THE LANGUAGES OF GOD
Texts: Genesis 11: 1-9; Acts 2: 1-20
Several years ago the United Church of Christ put out a video on the internet called “The Language of God.” It has flash pictures of all kinds of people in all kinds of activities -- worship, rebuilding houses, inner city youth camps, justice demonstrations, and many other activities -- with words that describe the UCC such as compassion, love, community, justice, hope, equality, praise. What it suggests, of course, is that the UCC is committed to all of these things. As I watched the video, I couldn’t help but think that this video should not be just about the UCC but all Christians for we are all called to be faithful to the God who sent Jesus into this world to proclaim God’s kingdom.
In his book, The Language of God, Francis Collins, a former atheist and former director of the human genome project, describes his intellectual journey that led him to embrace a faith, not like the one in which he was raised, but a new kind of faith that is seen through new eyes. As Collins and other scientists who have written on this subject all state, although faith is an experience, it does not shut out the intellect. Being open to God means being open to all possibilities, even the ones beyond our immediate vision.
Scripture tells us that something extraordinary occurred on that day of Pentecost when devout Jews were gathered to remember God’s gift of the Law to Moses. Although most of us may look askance at the emotional experiences that films like Elmer Gantry or The Apostle depict, anyone who has ever been to an old fashioned revival meeting can get some sense of how people get caught up in the emotion of such an event. There is a word for it: crowd behavior.
Psychologists tell us that we human beings are often influenced by those factors. It’s one of the reasons why people in groups behave in ways that they never would if not for the influence of the others. We are influenced by the experience and behavior of others to be sure. This propensity to such influence was a deep fear of our Nation’s founders, something that can be seen in the debates of the Continental Congress.
Looking beyond the literal details of the story of Pentecost allows us to better understand why this event was so important in the formation of the Christian community. It was clearly a formative event in the life of the small community that met together after their shared experiences of their new lives in Christ. After Pentecost, the inward looking fearful community became an outward facing community that reached out to the world to share the good news of God’s new realm of righteousness.
The word righteousness is a Scriptural term that encompasses more than just ethical conduct; it means God’s justice, the moral framework of the universe. It is a word that means that God is faithful to the covenant that was established between God and the human race; it is a term that demands our response in relationship to God and to others.
The writer of Luke-Acts provides us with a new understanding of how God operates in our lives. The writer did this by a description of a certain event, but more importantly, by describing how Peter after this event is bold to proclaim to those assembled what has come to be known as Salvation History, a detailing of who Jesus was, his relationship to God -- which by the way, if you read carefully is not Trinitarian in the traditonal sense. It’s important not to take words and ascribe to them our theology.
Pentecost represents the new community in Christ reaching out into the world and its beginning as the church. It is the first lurch into the world beyond the small community of Galileans who were with Jesus. As the community morphed into the church, it took many more lurches before the church encompassed the non-Jewish world, before it began to realize that old rules, such as dietary laws and gender separation during worship, were not part of the radical claims of Jesus of equality and justice. Pentecost meant even more.
It meant reaching out into communities where languages, customs, beliefs, and lifestyles were different. It meant being a new voice of God in the world, one that was and is open to everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, custom, legal status, sexual orientation, and a host of other factors that we as human beings use to differentiate ourselves from each other.
One reading from Hebrew Scripture that is often paired with the Pentecost story is the story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, all people spoke one language and decided to get together to build a tower to the heavens. The God depicted in Genesis did not find this amusing; in fact, the God of Genesis was downright upset to realize that people could get together in such a fashion.
So, the story goes, God made people speak different languages so they could not understand each other and became confused and angry. What Pentecost says to us is that all those different languages do not need to divide us; in fact, they can unite us in a higher purpose: to establish God’s rule of justice and peace on earth.
Just outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem is a church called the Pater Noster, Latin for “our father, the traditional site where Jesus was supposed to have first recited what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. Large stone plaques line the walls of the courtyard with the Lord’s Prayer carved in every conceivable language, a statement of unity in a divided Christendom.
At the Pater Noster church there are people not just searching for the Lord’s Prayer in their own language but attempting to recite it in other languages. You see people of faith from every boundary, every racial divide, every difference of age and gender reciting this extraordinary prayer.
Pentecost calls us to break down the walls that Babel created, to care for each other in ways that are faithful to the Gospel. That is the message of Pentecost: the language of God is one of diversity and justice, inclusion rather than exclusion, embracing not rejecting. The language of God is the variety of our human existence and we are called to reflect all that in our lives by fully loving and caring for the other.
Let us pray: You, O God, who created such diversity in our human race, help us to understand that the differences of language, race, and culture are just the reflections of your infinitude. May we reflect your call to live in covenant with each other and to share your good news of welcome with all whom we meet. In the name of the One who crosses all boundaries, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.