Pentecost, 23rd May 2021 - Austwick
[Show of hands] - who can speak a second language, or more than one language?
[Say “Hello” in the language you speak…]
I have always admired those who can speak in a tongue not their own. It’s not my gift. I failed miserably in French at school, and in my first months at Cardiff University I soon realised that the Welsh Language course I’d enrolled on was consuming so much time that if I kept it up I’d fail all my other subjects… I dropped it, and focussed my literature studies instead on Welsh poets like Dylan Thomas who as you may know, wrote and recited his works in perfect BBC English.
So I admire those who can speak in tongues not their own. It seems to me this requires generosity and a measure of humility - a reaching outside of what is comfortable and familiar to us, towards others and their different ways of expressing their being.
Some may be motivated to speak a foreign language for business reasons, of course; others for family reasons like my wife who sweats over online Japanese lessons for the sake of a deeper relationship with our daughter-in-law and grandson; it may be something to do with deepening your sense of your own heritage, which is why I attempted Welsh, the mother tongue of some of my forebears. You may be culturally motivated, planning to visit a country that you’ve long been interested in and wishing to be able to converse with the locals. Or, it may simply be wanting to learn enough phrases to get by when travelling. Even I know konnichiwa and sayōnara.
But whatever the reason we speak these other tongues, when we do, there are benefits to the speaker and to those they’re speaking with. Experts tell us that bilingualism can improve your mental health: that ‘Language learning is exercise for the mind!’ Exercising your brain like this keeps your mind active, and can help you develop a better memory.
To me, the important lesson here is that speaking in the language of a culture you have immersed yourself in, not your own, will build your appreciation and understanding of different people and their ways of thinking. You’ll become a better, more rounded person as a consequence. It can even change you: for some who speak multiple languages comment on how they alter as a person depending on the tongue they’re speaking in: for example, you may not think you’re all that funny in English, but you could be a regular comedian in Italian! Reaching out in another tongue can introduce you to parts of your personality that you weren’t aware previously existed. [1]
When the day of Pentecost came, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Why would the Holy Spirit give the disciples this particular gift on that particular day? He could have given them, say, the gift of healing, or to perform miracles; at that moment when Jerusalem was full of people feeling festive the gift of turning water into wine would have drawn people’s attention to the disciples and made them instantly popular. But the Spirit chose to give them the gift to speak in other people’s tongues - the tongues of the many tribes gathered there who were amazed to hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power, each in their own language.
Undoubtedly this showed how all people are invited to follow the way of Jesus, without restriction or constraint. But it worked on the disciples too, taking them out of themselves, causing them to reach out towards these foreign others in a strange and wondrous way.
Imagine the conversations they had that morning, and their effect. How much understanding the disciples gained of these people and their ways of thinking, who they had previously been separated from by language. How their appreciation of these foreign others would have changed, and the deep ways which these encounters would have changed them.
In the new awakenings of that astonishing morning these disciples may have remembered that when Jesus had told them about the Spirit coming he described him as the ‘Advocate’, a legal term meaning one who appears on behalf of another, an advocate in the sense of representative for the accused, a lawyer for the defence. ‘And when he comes,’ Jesus taught, ‘he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement… about judgement, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.’
In this world we tend to stick to our tribes, speaking our mother tongues and keeping our distance from those who talk differently. It’s not just between languages, is it: it’s between dialects too, and the classes of people they represent. The world’s view of sin, righteousness, and judgment leads to persecution, scapegoating, and the use of violence against violence between people of different tongues. We see this today sadly writ large in the very same city where this Pentecost event took place, and at the root of every antagonism between different generations or between rich and poor in our desperately unequal world. [2]
The historical task of the Holy Spirit is to prove all this wrong, by testimony to Christ; for Christ is the counterexample. The world that crucified Jesus is wrong about sin and righteousness because it wrongly accused him of sin and refused to see the righteousness confirmed by God’s raising of Jesus, and the world is wrong about judgment because the verdict against Jesus has been reversed. [3]
Jesus’ way is the way of self-giving love in generosity of spirit towards others. It brings people together to learn a new language of human fellowship and cooperation. By the cross and resurrection the way of Jesus has overcome the way of the world which divides us.
We must not be sentimental about this; it’s not a soft message we allow to comfort us for a moment then forget. For we must ask, what is the Holy Spirit doing in our world today? Surely the Holy Spirit is still working at proving the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement and showing the world the Jesus way. And we must know that he wants today’s disciples to be involved in this work of advocacy. Today’s disciples: that’s you and me.
Is the Holy Spirit telling the churches that it’s time for us to learn another language, or to exercise those second languages we already know? That it’s time to take ourselves physically or metaphorically to where those people of other dialects go?
Why yes, and all in the cause of reaching out beyond ourselves towards others, as Jesus did on the cross, breaking through the brutalising boundary walls of race and class and culture, to prove the world wrong about the way we can relate together and overcome our differences.
Notes
[1] Benny Lewis, 5 Unexpected Perks of Speaking Another Language. Fluent in 3 Months website.
[2] Campbell MacDiarmid, Israeli-Palestinian conflict explained: why is there violence in Gaza and Jerusalem? Telegraph, 18 May 2021; Eleanor Margolis, Culture wars between millenials and boomers distract us from fighting real inequality. inews, 25 April 2021.
[3] S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: a Theology of the Cross, pp. 153-54. Quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Pentecost B.
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