Sermon — Pentecost, May 28, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

The last year or so has seen a huge explosion in the field of “large-language models,” artificial-intelligence technologies that can be trained to process text and produce things we never thought they could: art and music and entire conversations, all in response to a paragraph of text. These tools are a little frightening, raising questions about “deep fakes” and plagiarized papers, about the future for copywriters and graphic designers and software engineers in a world where AI is starting to do parts of their jobs. But last week MetaAI—the artificial-intelligence research branch of the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta—released something new, which I’m shocked to say may actually be good for the world.

It’s a service that uses AI to transcribe speech to text, and text to speech, in over 1,100 different languages from all around the world, ten times more than any other speech-recognition approach. These sorts of tools make life better for real people in some very specific ways. Text-to-speech software, for example, lets people who are blind read emails or search the web without the need to see. Speech-to-text software provides automatic closed-captioning, so that Deaf people, for example, can watch cooking recipe videos or church services and be able to read the text. (In fact, if you watch the video of this service on Facebook, you’ll see that it provides closed captioning for the whole service, free of charge!)

And multilingual translation software unlocks even more power. In the very near future a single app on your phone could handle a whole conversation between two people with no language in common at all. Imagine how much easier it would be to be a refugee, or an immigrant, or a tourist, if you could speak into your phone, and have it transcribed, translated, and spoken out loud again, back and forth, all by artificial intelligence.

There’s just one problem. Large-language models depend on having access to, well… a large amount of language. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just really good at recognizing patterns. So what the model needs to learn a language, is to digest and analyze a huge amount of language; and what the model needs to be able to translate between languages is to have access to texts that mean the same thing, in a lot of different languages.

And last week, Meta’s engineers unveiled a great discovery. They discovered a single text that has been translated into more languages than any other and is widely available in a digital form online. Even better, audio files of this text and closely-related bodies of literature are also available online. Their discovery was so big that they just had to put out a press release. “Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge,” they wrote in their announcement this week, “To overcome it…”—and maybe you’ve already guessed where this is going—“to overcome it, we turned to…the Bible.”

There is no institution in the entire world, after all, that believes more deeply in “translation” than the Christian Church. Meta’s machine-learning engineers were able to gather a language-learning dataset based on text and audio recordings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, with an average of 32 hours of audio data per language.

We heard our readings this morning in our familiar English. But thousands of translators have worked for thousands of years translating these same readings into thousands of languages, spoken all around the world. Not just the big ones like English and Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. And not just the languages that seem obscure to you or me—Gujarati or Burmese or Lingala—but are in fact spoken by tens of millions of people. The dataset from Meta includes languages like Muria, spoken by 15,000 people in south-central India, and Kilivila, spoken by 20,000 in Papua New Guinea, and Itelmen, which is down to 82 native speakers at the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Siberia. The New Testament has been translated into all of these languages from Greek, and this is no accident.

The story of Pentecost, after all, is a story of translation. The rushing wind is amazing. The tongues of fire are impressive. But the miracle of Pentecost is, above all else, the miracle of translation. It’s a common tradition in some churches to have this story read aloud in many languages at once, perhaps beginning in English and then having readers join in speaking Spanish and French, Creole and Dutch, German and Arabic and whatever other languages their members speak.

But Pentecost itself, as you may notice, happens the other way around. “Devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) are gathered in Jerusalem for the great Feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. And the apostles begin to speak. They’re used speaking the Galilean dialect of Aramaic; perhaps a bit of Hebrew, perhaps a bit of Greek. But when they open their mouths on this day, “the Spirit gave them ability” “to speak in other languages.” (Acts 2:4) The people gathered from across the world hear them speak and are amazed, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6) The disciples are recognized as Galileans by their dialect; yet the Parthians hear them in Parthian, the Cappadocians in Greek, the Phrygians in Phrygian, the Egyptians in Egyptian, the Arabs in Arabic, the Romans in Latin. (Acts 2:9-11) Each one hears the disciples speaking in a foreign language and thinks it’s drunken babbling. Then they hear themselves addressed in words they understand, and they’re amazed, saying, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12)

What it means is this: the Christian message is, and has always been, and will always be, a message in translation.

