Delusion or Holy Disclosure?

Pentecost A

Am I delusional? A member of the Trinity community recently asked me this about themselves. It’s the special privilege—and I do mean privilege—of a pastor. People come to me and tell me extraordinary stories of grace and providence, and then wonder if it could really be true. If God could really allow such wonderful things to happen on our earthly plane. You probably have a few experiences like that yourself. Something is provided just when you need it, a word of comfort is spoken, a broken relationship is healed, or something just clicks into place when you didn’t expect it. And for that moment, at least, you know that all is well. And you might even think, in eternal terms, that all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as the mystic Julian of Norwich wrote in the 14^th century. You are amazed and astonished, you thank God—please do thank God—and then you wake up the next morning to the usual stresses and sadness xof life and you wonder. Am I delusional?

Are they drunk? That’s the question the devout Jews in Jerusalem asked of the disciples, who were speaking in other languages—our Acts reading teaches us—as the Spirit gave them ability. Well, some asked if they were drunk. And Peter responded—in a way that sounds fairly humorous in hindsight—that they couldn’t be drunk, because it was only 9:00 in the morning. I had no idea that the temporal rules around drinking were so strict in first century Jerusalem. Was Peter being sarcastic, or was he actually having to push back against the idea that—if the disciples had started speaking in tongues at 5:00 pm—it might just have been the alcohol talking through them?

Others, though. Others were amazed and astonished. And that’s where I want to linger for a moment. I want to linger with that statement because it’s actually rather hard to linger with amazement and astonishment. Speaking for myself, I am quick to look for an empirical explanation for whatever apparently miraculous event I might have witnessed, and then move on. Even when it was something wonderful—like hearing myself told a story of love in the language I know and love best—I still find myself wanting to blame it on someone else’s substance abuse or my own delusions. It’s hard to stay present to a miracle that we can’t explain.

Our scriptures tell otherwise, though. Whatever else our Old and New Testaments may be for us, they are a record of God’s deeds of power. The grand ones, like the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and also the ones that seemed like no more than the reassurance of a still small voice. Our ancestors knew that extraordinary things happened, and—even though they were surely as uncomfortable as we were about them—they felt that it was critically important to record them so that we know about them, too.

None of us here were present when those frightened disciples suddenly found their courage and their voice. But I like to think that the generations of Biblical translators who have rendered these stories we hear every Sunday, in languages we can speak and read and hear, are also disciples on fire. You don’t need to look any further than BibleGateway.com to experience your own Pentecost event. On the website you’ll find the scriptures readily available in all the languages you can ever hope to understand. Including the original Hebrew and Greek. Honestly, that’s a miracle.

And what I’ve learned from comparing translations of our Acts passage is that this is about more than a miracle of tongues. Of the spoken word. It’s a miracle of having ears to hear that word. As The Message translation has it, “Then when they heard, one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were blown away.” A timely image no? Maybe that’s how we know we are close to the Spirit of God. We hear, see, taste a thing… and we feel utterly blown away.

When I was a small child, my father was an amateur pilot. I’ve told you about him before: he was an astrophysicist and student of all things heavenly. It was, in a way, his own very empirical path towards astonishment and amazement. But as a pilot of a very small plane, he had to keep an eye on such earthly things as the direction of the wind. So one of my favorite jobs at the tiny rural airstrips he often took off from was to watch the windsock. Have you ever seen one? It’s a pretty basic technology: a slightly conical tube of fabric mounted on a pole, usually with orange and white stripes that help to measure wind speed. Because I was young, I was entirely amazed and astonished that so much critical information could be gleaned from the direction and extension of a fabric tube. It was magical, it was miraculous: when the windsock was blown away, so was I.

Since then, I’ve learned the empirical explanation for how a wind sock works, and I’m not quite as excited when I see one. Which is kind of a shame. Because for somebody you know—somebody I know—a wind sock is still a miracle. The ability to read and re-tell ancient stories in a variety of contemporary languages is still a miracle, too. A still small voice, a timely call from a friend, a moment of synchronicity—these are not delusions or drunkenness—they are very real lenses into eternity. Woven into the fabric or human existence, reminding us that our lives are part of an even more beautiful tapestry that we see only in part right now. Let’s name these moments of existential clarity—without shame or self-doubt—as the miracles that they are.

Our Eastertide readings have been all about those lenses into eternity. Times when the Risen Christ has shown up in all manner of weird and wondrous ways: in the guise of a gardener, on the road to Emmaus, appearing in locked rooms, eating fish on the beach, and often in forms that were unrecognizable at first. In our polite Episcopal circles, few of us actually want to talk about the weird things we experience in our own time. It would be so much easier—and likely more believable—to write them off as delusions or drunkenness. But the Spirit of Pentecost teaches us otherwise. These are our stories of God-with-us, friends, and they can only be told by us. Because, I assure you, there is someone among your circle of friends who will only hear the good news when it’s spoken through your voice and your language.

Pentecost is one of four feast days traditionally appointed for public baptisms in the Episcopal Church. A number of children will be baptized at our Spanish language service today, and still other young people will receive their first communion. As part of the ritual, they or their parents—and all of you who witness the rites—will once again promise to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” That’s the legacy of Pentecost, and there’s a reason why we revisit this vow with regularity. Proclamation is not just about saying something weird or countercultural; it’s about loving our hearers enough to speak of God in a tongue they can understand.

You don’t need a theology degree or permission from Moses to speak of God’s deeds of power In fact, if you think you are the wrong person to speak up, then it’s likely that you are probably just the right person. God seems to prefer it that way! If you are Eldad and Medad, preaching outside of the authorized tent of meeting, then you are the right person to speak to the outsiders. If you are only just now learning English, then you are the right person to tell the rest of us how to be a community of welcome and inclusion. If you are a person of color, or a genderqueer person, or a person who is poor or disabled, then you are the right person to tell the story your struggle and your survival. Don’t let anyone else define or limit your truth. Because what you have to say is not a delusion, it’s a sacred disclosure of God’s own truth. That can only be spoken or heard through your gift of speech. The question for us, in this season after Pentecost, is exactly how and for whom we will be people with tongues to speak. And also—of equal importance—whether we will be the people with ears to hear.