Acts
2:1-21
Pentecost
May
24, 2026
Tom Lehrer graduated from Harvard
with a Bachelor’s degree at the age of 18 and his Master’s degree one year
later. He taught math at MIT, Harvard,
Wellesley, and UC Santa Cruz but he’s mostly remembered for his comedy
songs. Learning one of those songs could
earn some extra credit points from my high school physics teacher. I never got past the first few lines,
unfortunately, and can’t do even those without notes, but here’s part of it:
“There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen,
and oxygen,
and nitrogen,
and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum,
and osmium,
and astatine,
and radium
And gold, protactinium,
and indium,
and gallium,
And iodine,
and thorium,
and thulium,
and thallium…”
Then
he runs through the rest of the periodic table and finishes:
“These are
the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there
may be many others but they have not been discovered.”
I definitely would have earned the
extra credit if this song had cited the elements as they were identified by
classical Greek philosophy of the sort familiar to a Greek physician by the
name of Luke who traveled with an early Christian convert and missionary by the
name of Paul. Luke, who wrote a gospel
that carries his name and a book about the Acts of the Apostles, would have
known this list, too: “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”.
Luke tells us how, shortly after
Jesus ascended to heaven on the fortieth day from his resurrection, Jesus’
disciples had gathered together
“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.” [Acts 2:2-4]
The
Holy Spirit had come like wind and like fire.
When Peter tried to explain what was going on, he reached for the words
of the prophet Joel, who had said,
“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
on the male and female slaves,
in
those days I will pour out my spirit.” [Joel 2:28-29, Acts 2:17-18]”
“Pour out” – there’s the water to go with the
air and fire, the wind and flame. And
the earth? That is humankind. That is
you and me.
Way back at the beginning, in Genesis,
there are two descriptions of creation.
There is the grand, sweeping one, where it all begins with water and the
Spirit when
“the
earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the
spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” [Genesis 1:2]
Then there is the intimate,
hands-on version in the next chapter, where
“the
Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” [Genesis 2:7]
God calls the universe into being
through his Spirit like a wind on the ocean.
God brings us to life by breathing into us, sort of like a rescuer
giving mouth-to-mouth respiration.
In
John’s telling, when the disappointed and terrified disciples, exhausted and lost
after Jesus’ crucifixion, were huddled behind a locked door for safety, Jesus
appeared among them.
“Then
the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the father has sent me, so I send
you.’ When he had said this, he breathed
on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” [John 20:23]
And, Jesus being Jesus, he
complicated it by telling them that now that they had received the Holy Spirit
through him, they had to forgive people the way he does, and the whole business
of building up and sustaining and the occasional miracle-working would happen
through the very human, dust-of-the-earth bunch like them and like us.
Somehow,
in fact, it even adds to the wonder that is God that his works are done by
people who are mindful of their limitations.
The miracle on the day of Pentecost was not that the disciples could
speak in foreign languages, but that people understood what they were
saying. The miracle is never what we do,
but what God does, either with or without us, sometimes through us, sometimes
for us, and sometimes despite us. Luke’s
friend Paul observed,
“For we
do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as
your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is
the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our
hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ.
But we
have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this
extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” [II Corinthians 4:5-7]
Consider this little nugget of
trivia: Sir Arthur Sullivan, the man who wrote the music to The Pirates of
Penzance, including the tune that Tom Lehrer stole for “The Elements”, also
wrote the music for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. That may mean something. It may not mean anything. But it’s worth pondering, and I had to fit it
in somewhere.
