“Found in Translation”By Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian ChurchPentecost Sunday – May 31, 2009
Genesis 11: 1-9; Acts 2: 1-13
On this Music Recognition and Pentecost Sunday, we both celebrate the beauty of what comes from this choir loft each Sunday and our unity in worship leadership by the Holy Spirit. So to honor that I thought I’d deliver today’s message from this part of our sacred space.
How we see, hear and experience life depends a lot on where we stand and sit. When we become accustomed to seeing things from the same vantage point, even like worshipping in the same way each Sunday, we get the benefit of routine but not of new perspective.
If we want to find out what something looks like from a different angle, we have to change where we are seated. If we want to be sure someone understands us from their perspective, their angle, we have to use language that they understand. A marketing colleague used to tell me “It’s not what we say; it’s what someone hears that really matters.”
Pentecost invokes thoughts of speech communications and images of people speaking with fire on their tongues. But the heart of the Pentecost story is in the hearing; how people heard the message of God’s amazing works from their perspective. As we read in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, shortly after the ascension of Jesus and right before Peter’s sermon that began converting people to join the early church, the Holy Spirit entered to speak to those gathered in Jerusalem. Reading now from God’s holy word.
Happy Pentecost. That is not something you often hear. Pentecost does not get the cultural attention of Christmas or Easter, or even the Fourth of July. In some ways, it is like the Fourth of July. They both have symbols of fire or fireworks. July 4th is the birthday of our nation and Pentecost is the birthday of the Christian church.
Pentecost can be tough for Presbyterians however. It’s a day of spirit, passion, fire and flame - that’s not easy us.
The Christian church didn’t invent Pentecost. Pentecost is an old Jewish agricultural festival fifty days after Passover, significant enough to attract people from all over the Middle East in Biblical times. But what happened on Pentecost did start the church.
On Pentecost, a mighty wind blew, the Holy Spirit descended onto the followers of Jesus, they began to speak in a variety of languages, many understood, Peter preached, and people began to be converted to join the church.
Yet not everyone who heard understood. Luke explains that many people thought the disciples were just babbling. Much of the conversation at my house these days involves the babbling of our seven month old so I’m sensitive to the value of babbling. But our first lesson today was not. In the Old Testament story of Babel, the people of the earth were once united in languages but their selfishness caused them to devolve into an inability to communicate. People didn’t understand each other.
The most miraculous part of Pentecost for me is not that disciples gained the ability to speak new languages. It is that those who had come to Jerusalem gained the ability to understand what was being said in their own native language. People began to understand each other. It’s a stunning reversal to the Hebrew story of Babel. This seems to be Luke’s focus as well. Three times in our thirteen line text from Acts, Luke emphasizes that with all the words that were being shared; the people heard the message in their own language. If you have ever worshipped in a foreign country you know that language can be a barrier to worshipping. Often people report such worship is more of a language lesson and they need to be in their own language to really worship.
Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit giving both passionate speech and an ability to listen and understand. I sincerely want us at Bradley Hills to speak passionately about our faith. But I am equally concerned that we listen and seek to understand each other.
Dietrich Bonheoffer once wrote that “Just as love of God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for each other is learning to listen to each other. It is in God’s love for us that God not only gives us God’s Word but also lends us God’s ear.” And we must do likewise.
When we speak passionately about our faith, we also must be willing to listen to someone else’s perspective. We had an opportunity to do that at Bradley Hills last Tuesday night when we joined Bethesda Jewish Congregation in our teaching and discussing our perspectives on social justice. If we cannot listen civilly to others, than our different passions can tear us apart. If we can listen carefully, than we can learn from others and grow.
There is much discussion about whether the church today should provide a general “timeless” message or be more customized. This is similar to the debate in business about whether there should be one standard, like you can have your Chrysler in any color you want, as long as its brown. Or the current customization crazy – you can have your Starbucks coffee in several dozen different varieties. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the church, messages were customized. People heard the message in their own individual language.
