Sermon for Pentecost Year C 2016 The Language Which the Deaf Can Hear and The Blind Can See

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Sermon for Pentecost Year C 2016 The Language Which the Deaf Can Hear and The Blind Can See"

Bethanie Watts
5 years ago
Views:

1 Sermon for Pentecost Year C 2016 The Language Which the Deaf Can Hear and The Blind Can See Speech and language are the skills we use to communicate with others. We form these skills from the first moments of life. In fact, infants who have no hearing development impairments, begin to hear and respond to familiar voices in the womb. Typically, barring any hearing deficits, most children by the age of 6 learn the basics of language both spoken and written. Most of us know that the most advantageous and prodigious time for language learning whether one or more is in early childhood. Which is one of the reasons I wish I had the opportunity to learn a second language in childhood rather than in middle school and high school. No one knows exactly why this is so, but it is true that the best time to become multi-lingual is in early childhood. The language or languages we learn very early in life stay with us, even through a long lifetime. Language written or spoken at first glance can seem pretty straight forward; we take words for granted thing and yet... we know and not just from our biblical stories that language and the words we speak have the capacity to unite us and divide us. On Friday evening, at our latest meeting of Women, Wine and the Word, we had an interesting conversation about human origins as written about in the opening chapters of Genesis, stories, in the broadest interpretation, that tell us about humanity s infancy and childhood. We noticed how much language plays a significant role in these stories: God speaks the world into existence; Adam names the animals and speaks the first love-song to Eve. Eve has a decisive conversation in the Garden of Eden and God has the last word as Adam and Eve leave the garden. As we delved more deeply into the possible translations of the Hebrew the original language of Genesis we not discovered that there are several ways to translate the original text and, consequently, something is always lost in translation. Knowing how easy it is to misunderstand things in our own language, we agreed that we should approach the interpretation and translation of the ancient languages of our sacred texts with great humility and surrounded by a community with many different perspectives. Based on this morning s texts, one thing we can say is human humility and diversity are valued and even promoted by God. 1

2 The story of Babel is a cautionary tale about human hubris making a name for ourselves building walls and towers so that they will be immovable and they can maintain a comfortably homogeneity; they won t have to learn anything new. But then God humbles them with the challenge of diversity. And they either couldn t or just plain wouldn t learn to work together despite or across their differences. I guess no one was willing to take the trouble to learn the other s language. How do think that went? What do you think it was like? Did it go something like this: No, you learn my language first. or My language is better than your language. What a find illustration of what Mary sang thousands of years later: God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. It is an illustration not of child-likeness but of childishness which are two very different perspectives. Perhaps had they been more childlike they would have retained a sense of wonder and learned new languages. Debbie Thomas, a pastor and essayist, wrote this week about her experience growing up bi-lingual, having immigrated to the United States from Kerala, India as an infant. Her parents insisted on speaking their native language of Malayalam at home, so she grew up not only bi-lingual but with a divided sense of identity because it was only the brown people from Kerala who spoke Malayalam; the white people only spoke English. Pastor Thomas wrote, As immigrants determined to make America our home, we might cross the great divide and master English, too, but the linguistic traffic would never flow in the opposite direction. After all, I had never even met an American who'd heard of my language despite the fact that 38 million people on the planet speak it. But then, one day, when she was about ten years old, there was a gathering of about 30 of her extended family at her uncle s home. As all thirty of the family were packed into the living room, her uncle introduced a guest a blonde, blue-eyed, white woman in her thirties, named Sarah. Her uncle explained only that Sarah had spent a few childhood years in Delhi, where Sarah s parents worked as journalists, and that her family had vacationed occasionally in Kerala the South Indian state where her family is from. The uncle then handed things over to Sarah. As Pastor Thomas puts it, it s hard to do justice to what happened next. Suffice it to say that thirty jaws crashed to the carpet when Sarah nodded to my uncle, smiled warmly at us, and spoke a greeting in careful but convincing Malayalam. 2

3 While the gathered Thomas family gawked and gaped Sarah told them her story in their native language. Those childhood trips to Kerala had fascinated her. So much so that she moved to South India after college, and immersed herself in the language and culture. "It was very hard," Sarah admitted. "Learning the script, forming such new sounds annoying people with my mistakes. But I'm so glad I did." What is more, Sarah concluded her evening with them by explaining how much her Kerala immersion changed her. "I didn't realize before how limited my own perceptions were. My ideas about humor, about art, about God. I didn't know how many things were unsayable in a single language." Pastor Thomas thought about that evening and Sarah for a very long time because her world was changed. That evening she had a Pentecost experience that began to give her hope of crossing her Babel-like dividedness. Something became possible for the first time an alliance, a bridging, a new kind of empathy and friendship. When her family experienced the unprecedented pleasure of hearing "an American" speak their language, they realized that the many distances separating "them" from "us" were not, in fact, un-crossable. Sarah the stranger had taken a risk, made herself vulnerable, and entered their world. In doing so, she had rendered them less strange. Less alien. Less Other. But, Pastor Thomas also wrote, Sarah had offered them a challenge: it would no longer be possible, in the light of her generosity, to hang onto our stingy, self-protective narratives about identity. She had bulldozed her way through that barrier, and only a massive act of cowardice and denial on our part would re-erect it. When you speak to a person in their language, Nelson Mandela once said, it goes straight to a person s heart. Because whether it is verbal or non-verbal, grace and kindness are languages which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. Today we celebrate Pentecost the coming of the Holy Spirit by fire, wind, and word. Pentecost from the Greek pentekostos, meaning "fiftieth," was a Jewish festival celebrating the spring harvest, and the revelation of the law or the Ten Words that God spoke at Mount Sinai to Moses and the people of Israel at their nations birth and infancy. In the story as Luke tells it in Acts, the Spirit descended on 120 believers in Jerusalem on the fiftieth day after Jesus' resurrection. 3

