Pentecost

Pentecost is one of those neat holidays that doesn't get enough recognition.  When I was in high school (and high school French), my pastor did a neat bit in morning service he called Pentecost Revisited.  His point was that Pentecost reversed the Tower of Babel, because at Babel the LORD scrambled language so that people couldn't understand each other because they were trying to be like God and build their own way to heaven, but at Pentecost, thru the power of the Holy Spirit, all the nations heard the disciples speaking in their own languages.  Why were all the nations in Jerusalem in Acts 2 anyways?  It was for the Feast of Weeks, aka Shavuot, a pilgrimage feast celebrating both the wheat harvest and the giving of the Law back in Moses' time.  You count with great anticipation seven sevens starting from the second day of Passover, which is 50 days, thus the pente- prefix to Pentecost.

So in this dramatic reenactment, we had about 10 people read out a verse, I think Revelation 7:9.  If that's the case, the verse is

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

But we didn't read it in NIV; we each had a language we'd grown up with or studied or were learning in school.  Even read each in turn, it was something of a babble. 

But Pentecost reverses that babble.  And we read together the successive verses in English together (Revelation 7:10 & 12):

Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.

Amen!

Praise and glory

and wisdom and thanks and honor

and power and strength

be to our God for ever and ever.

Amen!

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All that as a leadin... I'm just happy sermon art continued beyond Easter for me to color with Sharpies, even if calligraphic illumination (in the monastic sense) verses didn't necessarily.