The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The foreign language enthusiast in me looks forward to
Pentecost for the languages! I love to listen to the familiar words of
Scripture fly through the air with strange and exotic flair. Maybe one year we
will even sing the Gloria in Spanish and read in multiple languages at once,
giving ourselves over entirely to the chaotic babble of the first Pentecost?
Or maybe not. Often we think of the diversity
of languages at Pentecost as representing the wild commotion caused by the boundary-breaking
presence of the Holy Spirit. We see the scene in Acts mainly as an image of
hearts and tongues being set on fire for God. But my study of Acts this week caught
me up short. I realized that the miracle on Pentecost was not all about the
languages! The miracle on Pentecost was even greater. It was about a community
of “reconciled difference.”[1]
Let me explain:
All of those Judeans gathered in
Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost shared a common ethnic identity.
They were all Jews. They might have been born—or had parents or grandparents
who were born—in far-flung regions of the Mediterranean world. But like the
disciples, many of them likely understood both Aramaic and Greek. Aramaic and
Greek were common languages learned throughout the region for the purpose of
trade and commerce. Gathered on Pentecost in Jerusalem, the disciples could
have just spoken Aramaic to the crowd, and all of those Phrygians and Cappadocians
would have understood them--no big deal. If the problem that day were one of
mere comprehension, there was no need for a miracle to turn the disciples’
words into Arabic or Syriac in the ears of the gathered crowd. More than
comprehension was at work here.
While they could understand Aramaic, these
Jews would also have had “birth languages” that they spoke at home, less
well-known idioms for use among their families and friends. It is these “birth
languages” that they heard coming from the lips of the disciples. In
monolingual America, this is difficult for us to understand. In the high
mountains of the Swiss Alps, however, I have seen how each small valley has its
own language, spoken and understood only by the inhabitants of that valley.
Everybody learns German at school, and TV shows and newspapers might be in
German, but that is not the language spoken with pride at home. Today, too,
Obadear just read to us in Swahili, which is a common language used in parts of
East Africa. He can also read to us in English, which was a language imposed
upon the people of Kenya by the British colonizers. But I bet that he also
knows a “birth language,” the tribal language that he learned at home from his
parents, a language that is probably very dear to his heart and soul, a
language that is part of his deepest identity.
I’ll never forget the night that I
was called out to the scene of an accident in order to speak someone’s birth
language. I was living in France when our neighbors’ teenage son committed
suicide one night, running the family car straight into a tree. My husband and
I were needed to drive the grieving parents out to the accident site to meet
the police. I remember standing in the dark, staring at the ambulance lights
flashing in powerless circles around the wrecked vehicle, when the boy’s father
collapsed onto my shoulders with the weight of grief. I was young and overwhelmed
and could only stammer in English a weak, “I’m so sorry.” To my shock and
surprise, this Frenchman answered me in perfect, American-accented English.
“Thank you, thank you,” he whispered, his voice filled with profound meaning
that escaped me in the moment. It was only later that I learned that this
grieving neighbor’s mother had been an American. He later told me that what he
needed at that awful moment more than anything in the world was to hear his
mother’s voice. He felt my few, pitiful words as a gift from God. Though this
young and clueless foreigner, the Spirit was speaking his birth language to him
in his time of need.
In the same way, when the Judeans in
Jerusalem began to hear and to speak God’s word in their birth languages, God
was speaking to their inmost being in the languages that were theirs from the
womb. Unlike the many Christian missionaries who went over to Africa and said,
“You had better learn our language and follow our cultural patterns if you want
to know God,” the Holy Spirit was bringing the Good News to each small group,
celebrating and amplifying their diversity by using their birth languages. After
the miracle at Pentecost, the identity of Parthians, Arabs, and Elamites does
not depend on their ability to speak Greek or to share one culture; instead it
is based on the Spirit gathering them as a diverse
Christian people under the Lordship of Jesus.[2]
As Jurgen Moltmann writes, “[When we are in the Holy Spirit] we feel and taste,
we touch and see, our life in God and God in our life.”[3]
The Spirit unites us in Christ, across any distances of culture or language
that our world might create.
Today we
were supposed to have two baptisms. Ortance had asked me last Sunday if I would
baptize her two youngest daughters. I was delighted! First, I was excited to
have baptisms on Pentecost. Second, I realized that our French-speaking friends
from the Congo would fit nicely into our multilingual service today. What a way to show how the Spirit brings us
together in diversity! Cool! So I rushed everything along, urging her that this
was the perfect week for the baptism, orchestrating everything to fit my
brilliant plan. I learned late in the week, however, that Ortance’s friends and
the girls’ godparents could not attend a baptism held today. Embarrassed, she
asked if we could postpone it. While I told her that next week would be fine, I
was so disappointed! “The bulletins will be all messed up,” I whined to the
staff. “And I will lose my Pentecost illustration of unity! And we already
planned to have a cake and special fellowship for them…”
As I listened
to myself grumble, I slowly realized that, not only was I trying to control the
Holy Spirit with my liturgical maneuverings, I was also trying to fit Ortance
and her daughters into our system here at St. Thomas. I was not speaking their
“birth language.” I was not giving them time to invite their friends from
outside the parish to join them. I was assuming that they would want cake at
St. Thomas, rather than traditional foods with their own community. I was not
honoring their culture in making them part of this body of Christ. Proud of
myself for showing off a diverse congregation on Pentecost, I was not, in my
heart, witnessing to Jesus’ love for all people, just the way they are in their
own cultural particularities. I was not preparing for the Holy Spirit to enter
into this place in order to make it a community of truly reconciled difference.
On this
Memorial Day weekend, I do have a story of reconciled difference to offer,
though. Historians don’t agree on the origin of this national holiday, which
did begin right after the Civil War. One very early celebration seems to me to
be the most filled with God’s reconciling Spirit. It took place in Charleston,
South Carolina at an old planter’s race track which had served as a Confederate
prison during the Civil War. In that prison, African-American slaves and
prisoners had died gruesome deaths, and had then been hastily buried there. In
1865, soon after the War, a group of freed slaves gathered to build a fence
around the haphazard cemetery, cleaning it up and putting it respectfully in
order. Then, on May 1, a group of local school children, their teachers,
Christian missionaries, black pastors, and townsfolk both black and white, former
slave and former master, gathered at the spot with songs and armloads of
flowers.[4]
In speeches and sermons, they acknowledged the evil that had happened there,
speaking to one another in their “birth languages,” doubtless astounded to find
themselves standing together and singing praises to the Lord in this
once-cursed place. A community of reconciled difference. A community of peace.
A community filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. A community of witnesses to
the powerfully transforming Love of God.
[1]
Aaron J. Kuecker, “The Spirit’s Gift and Witness: Communities of Reconciled
Difference,” in Christian Reflection:
Pentecost, edited by Robert B. Kruschwitz, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). I am indebted to this article
for my interpretation of this passage.
[2]
Ibid., 15.
[3]
Jurgen Moltmann, quoted in Jill Dufield, Presbyterian
Outlook, “Looking into the Lectionary,” http://pres-outlook.org.
[4]
http://www.snopes.com/military/memorialday.asp
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