sermon preached at St Michael & All Angels, Helensburgh
Acts 2:1-21
Romans 8.22-27
John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15
Happy Pentecost!
It is odd that we don’t wish each other happy Pentecost. There have been no Pentecost cards in the shops; no chocolate Pentecost flames or doves. And yet today is a day which is as important as Christmas and Easter: the coming of the Spirit into the world, the gift that in many ways constitutes the Church. We remember and celebrate the day that the Spirit comes down on the disciples as they were left uncertain after the Ascension. “A sound like a rushing wind that filled the house where they were staying.”
It is not gentle, the coming of the Spirit, not a whisper but a rushing wind, a fire. Like the wind that buffets you as you walk along the shore in a gale (which I did one Pentecost, just a few days after I had been ordained deacon), or the fire that tears through a forest. This is an energetic intervention, a potentially disturbing and destructive intervention, and yet it fills the disciples with joy, sends them out to do things they did not know they could do.
One of the first aspects of this story is so familiar to us that we may miss the fact that it is quite astonishing. The disciples communicate with the people from many lands, from many backgrounds. “We hear,” the account in Acts tells us, “each in our own native language.”
What is going on here?
Elizabeth Kimball writes:
This narrative is often (and erroneously) interpreted to suggest that the “miracle”—typically
symbolized in art as tongues of fire—was that the listeners were in an instant given the supernatural ability to understand the Aramaic-speaking disciples.[1]
But, Kimball think this is to get the miracle the wrong way round. Rather, she says:
The miracle, according to a close reading of the text, is that the disciples were given
the instant ability to speak the many different languages around
them—languages that they perhaps had never even heard.[2]
Kimball’s interest is pedagogical, as she explains:
The miracle was not that God gave the world the ability to understand
the teachers. The miracle was that God gave the teachers the instant ability to understand the “languages”—that is to say, the life-worlds of the learners.[3]
The disciples were able to speak to those around them in a language that they understood.
Imagine: a group of people who all speak different languages, but who understand each other. John Bell tells a powerful story reminding us of the importance of speaking and being spoken to in our own language:
One Friday evening in Iona Abbey, the service ended with the congregation being
invited to bless each other in these words, commonly called the Grace:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God
and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with us all evermore. Amen.
It was suggested that the words might first be said in their native tongue by people
whose mother tongue was not English, and at the conclusion we would all share the words
in [English]. There were people working in the abbey who came from Hispanic and African nations,
visitors from France, Germany and the Netherlands, and at least one Gelic speaker. So the lovely litany began, with everyone saying Amen after whoever had said the words in his or her own language.[4]
One of those speakers was Tomas, a refugee from the then Czechoslovakia, who had then been serving in the Church of Scotland for several years. For Tomas, saying the grace in Czech had been both moving and highly significant. It was the first time in five years that he had prayed publicly in his mother tongue.[5]
There is someting really important here for us as the chruch: how do we speak to others in eways that they understand? But there is also something important here about how God comes to us where we are and speaks to us in ways which we understand. Eric Barreto writes:
God meets us in the messiness of different languages and does not ask us to speak God’s
language. Instead, God chooses to speak our many languages. God does not speak in a
divine language beyond our comprehension. At Pentecost, God speaks in Aramaic and Greek
and other ancient languages. Today, God continues to speak in Spanish,
Greek, Hindi, and Chinese alike.[6]
And English and Scots, in all its different accents. And Gaelic. And Czech. Pentecost reminds us that God speaks to us in ways that are suitable for us, in our own language, our own place, our own context. There is a theological term for this : accommodation. God accommodates God’s self to our needs and our abilities. The incarnation – and the coming of hte Holy Spirit – are part of that coommodation, part of the way that God speaks to us in ways that we can hear.
Pentecost also reminds us that God does not speak only to us – to our language group, to our nation, to our church, our denomination. The crowd at Pentecost who heard each in their own language surely becomes the “great multitude that no one could count, from all nations and tribes, peoples and languages” described in the book of Revelation (7:9) gathered around the throne of the Lamb. All those nations and tribes, peoples and languages hear the good news the gospel in their own language, each in their own context. The account of the languages at Pentecost is a powerful reminder of the radical inclusivity of the gospel. As Rowan Williams writes
life in the spirit is life beyond the boundaries erected between ourselves and each other and
between ourselves and God (even, it is tempting to add, between ourselves and ourselves,
since the divine spirit, we are told, draws out of us what we did not know
we desired [Rom 8:26]).”[7]
And this is also a challenge to us also: not only to welcome those other groups, but to become involved in that open proclamation. In that sense Pentecost is also a call to us to proclaim the gospel to those around us in a language – in terms – that they understand.
God speaks to us in our language, where we are, but ultimately the good news that we hear calls us out of that individual situation, calls us to transcend our own language. Pentecost reminds us that God speaks to us where we are, in ways that we understand, but it also reminds us that “the human capability of learning another language is what makes new and enriching encounters between cultures and ways of thinking possible.”[8]
This kind of encounter – the encounter in which we begin to speak and hear each other’s languages – is vitally important in our world which despite globalisation is increasingly individualistic. They are vital as we hear the incomprehensible news of the ongoing wars in Gaza and in Ukraine and in Yemen and so many other places of the world, which seem to be so much about privileging the identity and perceived need of one group or party above the identity and needs of others. Pentecost is about hearing and speaking an language of hope, a language that enables the good news to be heard in those places too.
The South African theologian John de Gruchy writes that in Pentecost all people are drawn into God’s action, called to dream God’s dream. Inspired by God’s Spirit of freedom and truth, those who are oppressed or hurting are able to look beyond the traps of their own situation, see the vision of the “new heaven and the new earth”, dream of something better – and not only dream, but are strengthened to face persecution and to be led by the Spirit to turn their living nightmare into a lived dream, “which is no-one’s nightmare because it promises hope and life in a new way for all.”[9]
This is the language of the Spirit – a language which all hear, as and where they are, but which draws us out of our individual places, together, to learn to speak each other’s languages and to make a difference to the world. Happy Pentecost!
Amen
[1] Elisabeth M. Kimball, „Pentecost Pedagogy: Religious
Educators Speaking Many Languages of Hope,“ Religious Education 111 (2016), 250-255, at 251.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] John L. Bell, Living with the Psalms (London: SPCK 2020), 81.
[5] Ibid., 82.
[6] See http://odysseynetworks.org/news/onscripture-the-bible-acts-2-1-21-page-2.
[7] Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (London: Bloomsbury Continuum 2024), 82.
[8] Charlotte Methuen, “From all nations and languages: Reflections on Church, Catholicity and Culture,” in: Mark D. Chapman (ed.), The Anglican Covenant: Unity and Diversity in the Anglican Communion (Mowbray: London 2008), 123-142, at p. XX.
[9] Lion Christian Meditation Collection, p. 273.
Wings of the Morning 