4 The Spirit empowered them to testify to God's great deeds, emboldened the apostle Peter to preach to a bewildered crowd of Jewish skeptics, and drew three thousand converts in one day (wow!! wish I could preach a sermon that good!) Pentecost marks the birth-day of the Church; a day of new creation, a day of promises fulfilled. By any stretch of the imagination, it's a fabulous birth story, full of riveting details. Tongues of fire. Rushing winds. Accusations of drunkenness. And mass baptism. It's easy to get lost in the spectacle. But the detail that always grabs my imagination is this: "All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." "At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each." This part of the Pentecost story is even more compelling to me after reading about Pastor Debbie Thomas experience. In the Church s infancy, they listened anew to God speaking to them in their own language and it went straight to their hearts. As Christians, we place great stock in language. In words. Like our Jewish brothers and sisters, we are People of the Book. We love the creation stories of Genesis, in which God births the very cosmos into existence by speaking: "And God said." "In the beginning was the Word," we read in John's dazzling poem about the Incarnate Christ. Each Sunday morning, we profess our faith in the languages (both verbal and non-verbal) of liturgy, creed, prayer, and music. In short, we believe that language has power. Words make worlds. And unmake them, too. If this is true, then what does the miracle at Pentecost signify? Have we really grasped the import of what the Spirit did what the Spirit insisted on at the birth of the Church? After all, as I shared with you earlier, there is nothing easy about substituting one language for another. Languages are intricate and messy. To attempt one language as opposed to another is to make oneself humble, a learner, a servant, a supplicant. To speak across barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, culture, or politics is to challenge stereotype and risk ridicule. It is a brave and disorienting act. 4

5 And, yet, this is what the Holy Spirit required of Christ's frightened disciples of the newborn Church. Essentially the Spirit was saying: Stop huddling in what you call safety. Throw open your windows and doors. Feel the pressure of My hand against your backs, pour yourselves into the streets you've come to fear, and speak in languages that go straight to a person s heart. Don't you understand? Silence is no longer possible; you are on fire with God s grace and love. What I love about the Pentecost story is that it required surrender and humility on both sides. Those who spoke had to brave languages far beyond their comfort zones. They had to risk vulnerability in the face of difference, and do so with no guarantee of welcome. They had to trust that no matter how awkward, inadequate, or silly they felt, the words bubbling up inside of them new words, strange words, scary words were nevertheless essential, life-giving words words precisely ordained for the time and place they occupied, meant to live in the hearts of those who heard them. Meanwhile, the crowds who listened had to take risks as well. They had to suspend disbelief, drop their cherished defenses, and opt for wonder instead of contempt. They had to widen their circles, and welcome strangers with accents into their midst. Not all of them managed it some sneered because they couldn't bear to be bewildered, to have their neat categories of belonging and exclusion explode in their faces. Instead, like their ancestors at Babel, who scattered at the first sign of difference, of diversity, they retreated into the well-worn narrative of denial: "Nothing new is happening here. This isn't God. These are blubbering idiots who've had too much to drink." And, yet, even in that atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, some people spoke, and some people listened, and into those astonishing exchanges, God breathed new life, and began speaking the kingdom into existence as hearts were opened and changed. Something happens when we speak each other's languages. We experience the limits of our own words and perspectives. We learn curiosity. We discover that God's "great deeds" are far too great for a single language, a solitary perspective. The Pentecost story compels us because it's a story for our time. We live in a world where words have become toxic, where the languages of our cherished "isms" threaten to divide and destroy us. 5

6 The troubles of our day are global and catastrophic. If we don't learn the art of speaking across the borders that separate us, I m afraid we will burn ourselves down to ash. Can we, as Jesus told Nicodemus, be born again by listening to what the Spirit is saying? Can we dare listen anew to the Spirit and learn to speak the language of Christ s love, the language of kindness, grace, and peace that goes straight to the heart? Thanks be to God, I think we can if we trust and believe in Christ s words that he has sent and sends the Spirit here and now to abide with us and teach us. So, let us first listen with our hearts wide open. And then let us speak in the peace of Christ without fear in the language of kindness, love and peace which even the deaf can hear and the blind can see. 6

amazing the sanctuary looks all dressed in red (but it does look amazing, doesn t it?!?).

amazing the sanctuary looks all dressed in red (but it does look amazing, doesn t it?!?). When the Spirit Moves Acts 2:1-21 First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) May 20, 2018 Rev. Jill Cameron Michel Today is one of my favorite days in the Christian year. And this is about more than