“Would that all the Lord's people were prophets!”
Today is Pentecost, one of the great feast days of the Church. Easter was fifty days ago. Ascension Day was ten days ago. Today, we remember the day the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples with “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” and with “tongues, as of fire.”
Pentecost is the day a crowd gathered in Jerusalem from around the world heard the disciples speaking in what seemed to be their own native languages.
Pentecost is the day the Apostle Peter stood up to speak, and reached back for the words of the Prophet Joel: “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.”
Pentecost is also sometimes described as the birthday of the Church, of the organization that evolved, through many fits and starts, to make possible our gathering here this morning.
The institutional Church is a place of hierarchy, of titles, of rules and regulations. We have creeds and official liturgies, bishops, priests, and deacons. Buildings and insurance policies. Mission statements and strategic plans.
Just as an aside: I’ve honestly always been a bit wary of strategic plans. Not of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is important. Critical, even. But strategic plans? Maybe I’m a cynic, but it seems like we spend all our time creating the plan, and by the time we’re ready to implement it, it’s stale, no longer relevant, and we start the whole cycle over again.
I love the Church, bureaucracy and all. But we can probably all admit that Pentecost doesn’t sound much like a strategic planning session. A rush of wind and tongues of fire. No PowerPoint presentations or slide decks.
Our first reading this morning comes from the Book of Numbers. It’s not one of the great stories of the Hebrew scriptures. Eldad and Medad aren’t famous. Their names only show up in the Bible this one time. But their story is also a Pentecost story.
The Israelites are deep into their journey through the wilderness. They’re tired and hungry — and they’re cranky. Moses is tired too. He says to God, “I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me.” So God tells Moses to gather seventy elders. The selected elders gather in the tent of meeting, and God takes some of the spirit that rests on Moses and puts it on them. And they begin to prophesy.
Eldad and Medad apparently didn’t get the memo about where to meet. They don’t follow the rules. They don’t go where they’re supposed to go. They stay behind in the camp, away from the other selected elders. But God’s spirit comes down on them too, and they start to prophesy right where they are. A young man runs to tell Moses what they’re doing, and Moses’s assistant Joshua begs Moses to shut them up. But Moses replies, “No.” “Are you jealous for my sake?,” he asks Joshua. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!
What is a prophet, anyway?
Prophets in the Hebrew Bible aren’t fortune tellers. They’re truth tellers. They’re people called by God to say what God’s people need to hear. More often than not, they say what God’s people need to hear—but don’t particularly want to hear.
Amos was a shepherd before God called him to confront the rich and powerful of Israel. He’s the one who said, “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Jeremiah described himself as a child when God first sent him to warn Jerusalem of its pending destruction. He called the people to repent. “For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood…, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you.”
Deborah was a prophet and a judge. She sat under a palm tree offering judgment to those who came to her until she was called out to lead an army in a battle that led to forty years of peace.
And then there’s Joel, the prophet Peter quoted on Pentecost. Joel promised that one day God would pour out the Spirit on everyone. Sons and daughters, old and young, slave and free. He promised that Moses’s wish would come true, and all God’s people would become prophets.
On Pentecost, that began to happen. The Spirit was poured out, not just on those you might expect, but on Jesus’s ragtag band of disciples. On men and women, on fishermen and tax collectors, on scholars and on many who probably couldn’t read a word. And a crowd from every nation heard them speaking in their own native tongues.
That’s how the Spirit works, it seems. The Spirit doesn’t match our expectations. The Spirit came to Eldad and Medad, even though they were in the wrong place. The Spirit came to Jesus’s disciples gathered fifty days after Easter, even though Jerusalem was full of people with more learning and more power.
And the Spirit comes still today to those who our cautious institutions and careful strategic plans insist shouldn’t have a voice.
Pentecost is the birthday of the Church, yes. And the Holy Spirit is here within our walls. But Pentecost is also a good time for us to remember that the Spirit sometimes operates in ways and in places we don’t plan for and can’t control. And that prophets can be found in unexpected places.
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Moses’s prayer is an audacious prayer. But it’s a good prayer for Pentecost. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Amen.
Cover image attribution: Miller, Mary Jane. Pentecost (A Second Version), https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59681 [retrieved May 26, 2026]. Original source: Mary Jane Miller, https://www.millericons.com/.