This is true, of course, on the literal and historical level, and it’s important to remember. Christianity is not native to our culture. It’s not an American religion, or an English one. The Christian tradition doesn’t belong to us, any more than it belongs to anyone else. With the exception of that small band of Galilean-Aramaic speaking Jews, Christianity comes to every culture as a translation, as a gift or an imposition brought by someone else. It’s important sometimes to remember that our own traditions and understandings are not the whole truth of our faith. And it’s important sometimes to remember that our religion is one of constant change and reinterpretation: that the traditions handed down by the generations before us might sound different from the ones being created by the next, and that’s okay. They’re speaking different languages, is all.

But it’s true on the individual level as well. The Christian message doesn’t only need to be translated from Greek into English, from ancient Mediterranean cultures into a modern American one. The Christian message needs to be translated for each and every one of us, so that what seems at first to be nothing more than random babbling becomes, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a “river of living water,” (John 7:38) an encounter with the living God who is pouring that same Spirit out on us.

We come to this place seeking some way to experience God. And we’re confronted with language. Paragraph after paragraph of language. Some of it comes from the Bible, written thousands of years ago in Hebrew and Greek. Some of it comes from pieces of our liturgy written in Latin a thousand years ago, or in English five hundred years or fifty or twenty years ago. Some of it is set to music, having been composed in verse. Some of it comes out of my mouth, and some of it you hear from one another. But none of it flows directly from God’s mouth to your ears. Most of it isn’t addressed directly to you. All of it needs to be translated from its original language and context and meaning into the circumstances of our lives, because every word that’s ever been spoken loses something as it passes between two minds. (Unless, of course, you’re talking to yourself, which I do, almost constantly.)

And the fact that it makes any sense at all, the fact that some verse or prayer or lyric in this service might touch you somehow, that it might move you, comfort you, maybe even change you, is the miracle of Pentecost happening again. If there is anything in this hour of your Sunday morning that makes sense to you at all, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing you to hear the babble of a thousand voices speaking to you in the words you understand and need to hear. “Would that all the Lord’s people are prophets!” Moses said, “and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them all!” (Numbers 11:29) And he does. God gives the Holy Spirit to us all, God pours out the Spirit on all flesh, (Acts 2:17) God does the work to translate the good news to each and every one of us, so that across the millennia we too, can understand God’s power—not just in the stories of the past, but in all the wonders of the present—and be amazed. (2:12)

Sermon — May 21, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Of all the Sundays in the entire church calendar, today seems to me be the one in which the apostles’ lives actually seem something like our own. For the last six weeks, we’ve been in the season of Easter, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Pentecost, and the miraculous and overwhelming manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Most of the rest of the year, we follow Jesus around in his Galilean perambulations, as he heals people and casts out demons and teaches his disciples face to face. And then for a few weeks in December, we’ll eagerly await the Messiah’s birth.

But none of these are the way we spend our lives today. Jesus does not appear to us in his resurrected body and say, “Peace be with you.” (I want you to call me if he does!) We don’t sit at Jesus’ feet and engage in a Q&A about his parables, or see people cured of an illness just by touching the fringe of his garments. And while the Holy Spirit is active among us, it rarely shows up with tongues of fire and the miraculous ability to understand other languages.

Most of the year the “plot” of our church year follows Jesus himself, during a short period, the year or three in his life when he was really, tangibly present with his disciples. But today, this Sunday after the Ascension, finds the disciples in a very different place. And it’s one that’s much more like our world. The amazing story of Jesus’ time on earth, of his ministry and death, his resurrection and reappearances, is over. The miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit is yet to come. The one whom the apostles thought would transform the world and establish a new way of life for them and all their people has gone, and the apostles are left wondering, “What now?”

“What now?” is the great question of Ascensiontide, this strange little mini-season of the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. But “what now?” is also the great question of our lives. Something happens. Somehow, we encounter God. And we’re left asking: What next?

If you’re sitting in this church, after all, it’s not by accident. The overwhelming majority of people in this neighborhood, this morning, are not sitting in church at all. Something happened, for you, at some point, which brought you here. Maybe it was a spiritual experience or a life crisis, a moment of great beauty and inspiration or a parent or spouse telling you that you didn’t have a choice. But one way or another, you’ve found your way here, and the question that you face, whether it’s conscious or not, is, the same as those disciples. Here we are. What next?

