Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:41-47) The Spirit gathers people from every tongue, tribe, and nation into the unity of the body of Christ. (OWBTG 30)   I'm sitting at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago right now, people watching.  All the tongues, tribes, and nations of the world are busy bustling past me.  None of them belong here, save for a handful of employees who hold a quiet community with one another, and even they will end their shifts and soon go home.  This is a transitory place.  A place of comings and goings, but not a place of permanence.  No one means to live in an airport. It was actually not so different on the day of Pentecost.  This large crowd that had gathered from every nation under heaven in Jerusalem that day were all from out of town. They didn't live in Jerusalem. They lived elsewhere—in all those other nations under heaven. They had only come to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast of Pentecost and they would soon be going home. Yet something new and significant did happen there that day.  Something different.  The Spirit came, gathered this crowd of wandering travelers, slashed through the barriers of language, culture, and race and turned them into a community of the baptized people of God.  Sure, they would still be traveling on, but not as the same people who had come.  They were changed now.  They had a foretaste of the kingdom of God. And they would bring it home with them—this taste of the Kingdom of God breaking out on Earth through the power of the Spirit—Jesus reconciling a church to Himself from every nation under heaven where all are truly and justly: together. Filled with the Spirit they too would go and tell as witnesses of what they had seen, heard, and experienced of Jesus and His Spirit filled community. As yeast through the dough, the Kingdom of God would spread. And with it, this taste of a church that looks like the bustling lobby of an airport terminal: a church without borders or barriers of race, culture, wealth, or language. Sure, the church wouldn't and hasn't always—or even often—looked like that. But a community like that is the longing placed in our hearts by the reconciling power of Jesus through the Spirit.  And so we pray: Holy Spirit, come.  

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