What happened on Pentecost was not about the individual disciples having their hearts set on fire by the spirit as much as it was the corporate community making progress together by reaching people as they found them. Theologian William Willimon writes, "To those in the church who regard the Spirit as of purely personal significance… Pentecost offers a rebuke. The Spirit is the power which enabled the (collective) church to 'go public.'”
The role of the corporate community at Pentecost was to share their experience with God. The disciples talked of God’s mighty acts, but they didn’t try to translate the message. They shared their experience and left the rest up to the Spirit. In our greeting visitors, in our evangelism and in sharing our stories, we need to trust the Holy Spirit as well. We can share our own experience, and leave it up to the Holy Spirit to do the translating.
We must be aware that what we say is not always what people hear. What people hear often depends on where they are sitting in life at a particular moment. I’ve had people come up after a sermon and tell me how much they enjoyed some point I made and more than once I’ve thought, “I don’t recall making that point.’ But that’s great because it shows that the Holy Spirit is present in the proclaiming of the word, translating and speaking to people in their context. One of you came up to me after the early service today to thank me for my point in the sermon about the importance of golf on Sundays.
Many people come to Bradley Hills from different religious backgrounds and bring different spiritual traditions, and they experience worship a bit differently as a result. When the church communicates its many messages, they are heard differently by a person who has a serious illness than a couple who has just had a baby. Many people come to church happily and some come looking for support because they are feeling a great deal of pain. Some come because their parents are making them and some are trying us out for the first time. Our services, communications and programs are translated by the filters of life experience based on where a person is sitting in life. People will be engaged and inspired by different things. That’s why Apostle Paul said he would became “all things to all people” in order to win more for Christ. The message of the Spirit is heard in the deepest, most authentic language of the listener.
Our controlling messages doesn’t always work anyway. Translating can be a tricky business. Last March, Secretary of State Clinton said her team spent a great deal of time getting a message translation just right and she presented the Russian foreign Minister with a button that she thought said, “reset,” as in “let’s reset our relationship.” But the words were mistranslated so her gift to her counterpart indicated that Clinton wanted to “overcharge” their relationship.
One of my favorite translators of all time is C3PO from the Star Wars series. On Memorial Day, MTV was running a Star Wars marathon and our Andrew got his first brief taste of that classic. In Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and the gang were captured by Ewoks, there are like little cute bears. Our heroes could not communicate with their captors, but C3PO, the translator, was “fluent in more than 6 million forms of communication” and discovered that the Ewoks thought that the gold plated C3PO was some sort of God. They decided to barbecue Han, Luke and the others in C3PO’s honor. Han Solo told C3PO to pretend he was a God and prevail upon the Ewoks to free them. But the translator C3PO declines, telling Han Solo, “It is against my programming to impersonate a deity.” That is good advice for the church when it comes to messaging. We are not deities. We cannot control how someone else experiences God.
I officiated an outdoor wedding last night. There is a moment in every wedding where the bride and groom look at each other and smile in a way that you know they are communicating something special spiritually without saying a word. Sometimes it’s when their eyes first meet as the bride comes down the aisle. Often it’s a collective exhale after the vows have been said and the rings shared. Last night, that beautiful moment was a sharing of a cup of wine during the ceremony when they raised the cup to each other.
The root of the word communicate is the same as of the word communion. This morning, we all will share a special moment that comes from the cup and in silence the Spirit will allow us to commune with Christ as we will be in the spiritual presence of our Lord.
We all have a part of worship that speaks uniquely to us. For me, it’s often in the moments of listening to our choir’s anthem before the sermon that I feel the spirit’s translating the music into a language that connects to my soul.
Standing here, I can see our two stained glass windows in the transepts clearly. The Pentecost window and our Resurrection window face each other. That is appropriate.
The formation of the church at Pentecost is a result of the resurrection. The Holy Spirit inspired the group gathered in Jerusalem to come together by convincing them of the reality of the resurrection. And it showed them, and us, that if the church is going to get people to take us seriously as a witness to God than we better have something to say. We better be willing to listen and change our perspectives at times. And relying on the Spirit, we can put our message in terms that speak to the unique needs of our diverse world. Amen.
