John 20:19-23
When I was in the seventh grade at Anacapa Junior High school. I took my first stab at a foreign language. The language was Spanish, and we thought it was all just for fun. We weren’t mature enough to think of language as communication and culture. We delighted in making up our own spanglish sentences. "Silla" is the word for chair. Our teacher would point to a chair, and we would say in unison, "Este es la chair." When I was sixteen I went to Utila Bay Island off the coast of Honduras with a program called Amigos de las Americas. There, in our little clinic where we gave out medicine to children who had worms, I wished I had paid more attention to the serious joy of being able to communicate across cultures. All in all I had five years of formal Spanish, now it has been so long, I am mediocre at best.
In seminary I managed A's in Greek and Hebrew, but fortunately you didn’t have to speak those dead biblical languages just translate written passages. Now I am taking German with the hope that I will be able to pass a reading exam in german in graduate school if I ever get back there. I also tackled Japanese when I was a college student and traveled to visit a young man who had been an exchange student in high school and lived with my family. Unfortunately all I could ever seem to remember out of the simple conversational phrases we learned was "Watack shi wa Amerika desu." Which means I am an American, something you really don’t need to memorize if you look like me in Japan. All of which makes me an American, for if a tri-lingual person speaks three languages, and a bi-lingual person speaks two languages, a person who speaks one language—even after studying four of them—must be an American. Even if you speak only one language, your accent can betray you. Identifying a person's regional dialect suggests a number of things about them. My father was from the south. I can distinguish between redneck slang and an aristocratic drawl. My father’s family definitely came from the white trash end of that spectrum. Seminary in Iowa acquainted me with the mid-western twang, and internship in Detroit introduced me to black southern/moved north accents. In the women's room at the County Line BBQ restaurant on San Antonio's famed Riverwalk, I heard a hilarious soundtrack called "How To Talk Texan." Here in California, people love to ridicule "Valley Girl" slang—really, I mean, like, you know! We have had fierce linguistic, public policy and educational debates about language here in California and now we even have a governor who has added new pronounciations to the mix.
Historically, languages have been a virtual weapon by which people have exploited one another. In the Old Testament the Gileadites slaughtered 42,000 Ephraimites when the latter were unmasked as the "enemy" simply because they incorrectly pronounced the word "Shibboleth" as "Sibboleth" (Judges 12). In the former Soviet Union, a country that used to be comprised of hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups in eleven time zones from east to west, the government stripped people of their ethnic identities by forcing everyone to speak Russian.
Once a parishioner of mine from Helsinki remarked to me with pride that although Sweden had ruled Finland for 700 years they never could take our language. So too in the Old Testament: the orphan Moses learned Egyptian and its customs, while the Babylonian exiles Daniel and his friends were "re-educated" not only in a new language and literature, they were even given new names.
Christians have used language as a tool of subjugation and a rationale for division. Early on strife emerged between Greek-speaking Jews who complained that the Aramaic-speakers overlooked their widows in the distribution of food for the poor (Acts 6). A thousand years later the Latin-speaking, Catholic west and the Greek-speaking, Orthodox east divided in the Schism of 1054. During the Protestant Reformation the Catholic Church banned translations of the Bible into the everyday language of the people: "Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics...As a result between 1567 and 1773 for 200 years - not a single edition of an Italian language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula."
How outrageous, then, that in the transition from the earthly days of Jesus to the age of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the new Christian church-community, God featured human language to symbolize his emerging kingdom. So Luke describes that first Pentecost, the term "Pentecost" comes from the Greek word pentekostos, meaning fiftieth, from which one of the most important feasts in the Jewish calendar derives its name. Fifty days after Passover, the Jews celebrated the "Feast of Harvest" or "Feast of Weeks" .
Centuries later, after their exile to Babylon, Jewish Pentecost became one of the great pilgrimage feasts of Judaism, when Jews scattered all over the world returned to Jerusalem for worship. Since about the second century, Christians have celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the death and resurrection of Jesus, on the Jewish feast of Pentecost. On this day Christians celebrated the descending of the Holy Spirit and birth of the church. After Easter and Christmas, Pentecost marks the most important celebration of the Christian calendar.
In this second lesson from Acts, Luke describes "God-fearing Jews from every nation of the world" as having converged upon Jerusalem for Pentecost; he specifies at least fifteen ethno-linguistic groups. Then, in a miracle either of speaking or of hearing, the Holy Spirit descended upon the first believers, and they "began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them....Each one heard them speaking in his own language...How is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!" Whatever "speaking in tongues" might mean, at least here it involved known languages.
When some people in the crowd ridiculed the believers as drunk, Peter explained that a momentous time had arrived in salvation history, a time when God was now calling not only Jews but "all people" to a life of the Spirit in His kingdom. Paul explains the radical implications of this. Just as the human body is one body with many parts, so too the Christian community draws people from every language and nation to form a single family.
The new community of the Spirit celebrates, incorporates, and then transcends barriers of race, social stratification, economics, ethnicity, language, and gender. Diversity without division, and unity without uniformity, ought to characterize the Jesus Way. By the time you reach the end of the Bible and John's Revelation, the reality inaugurated at Pentecost has culminated in a linguistic extravaganza that pictures God’s kingdom as populated by "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language". Pentecost and the birth of the new unified-but-diverse Jesus-community thus reverses the curse of the tower of Babel where human language divided humanity in a disharmony of confusion.
We often go to places where we anticipate that something good is going to happen. We go to parties because we know that it is likely that the friendships and the socializing, the good food and the laughter will produce an experience that will be memorable. Or we go to favorite vacation spots because we know that there we are likely to experience a quality of life, a joy and a peace in our life, that we cannot find in the busyness of our everyday routine. We go to Holy Communion because we anticipate, although we cannot explain it, there is something of God that we can touch and taste that will feed our souls.
In all those experiences there is more a waiting than a doing. And the less we think about them, and the less we try to analyze them, the more we just let them happen, the more likely it will happen. At Pentecost it was like that too. In some spectacular way God poured out a new spirit upon the disciples as they quietly gathered. No matter who they were, or what they had done, those who had denied and abandoned Jesus in his need, those who had sometimes lived out their faith well, and sometimes not, all of them gathered all of them empowered to spread the Good News of God’s love for all; diversity without division, unity without uniformity.
I used to love to watch the television show "The Wonder Years." It aired when Pierce was young and I watched a lot more television. What drew me to the show was that the main character was growing up in the same time period I grew up – the middle ages. In one of the episodes Winnie Cooper, the beautiful girl next door was in a play and she forgot her lines and Kevin Arnold, who was desperately in love with her was the light man for the production. In the narration which constantly spoke what Kevin was thinking, he said, "I loved her so much I felt like I was holding her up with the light trying to get her to remember her lines." When she finally remembered her lines, a solitary tear rolled down Kevin's cheek. I know this isn’t the perfect illustration, but I am thinking. The Holy Spirit is the light holding us up, helping us to remember our connection with all the people of the earth, conveying the love which never fails. Amen.