¡Qué placer estar con Uds. este Domingo de Pentecostés! What a pleasure to be with you this Sunday of Pentecost!
June seems to be a traveling season for me. Last year, at just about this time of year, I found myself in Louisville Kentucky. Which is a long way from Jerusalem no matter how you measure it. A long way from Puerto Vallarta, too. But as I was thinking about you—and about the privilege of entering your community to be your pastor for a brief season—it occurred to me that there are some similarities to the Pentecost story worth exploring.
Louisville is a charming metropolis. It’s the hometown of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Muhammad Ali, and also home to lots of distilleries and racing stables. It’s got a sweet southern slowness and not a whole lot of diversity, except when 10,000 Episcopalians descend on the city for the week of the 81st General Convention. I was there, and so was my husband John, whom you’ll meet next week. Both of us are bilingual, so he was volunteering with translation services and I was helping with hospitality for the bishops and deputies that came from Latin America.
After feeding folks all day, our hospitality team would gather late in the evening—in some obscure hotel room—and make plans for the following days. The pace of it all was exhilarating but exhausting, and I was grateful that our late-night debrief meetings were conducted in English. I was the only native English-speaker in the group, but every member of our team was bilingual. So no problem, right?
Wrong. One late evening, Alexander from the Dominican Republic quietly pulled me aside before the meeting. “You should really speak in Spanish,” he said. “The others will always speak in English out of respect for you, but it’s harder for them.”
I confess that I was momentarily offended. I mean, Spanish is harder for me! You all know what I mean. Even for those of us who regularly live and work in multilingual contexts, there’s always an easier language. The one we default to when our brains get tired. The one we dream in. The one we’d write poetry in if we could. And even though I’m a pretty good non-native Spanish-speaker, I’d still prefer to use English at the end of an exhausting day. But as soon as I got over the momentary offense, I realized that Alexander was right.
It wasn’t fair for me to always assume the dominant language advantage. So I pushed myself a little harder—kind of like you do for the last mile of a marathon—and started listening and speaking in my non-dominant language when we met together in that hotel room.
“When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind… tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” I’m guessing you’ve heard that story a few times—I certainly have—so I genuinely wondered what more I could offer you on this, my first Sunday with you. And, remembering my experience in Louisville—home to devout Episcopalians from every nation under heaven for that week last year—I’ll admit that I wasn’t really feeling it. That is, feeling the powerful rush of wind and fire that the beloved story from Acts describes. In Louisville, at least, I was feeling tired and a bit awkward. My Spanish is very good, but not as good as the English I use more frequently. I make mistakes. In Spanish, I often feel foolish. What do I have in common with those Spirit-empowered disciples at Pentecost? What do any of us have in common with them?
Maybe… maybe what we have in common with them is everything! Notwithstanding the wind and fire that got the disciples up and out of the house, maybe they too felt utterly foolish speaking in tongues they didn’t know they had. Maybe they knew that all those international Jews gathered in Jerusalem also spoke Hebrew, so why was the Spirit making them work so hard? Maybe they spoke awkwardly and made mistakes. Maybe that’s why they were accused of day drinking. We don’t know that to be the case, but all of us who have stumbled to express ourselves in a second language know that our speech can sound a little garbled while we’re learning. And people appreciate our efforts anyway—you know what I mean—and perhaps listen a bit more closely because they know we are trying so hard. Sometimes our most convincing evangelism is manifested through our willingness to be foolish for Christ’s sake, as Paul was in the habit of reminding the church in Corinth.
Myself, I’m in the habit of reading the Pentecost story as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s great power. And that’s not wrong, of course. Today we remember that Jesus left us the promised Advocate to be with us forever, we remember that the church—that that would be built on the testimony of ordinary people—was born this day, we remember that the teaching and healing ministries of Jesus now belong to (and are the responsibility of) all of us. Thanks be to the God of manifold works and wisdom! But reading between the lines, I think there’s a story of humility and perhaps even some foolishness embedded within the bold Pentecost proclamation. The Spirit appeared in great power, yes, but it took ordinary people to go out and preach the best they could in languages they barely knew.
Once upon a time—in the mythical days of Genesis—this wouldn’t have been necessary. Remember that “the whole earth had one language and the same words.” But as is so often the case when there’s a dominant language, so too there is a dominant culture building bigger towers. “A language is just a dialect with an army,” the Mexican ambassador to Jamaica once said in my presence. It was a wise observation by someone who had lived in two countries where economic and military power spoke one dialect, and cultural resistance spoke another. One way to resolve the difference is for the dominant group to insist that everyone speak Spanish, or the Queen’s English, or whatever be the language of those with the tallest towers or the biggest army.
But if the Bible has anything to say about it, that’s not God’s way. God’s way is to level the playing fields of the tower-full, and send Jesus’ beloved disciples out to tell stories in their second or third languages, maybe even feeling foolish and sounding drunk as they did it. So my prayer is that—in the brief few weeks we have together—I may offer the same compassionate ears to you. Bear with me as I seek to listen for the Good News of God in whatever language or story you choose to tell it in. Lord, give me ears to hear, as those Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs were once able to hear. And forgive my own foolishness and occasional drunken-sounding mistakes of communication as I attempt to be in your midst and remind you that—no matter what else may be going on in our lives or in the world—God has indeed sent forth the Holy Spirit to be with us forever. Through whom all of us—in both the Spirit’s power and our human vulnerability—are called to renew the face of the earth.