Well, if you’re anything like me, your instinct is to plan; to worry, fret, imagine, dream about the things that could come next. Every two or three years of my adulthood, I’ve come up with a five or ten-year plan. And the fact that every single one of them has been almost completely wrong hasn’t been enough to stop me yet. Like the apostles, I crave certainty. They ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, you’ve risen from the dead; now are you going to take charge and set up that kingdom of God you’ve been talking about so much?” (Acts 1:6) I ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, we’ve made it through the pandemic, more or less; now is it time for a big new vision for the church? Okay, Lord, the child’s six months old. (Two years old, three, four, five, fifteen years old.) Now is this going to start getting easier? Okay, Lord, you’ve made your point; I’ve realized that this grudge is only hurting me, and it’s time for me to let go and forgive my father, mother, sister, friend, spouse. Now could you just get them to apologize, first?” And to this, and to every single one of our attempts to predict the future, to force God’s hand, to speed things up or slow them down, Jesus replies that “it is not for you to know the times or periods” that God has set (Acts 1:7).

(Of course, it’s good to have some kind of vision or strategic plan. I worry that the Church doesn’t do this enough, that we just veer from crisis to crisis. And then I remember that the five-year Mission Strategy we adopted in 2016 had nothing to say about pandemic preparedness, and the one we adopted in 2021 will probably miss the crises of 2025. Maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower who put it best, when he said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”)

Well then, maybe plans won’t work; so what’s the plan?

“I know!” the apostles say. If focusing on the future won’t work, then let’s turn our eyes to the past! We know where Jesus went, and we know he’s coming back. So let’s get out our telescopes and fix them on the heavens, and wait and watch for Jesus to return in that very same patch of clouds. And this is something that we, the Church, love to do. We tell and re-tell stories of the past. We cherish the art and the buildings and the memories we’ve been left. We hold onto our traditions and value them, simply because they’re traditions. And we don’t just do this as churches. We do it as individuals, too. You see it all the time when we, as parents or teachers or coaches or friends, try to recreate the best moments of our lives for someone else. Our lives are full of golden memories, beautiful experiences of life or worship or prayer, and we try to reenact them so someone else can experience that same transcendent feeling that we did. And it almost never works.

I don’t even mean this as a criticism. Sure, it can go too far. We don’t want the church to become a museum, a place where nothing can change or grow or be touched. We want it to be a home, and a community, and it is. But there’s nothing wrong with remembering traditions. If those apostles had just thrown out their memories of Jesus altogether, where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be reading the Gospels. But as the pastor and author Sam Rainer says, it becomes a problem when nostalgia trumps devotion, when “memories of the past bring more emotion than the mission of the present.”[1] And it’s not a problem because there’s something wrong with what worked in the past. It’s a problem for the very reason the angels suggest when they appear and ask the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s where Jesus went, and Jesus really was there. But it’s not where he’s going next.

So if we want to follow Jesus in these in-between days, the question remains: What next? We can’t make a fool-proof ten-year plan. We don’t want to become stuck in the past. What’s left?

Well, what’s left is the present. And that’s what the apostles do: they live in the present. Not in the peculiarly-modern YOLO sense—they don’t fly to Bali and drink smoothies and do yoga on the beach, and post it all on their Instagram accounts. It’s something else. They go to a holy place, to the city of Jerusalem, and they go to a room, and they spend their time in prayer.

(Do you like to go to a holy place, and to go into a room, and to spend your time in prayer? Because if not, I have bad news for you, about what you’re doing right now.)

The disciples don’t seek self-indulgent pleasure or isolated enlightenment. They live in community; not just the abstract idea of community, but an actual community of actual people. Annoying people. Difficult people. Not“Beloved Community” in theory, but Peter, John, and James, Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Jameson; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s just fantastic; and all his brothers, who… hmm.

In those remarkable early days, between losing Jesus, the leader of their community, and receiving the Holy Spirit that would lead them to transform the world, the disciples do what we do now. We come, and we pray, and we wait for the Spirit to lead us where it will. And in the meantime, we live together as a community of prayer; as imperfect people made holier by one another and by God.

We can’t predict when the Spirit will come, or what it will say. We know it probably won’t be in the exact same place it appeared in the past. We might suffer along the way, as Peter is always eager to remind us. But God will not leave us comfortless. And even if we don’t know the way, and even if we can’t plan ahead, God is guiding us into even greater things. For “the spirit of glory,” as Peter says, “which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you…” and “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:14, 5:11).

[1] Sam Rainer, The Church Revitalization Checklist (Church Answers: 2021), 59.