In the Native Language of Each (Acts 2:1-21; Pentecost C; May 19, 2013)

In the Native Language of Each

 

Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost C
May 19, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

For lay liturgists and lay readers, the reading from Acts 2 is a giant slayer: all those strange names for places we have never heard of, much less been!  The main reason for going to seminary, I say, is to learn how to say the names.  It takes about three years.

But the names of the places are not the only strange thing about this story.  While the story makes sense on its own, it’s pretty clear to me at least that its meaning extends far beyond the boundaries of the story itself.

The first part of Luke/Acts begins with people from all over the Roman world going to their hometowns.  The second part of Luke/Acts begins with people from hometowns all over the Roman world coming to Jerusalem.  Luke/Acts moves on from here to have followers of Jesus going from Jerusalem to places all over the Roman world.  As a result of that scattering of apostles, people all over the empire become Jesus followers. 

When Pentecost came and they (whoever we imagine “they” might have been) were all in one place, many spoke all at once in different languages and many others heard this jumble of voices and could pick out their own native language being spoken and all the speech was given to the praise of God.  Out of confusion came common understanding and agreement.  This is the reverse of the theme of the confusion of languages at Babel. 

In fact, I’m not really sure which is the more marvelous: that each disciple was able to praise God in a different language given by the Spirit or that a “United Nations” crowd of different ethnic groups and languages could understand them. 

I am sure that at the heart of these marvels is a commitment: a commitment to the translatability of the message of God’s love.  Wherever the good news of God’s love has gone, missionaries undertook to translate the Bible into the native language of the people.  This isn’t just true of the modern missionary movement of the last two hundred years or so.  It was true in the earliest days.  There are ancient translations into Latin, Gothic, Syriac (a language very similar to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke), Coptic (spoken in Egypt), Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian (the language spoken in Atlanta) to name just a few.

From the very beginning, Christians have insisted on the translatability of the good news.  This seems normal to us, but it’s really a rare commitment.  The Jewish tradition admits translations of the Hebrew Bible into other languages, but really Hebrew is the proper language of Scripture.  To this day Jewish young people learn at least enough Hebrew to be able to read a selection from the Torah at their Bar or Bas Mitzvah.  Jewish religious instruction for young people is often called simply Hebrew School and learning Hebrew is the vehicle for greater learning about Jewish faith and practice.

When it comes to Islam there is an even stricter line drawn around the sacred text.  The Quran is written in Arabic.  You can buy translations, but Muslims are clear that these translations are interpretations rather than the Quran itself.  To read the Quran itself you must learn Arabic. 

Being able to read the Bible in the original languages is important to me.  It really is amazing just how often subtle differences between the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Greek and the word used to translate it in English make a real difference in understanding.  This is why serious Lutherans learn Norwegian so that they can read the works of Martin Luther in the original.

I also believe that every language carries with it a different map of human experience.  In that sense each language is a complete world.  Each language is able to express some thoughts that other languages cannot.  Some ideas or experiences cannot be translated.  But Christians have been convinced from the very beginning that the love of God is not one of those ideas or experiences.  The love and justice of God can be expressed in every language.  God’s good news in short is translatable.

We do not expect people to learn our language in order to learn about God’s love and justice.  We learn their language in order to tell God’s story.

I’m not just talking about learning Spanish or Somali to be able to share God’s love with our newest neighbors.  I am talking about that, but not just about that.  There are lots of people who speak English who are not speaking our language.

Each generation speaks a different dialect of English.  Each generation has had a different experience of the world.  Each generation has a different way of mapping that world.  Trust me when I say that “gay” no longer means happy or care free.  Trust me when I say that for most people grace is not a theological word and when we talk about God’s grace they wonder why we’re saying God is like a figure skater.  When the word God means the one who protects soldiers from bullets and IEDs, helps us sink foul shots and punishes bad people; when love means the same thing as sex; and when justice means what happens in a prison, telling the story of God’s love and justice may require us to come up with different words.

As this story and the rest of Acts make clear whether it’s a matter of the language that people speak or the place where they live, we go to them.  We don’t expect people to come to us.  We don’t expect them to learn our language.  We don’t expect them to conform to our customs.  We don’t expect them to dress like us.  We don’t expect them to know our unwritten codes of behavior for how “good people” are supposed to act.  The challenge that we face today is not how to get other people to come through the doors into our church.  The challenge we face today is how to get us out the doors of our church to go to other people.

Now here is where it gets scary for us, just as it got scary for the early followers of Jesus.  A commitment to going to where people are and telling God’s story in the language they understand—even if that language is English—means that we are committed to letting God’s love and justice take us to uncomfortable places.  We meet other people on their safe ground, not ours. 

It’s scary because we cannot control how those meetings will turn out.  We are likely to be changed by them.  Conversation and conversion both come from the same Latin root that means “to turn with.”  Whenever we have a genuine conversation we risk conversion.  The story of God’s love and justice will remain but everything else is up for grabs when we commit ourselves to going to others.  That’s scary.

The Spirit—that presence of the God of love and justice that propels us into the world as God’s agents—is never very predictable.  We never know what will happen when the Spirit moves among us any more than we know what will happen when we dump eighty balloons on a singing congregation.  We know that our plans will be disrupted.  Our lives, the lives that we had imagined and planned for ourselves, will be ruined.  We will go places we had never intended to go.  We will meet people we had never intended to meet.  We will become people we had never intended to be.

I can testify in some detail that in this way God has ruined my life.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.  A long time ago I decided that I had no idea where I would go, nor whom I would meet.  And here I am and here we are together in Decorah!

I hope for all of us that God will come as fire and burn our plans and our spreadsheets.  I hope for all of us that God will come as wind and scatter the resulting ashes.  I hope for all of us that God will ruin our lives by moving among and within us, urging us beyond the cocoons we would fashion for ourselves otherwise, pushing and shoving and even—to use the word that Mark uses to describe how the Spirit moved Jesus—driving us to meet other people on their ground and to tell the story in their language.  I offer this blessing especially to those of you who are graduating from high school or college or vocational training and have your future all neatly planned: I pray that God will ruin your life.  Otherwise the life that you end up with will only be the one you have been able to imagine, rather than the life that God dreams for you.  Having your life ruined isn’t comfortable or pleasant, but it is an adventure.  And I can guarantee that you will have a story to tell, a story of “the mighty works of God.”Some will scoff and say you’re probably drunk, but others will know that they have a glimpse of what God is like because they have known you.

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