signature of a creature made for the Sacred Presence of the Triune God, who gives himself to be known without ever being contained.

Consciousness is given to us before we can make use of it. No one wakes themselves into awareness; it is simply there when we arrive. The sheer fact that we are conscious, before we think a single thought, is a daily sign that the One in whom all things hold together never asked our permission to create us, is the very One who sustains us in existence. Each morning is an act of grace before it becomes a plan.

Growing up Italian, and in particular with grandparents who were born in Bari, with Puglia right next door, we had the privilege of eating homemade Italian foods and desserts native to the region. Since we have been in the Bari-Puglia area, I couldn’t resist stopping at one of the local pastry shops. My eyes caught a tray of “pasticiotti.” Despite wanting to be calorie-conscious, memories of my paternal grandmother making them from scratch led me to eat one. Needless to say, it disappeared quickly. The ricotta cream and chocolate inside the one I chose brought back so many memories. This was real comfort food. I found myself wanting more, at which point I felt compelled to utter the words: “Get thee behind me!” (But…I bought a box to bring with us for the next few days…I solicit prayers that they will last a few days…not because of spoiling…fill in the blanks…). For all of my friends who told me they ate all they wanted while they were here and gained no weight…I believe they need to repent of lying.

When someone on your side does what you condemned on the other side, the standard hasn’t changed. Your willingness to apply it has. Saying “their side is worse” doesn’t answer for what yours has done.

An apology needs to say what happened and take responsibility for it. “Mistakes were made” leaves everyone guessing who did what. People deserve a plain answer, especially those who were harmed.

In Jesus’ parable, the man listing his religious achievements also looked down on the person beside him. That ought to give us pause when our defense of the faith becomes contempt for people.

How careful we need to be when defending a good cause starts requiring us to dismiss facts, excuse cruelty, or silence people. We cannot afford to ignore or dismiss the fact that a cause worth serving deserves better judgment from the people serving it.

In 1513, Rome unearthed an ancient image of the Nile as a god and installed it in the papal garden. The statue now stands in the Vatican Museums’ Braccio Nuovo: a Roman marble sculpture of the river god Nile, carved after an Alexandrian model and discovered near the sanctuary of Isis in Rome’s Campus Martius. Sixteen children climb over his reclining figure, representing the cubits the Nile had to rise for Egypt’s harvest to flourish. He reclines on a sphinx, with a crocodile crouched at his feet. To those who made and worshiped such images, the Nile’s annual flood was not merely a natural event but a source of divine provision. Pope Julius II placed the statue in the Belvedere courtyard, alongside the Laocoön and the Apollo. A decade later, Michelangelo carved Day, Night, Dawn, and Dusk for the Medici tombs. Each figure echoes the Nile’s reclining pose: the torso raised on one elbow, one leg drawn inward, the body’s weight settling into stone. In this way, a visual language once used to depict a pagan river became part of the Renaissance language of Christian mourning. That is how applied semiotics (the study of signs) works: signs are not confined to the context in which they were created. Their meaning also depends on how later viewers interpret them. The Renaissance Church did not destroy the Nile or claim that it was a Christian figure. It could recognize the statue’s artistic power and the truth of the human body it portrayed without accepting its former religious meaning. For followers of Christ, the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, affirmed the dignity of bodily form, even when that form had first been shaped to represent a pagan subject. Sixteen cubits (again, depicted as the sixteen children) signified abundance in Egypt. Christian thought located abundance in another river: the one flowing from the throne in Revelation 22. Michelangelo took the Nile’s reclining pose and gave it to all four figures he carved for the Medici tombs: Day, Night, Dawn, and Dusk. His use of that pose can therefore be read as a meditation on time and mortality. The four figures recline as the river god does, but they do not rest; they twist and strain and press their weight into the stone, so that time itself is shown as restless even while it lies down. Over them stand the dead princes, and above the whole chapel stands the Christian hope of Resurrection, which does not soften death but overturns it, so that the hours lying at the foot of the tomb are no longer the measure of a life but the ground from which it will be raised. What is true does not belong to the idol; it belongs to the One who made the river.

After more than fifty years of preaching, I have come to recognize that perhaps the greatest temptation along this journey has been to speak of an experience before it has truly had the time to become one in me. I have learned that this is a particular hazard for those of us entrusted with the call to preach, perhaps especially in the Pentecostal tradition. When you have walked through seasons when your presence is in demand, you learn, almost by necessity, to turn your experiences into words with a certain urgency, sometimes before they have settled in your soul. In these latter years, I am learning, albeit slowly, and sometimes with pain, to slow down to the speed of life in order to slow down to the speed of revelation. In my earlier years, I imagined that revelation was found at the table where preachers compared notes. But I have seen how easily that table can become a place where borrowed or recycled words are mistaken for the voice of the Spirit. Genuine revelation is always born on the path of transformation, which is never a shortcut but always a three-day journey: death, burial, and resurrection, again and again and again. I am still trying to catch up to that man who was blinded on the Damascus Road so that he might truly see, the one who confessed, “I die daily”.

What a family, a church, or a culture suppresses never disappears. It is alive and well, even though we buried it. Make no mistake, it does come back, and when it does, it is usually in a form everyone recognizes immediately. Recognition however, is not the same as integration. You can name the thing you buried easy enough, and still refuse to let it change you

"Will I be okay?" is a request for a forecast. What the Spirit of God usually returns is a question about our allegiance. We expect, and at times even “demand” a prognosis. He, instead, wants to know from our own heart and lips who we belong to. That exchange is not a dodge. Rather, it is the authentic conversation.

When our body stops obeying, our mind goes shopping for certainty. We reach for a test, a protocol, a forecast, anything that promises to put control back in our hands. The hunger for prediction is usually grief about a loss of control, masquerading as research.

Changing your manner changes your outcome more often than changing your directives or your orders. The person who keeps their responsibility but drops their demands, bows, and asks for mercy is not weaker. Force gets narrated in Scripture. It is never handed to us as a method.

The LOGOS himself does not wait to be asked before He speaks. Some of the most important words you will ever receive will arrive uninvited, on an ordinary day, interrupting a plan you were already carrying out. Unsolicited speech is still grace.