ACTS 2:1-11

PSALM 104:24-32

1 CORINTHIANS 12:4-13

JOHN 14:8-17

Sermon – June 04, 2006

I love Pentecost – and not just because the liturgical color for Pentecost is my favorite color, red. I love Pentecost partly because there is no secular celebration of Pentecost. We are not trying to celebrate a major Christian Holy Day while being bombarded with ads reminding us “how many shopping days there are left until Pentecost.” There is no giant rabbit standing outside candy stores two months ahead of time who seeks to define and commercialize what our holy celebration means. There are no reindeer or chocolate eggs for Pentecost. (After all, how could you make a lawn ornament or a candy treat representing the Holy Spirit?)

O.K., so what are we celebrating? We are celebrating the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to his followers right before his ascension into heaven. Jesus said in Acts 1:8, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

So, seven weeks after Easter (and seven weeks after Passover) Jesus’ followers were in Jerusalem along with many of their fellow Jews from far and near for the great pilgrimage feast which celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

These first followers of Jesus, remember, were all people from Galilee, a rural area which was diverse but not cosmopolitan. Most of them would not have been fluent in any language except their native Aramaic, though some would have known some Hebrew, perhaps some Greek or Latin to communicate with the Romans when they couldn’t avoid doing so. But Galilee was hardly the world center for any First Century Berlitz instruction, and provincial fishermen didn’t go in for being United Nations translators.

Yet suddenly they were able to speak – not “in tongues” as in glossolalia, private prayer languages which required interpreters, but in recognized languages which they had never studied. And their speaking was for a purpose: to reach these pilgrims from Iran, Iraq, Arabia, Libya, Asia Minor, Israel, Greece and Italy exactly so they would respond “in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

The Day of Pentecost really takes us back to the Church’s season of Advent, when we sang “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” “Emmanuel” means God with us. At Christmas we celebrated the awesome and wonderful reality that God came to earth as a human being, with all that means. At Pentecost, we celebrate the fact that God speaks our language, whatever that is. That truth is more profound than it might sound at first.

Alone among the great monotheistic religions, Christianity has no sacred language. The Hebrew language is crucial to Jewish identity and to Jewish survival through the millennia, as Jews spread to many countries and endured persecution as well as subtler but equally dangerous temptations to “blend in” with the cultures of the places where they settled. So it is that, even in Jewish worshipping communities which do not worship primarily in Hebrew, some knowledge of Hebrew is prized and maintained from generation to generation among the laity as well as the clergy.

Torah Scrolls – meticulously hand-copied parchment copies of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures – must be exactly right – no corrections, no erasures. Tied to that is the belief that these words are divinely given, and some of them are literally the words of God – through Moses to the people – and they were, and are, in Hebrew.

Muslims regard Arabic as their sacred language and the Koran as a document literally dictated by God to Muhammad. As such they have enormous respect for the printed words of the Koran – even more than the average Christian has for a Bible. Some devout Muslims, in fact, think that it is truly impossible to translate the Koran, because Allah’s words are untranslatable, or cannot be translated adequately: Muslims need to learn the language in which Allah spoke, and speaks.

For Christians, on the other hand, as I recently heard the historian of religion, Karen Armstrong, explain, Christ is the word of God. The words of the Bible, while crucial, do not therefore have the same stature among us as their inspired Scriptures do for Jews or Muslims, who share between them a disbelief in the incarnation of God as a human being. For them the closest a person can come to God in this life is the words of their Scriptures. For us, the closest people could come to God is being touched by Jesus Christ – and by a deep personal relationship with Christ now (including studying the Bible!) and by following the guidance of the Holy Spirit now even as did the disciples on Pentecost.

So, from this first day of the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ followers, God proclaimed that Christianity has no single sacred language, nor even two or three (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of our Bible), because God’s word can be translated into any and all languages.

This leads to challenges and complications, as anyone who’s done the simplest translation exercise knows: each language has attached to each word shades of meaning and constellations of associations which can never be transferred exactly to another word in another language. But that’s O.K. We trust that the Holy Spirit not only inspired the original authors of the books of the Bible, but (hopefully) those who sought and seek to translate the Bible so that all people can say, “In my own language we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” God with us – Emmanuel – takes on new power when people hear “The Word of the Lord” in their own language.

Many languages, of course, have emerged since the Bible was written. Even proto-English was centuries in the future in the days of Jesus and Paul. But because the Holy Spirit is in the world continually reaching out to and inspiring people, Christians continually seek to reach people “where they live” in their own language. Late 20^th Century English language translations at first sounded odd to those who were adults when I was a child, because they were used to hearing Jesus use Shakespearean English in the King James Version of the Bible. But God is with us, God speaks our languages as human beings, so translations need to be updated as languages change. Lately, there are even “Hip Hop” translations of some of the Bible, and some Episcopalians have written a “Hip Hop Prayer Book!” If it reaches people where they live with the true word of God, praise God!

So this is the Good News of Pentecost – God speaks our languages, whatever they are, so that we might be transformed by the Good News of Jesus Christ. This also means that there should not be any cultural imperialism by Christians, for no language can claim to be “God’s language” more than any other: even biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek have yielded their exclusive rights to embody God’s words.

Of course, there has been cultural imperialism by Christians – 19^th Century English missionaries, for example, often assumed that to be a Christian one had to not only talk like them but also dress like them! But if we understand what happened at Pentecost, we can recognize that and other similar attitudes as cultural imperialism and realize that a good, scholarly translation of the Bible into, say, French, Ga, German, Ibo, Kikamba, Malagasy, Spanish or Swahili [the languages we will hear at the 10:30 service] is just as much The Word of the Lord as a good, scholarly translation of the Bible into English.

Praise God, Emmanuel, “God with us.” Praise God for speaking our languages as human beings, whatever they may be. Praise God for teaching us to reach out and share the Good News of Jesus Christ with others, breaking through all kinds of barriers by the power of the Holy Spirit! Praise God for making all Christians throughout the world one people in God’s eyes! Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church