Sermon — The Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Imagine yourself in the middle of the scene. You’ve traveled nine hundred miles from your home in Pontus on the Black Sea coast of what’s now northern Turkey, all the way to Jerusalem, to celebrate a great feast. Today, it would be an eighteen-hour drive, but back then, the journey would have taken you 17 days at best. But the journey is worth it. You’ve come to celebrate one of the three great holy days of the year, the feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. Just as they would on Passover or Rosh Hashanah, faithful Jews and monotheism-curious Gentiles have gathered in Jerusalem to worship God, to offer sacrifices in the Temple and celebrate the arrival of spring.
Your fellow-pilgrims come from all over the known world, from Parthia in the east to Libya in the west, from Pontus down to Egypt, from Judea and from Rome. Those from the further-flung regions wouldn’t make it to Jerusalem every year. This is a special day, and people are excited, but they’re tired. You’re in a crowded room, but the volume is low. Suddenly the rush of wind fills your ears, like a strong gale blowing through the walls; and fire appears all around you, in the shape of tongues, resting on people’s heads. The room erupts into a hubbub of excited speech.
The people around you are amazed and bewildered, and they express their astonishment at these miraculous events: “Wait, aren’t those guys from Galilee? I don’t speak Galilean. How come I understand?” They don’t comment on the fire that’s divided into tongues. Nobody says a word about the wind. The miracle of Pentecost, it seems, is not the extraordinary signs and wonders; or rather, it’s the greatest wonder of all: The idea that you could hear someone else speaking and actually understand.
At the heart of the miracle of Pentecost, at the heart of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, is the paradox of language. Language is the human gift from which all the rest flow, the thing that allows us to cooperate and collaborate, to learn from one another’s discoveries and to express our love; and yet language, in its messiness and imperfection, is the source of so much misunderstanding and pain.
The miracle of Pentecost is a reversal, in a way, of the curse of Babel. Do you know the old story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis? Linguists love it. In the generations after Noah’s family survived the Flood, the story goes, the whole world spoke one language. We could understand, and be understood, by everyone, and all the people lived together in a city. And in that city they decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens. God didn’t much like this idea. If they could build a tower that could reach the heavens, they might think that they could be like God. So God puts an end to the project. Not by destroying the tower—they would soon begin to build another—but by transforming their shared tongue into many different languages, so that they could no longer understand one another.
And then on Pentecost, God acts again. God gives them the gift of understanding, and of speaking, in other languages. It’s not that God undoes the scattering of Babel, restoring them all to one common tongue. God hears the diversity of their languages, and rather than erasing their differences, God helps overcome the misunderstandings.
The fruit of the Holy Spirit, you might say, isn’t homogeneity, but translation. And since that day, Christianity has always been a religion of translation. As the Yale history professor Lamin Sanneh wrote, who grew up in a Muslim family in Gambia before converting to Christianity, Christianity is almost uniquely a religion in translation. You can’t become a bar or bat mitzvah, a “son” or “daughter of the covenant,” without learning some Hebrew; the Quran isn’t the Quran if you translate it out of Arabic. But Christianity is not the religion of any one language, culture, or nation. The Galilean Aramaic of the apostles has no special status in our faith. From its earliest days, Christianity has been translated, again and again and again, and it belongs to none of our cultures any more than to any other.
This morning, St. Peter explained that the disciples could not be drunk, for it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and however decorous you may have been I think some of you laughed; and this is an extraordinary thing. That the voice of a man who died two thousand years ago and four thousand miles away can reach out to you across the millennia and make you laugh—surely, that is miracle in itself.
But this Pentecost miracle of translation is about more than just the past.
The Holy Spirit is always present in our work of translation in the present.
We experience this miracle anew whenever we can get over the ways that language and culture and history divide us, and connect with one another. Sometimes that happens in small ways within a much bigger picture; I think of the Jerusalem Peacebuilders camps run every summer by an Episcopal priest, that bring together Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers to spend time together, getting to know one another, speaking and listening and being heard. Sometimes it happens in big ways within a smaller picture. Language and history can divide us as much in individual relationships, with family or friends or partners, as they do in our collective life, and the miracle of Pentecost is there every bit as much when we really listen to the people we love, and the Holy Spirit helps us really understand what they’re saying. Every one of us speaks our own language, and translation can be hard, but every time we hear one another speaking in a language we can understand, the Holy Spirit’s work is there.
But God is not only with us when we listen. God is with us when we speak! And that’s the other side of the Pentecost miracle. “Each one” of those present “hears [the disciples] speaking in the[ir] native language,” specifically because “the Spirit gave them ability” to speak in those other tongues.
“Spirit” is always present when we speak: the Latin word spiritus, after all, just means “breath,” speech is mind and voice shaping the sound of breath. But sometimes, when we speak, the Holy Spirit is joined to our spirit, and we speak as one. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak words of love and kindness to one another. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak truth to power in the hope of building a better world. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we share the good news, as those ancient disciples did: when we proclaim the love of God to the world, and the Spirit helps us translate what that means to all those who hear it. The Holy Spirit is there, whether we invoke its name or not, when we share out loud with someone else the joy and the pain of life; when we translate our experience into a language someone else can understand, and we are heard.
But God is also with us when we cannot speak, when we don’t know what to say, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans. “The Spirit helps us,” he writes, “in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit is with us when we speak in love, and that’s a wonderful thing. But sometimes we just don’t have the words. Sometimes, a situation is too hard, and there’s nothing we can say. Sometimes, someone’s looking for advice, and we have no guidance to give. Sometimes we know we need to pray, but we don’t even know what it we’re praying for, and yet, the Spirit prays for us, “with sighs too deep for words.” God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and when, despite the Holy Spirit’s help, words fail us, there the Spirit is, praying with us nevertheless.
So I wonder what the Holy Spirit needs to translate for you, this Pentecost. Is there some aspect of your faith or some practice of prayer that you’ve received from someone else but which isn’t quite speaking your language, and which needs to be translated for you? Is there someone in your life who’s trying to tell you something, which you just can’t understand? Is there something you need to say, but can’t quite find the words to express? Or do you simply need the Comforter to come and be with you awhile?
Whatever it is, may the fire of the Holy Spirit give light to your eyes, so that you can see the road ahead; may the wind of the Holy Spirit give you a nudge in the right direction; may the Holy Spirit be your translator, so that you can speak and you can hear; and when there are no words to say, may the Holy Spirit speak for you in “sighs too deep for words.” Amen.