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Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles\u2019 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)

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I\u2019m sitting at O\u2019Hare International Airport in Chicago right now, people watching.\xa0 All the tongues, tribes, and nations of the world are busy bustling past me.\xa0 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.\xa0 This is a transitory place.\xa0 A place of comings and goings, but not a place of permanence.\xa0 No one means to live in an airport.

It was actually not so different on the day of Pentecost.\xa0 This large crowd that had gathered from every nation under heaven in Jerusalem that day were all from out of town. They didn\u2019t live in Jerusalem. They lived elsewhere\u2014in 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.\xa0 Something different.\xa0 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.\xa0 Sure, they would still be traveling on, but not as the same people who had come.\xa0 They were changed now.\xa0 They had a foretaste of the kingdom of God.

And they would bring it home with them\u2014this taste of the Kingdom of God breaking out on Earth through the power of the Spirit\u2014Jesus 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\u2019t and hasn\u2019t always\u2014or even often\u2014looked like that. But a community like that is the longing placed in our hearts by the reconciling power of Jesus through the Spirit.\xa0 And so we pray: Holy Spirit, come.

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