What is Pentecost really about? This Pentecost Sunday sermon on Acts 2:1-21 goes deeper than tongues of fire and a rushing wind — all the way down to the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot, the meaning of firstfruits, and why the Holy Spirit fell on that specific day in that specific room with those specific people.

Pentecost didn't replace Shavuot. Pentecost is Shavuot arriving at its appointed harvest. The feast of firstfruits, the giving of Torah at Sinai, and the scroll of Ruth — three layers of the same feast, all pointed in the same direction, all saying the same thing for a thousand years: the harvest was always headed past the border.

When the Spirit fell and every person heard the mighty works of God in their own language — that wasn't a new program. That was the grain head breaking the surface of a field that had been growin ...