Language at Pentecost

by Sue Collins

(Based on Acts 2:1-10; John: 14: 25-27; Ps 104)

This is the ‘Birthday of the Church’: the day of Pentecost!

In the Book of Acts, Paul us gives us a vivid account of God’s launching of ‘the Church’ into the world, describing
– the coming of the Holy Spirit, and
– a coming together of people from all parts of the known world. 

It is a gathering like no other! Full of wild details that challenge the imagination – tongues of fire, rushing winds, and accusations of drunkenness.

Pentecost, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

To put it bluntly (quoting Debie Thomas),
“God showed up fifty days after Jesus’s resurrection and threw the world an unforgettable party.”

He did more than that; he gave his followers a clear and startling picture of what a Christian’s ‘body on earth’ should look like. All were “filled with the Holy Spirit”: they began speaking in other languages as the Spirit gave them the ability – Christian language, holy, and worthy of God’s stories, weaving diversity and inclusiveness into the very fabric of the church.
He called the people of God to be ‘the One and the Many’, to be a miraculous weaving together of race, culture and language.

We need to take time to consider this word “language”. It features heavily in this Pentecost event, because language is far more than the sum of its parts. Grammar, vocabulary, syntax. Languages carry the full weight of people’s respective cultures, histories, psychologies, and spiritualities.
As individuals, we see and hear differently, we process and punctuate differently. Those who speak several languages and those who translate are very aware of this.
We are all familiar with people on TV translating from English into Maori (and vice versa), and how interesting it is to compare some of these differences – differences which are sometimes obvious even without knowledge of the words. 

There is no such thing as a perfect translation.

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit empowered these first Christians, enabling them to speak in a great diversity of languages. Perhaps, in this first coming together, God wanted his church, from the very beginning, to honour the boundless variety and creativity of human voices.

Why? 

Because God’s ways and the things he does need diverse understanding and telling.  We here living in New Zealand all have some varying understanding and experience of this. Think of the Maori, early residents in Aotearoa, who inhabited this South Pacific land long before the wave of European explorers and settlers came with their pakeha knowledge and ways. Much adjustment has been needed as we’ve begun to understand and respect the value of different ways and practices.
One special example is Maori’s regard for this land, and for the use of it: their belief that neither land nor sea are ‘owned’, and that respect is to be given to this God-given earth. 

And this immediately brings to mind our psalm, 104, for today: “Oh Lord, what a variety you have made!  And in wisdom you have made them all! The earth is full of your riches! There before me lies the mighty ocean, teeming with life of every kind, both great and small. And look! See the ships! And over there, the whale you made to play in the sea!”

Pakeha arrived in a new land with different understandings. We are all still learning ways forward, learning from each other.

Returning to the Day of Pentecost, the Birthday of the Church:
– Understanding was needed on all sides. People had to interact by speaking and by listening.
– They had to surrender to languages outside of their comfort zone. Races could not huddle together in their own versions of sameness and safety, so they were opening up to each other.
– God was calling his church to proclaim his great gifts and deeds in every tongue. Perhaps he was saying, “This spirit-drenched place, this fledging church, this new body of Christ, is yours! You don’t need to feel like outsiders here, we speak your tongue too. Come in. Feel at home!”

We as Christians today place great stock in language. On Sundays, here, we profess our faith in the languages of liturgy, prayer and song. We believe that language has power.

To speak out across barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, culture, denomination, or politics is to challenge stereotypes and risk ridicule. It is a brave and disorienting act! And this is what the Holy Spirit required of Christ’s frightened disciples on this day – essentially to stop them huddling in their version of sameness and safety – to open up, to speak out. Silence and disengagement were no longer options.

Those who listened took risks too. They had to suspend disbelief, lower defences, and opt for wonder instead of contempt. They had to widen their circles and talk to strangers with weird accents.
Some couldn’t bear it and retreated into self-protection, scoffing in denial, in an atmosphere  of suspicion and cynicism. 
But some people spoke and some listened, and into those astonishing exchanges, God breathed fresh life.

Something happens when we speak each other’s languages. We experience the limits of our own perspectives. We learn curiosity. 
And so it is no small thing that the Holy Spirit loosened tongues. In the face of difference, God compelled his people to engage from Day One. That day of Pentecost, the call was to press in, linger and listen.

And something happens – something grows from this. No matter how passionately I disagree with your opinions and disbeliefs, I cannot disagree with your experience.  Once I have learned to hear and speak your story in the words that mean the most to you, then I have stakes I never had before.
I can no longer flourish at your expense, I can no longer ignore you.

From the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus’s words to the disciples as he prepares them for this coming change.  He tells the disciples that he is leaving them, at the same time assuring them of the coming of the Holy Spirit into their lives. And knowing how hard it will be for them to understand, and how difficult it will be for them live new lives in a hostile community, he promises them ‘the Comforter’, the Holy Spirit. Saying: “I am telling you these things now while I am still with you. But when the Father sends the Comforter instead of me – and by the Comforter I mean the Holy Spirit – he will teach you much, as well as remind you of everything I myself have told you.
“I am leaving you with a gift – peace of mind and heart! And the peace I give isn’t fragile like the peace the world gives.
“So don’t be troubled or afraid.”

In this time and world, let us hear what the Spirit is saying to us, his people, now, today.

Read This: You Won’t be Disappointed

None of us can escape disappointments.  We all have them.  We all must learn to cope with them.
But spare a thought for those crushed under the gaze and expectation of the global public.  This week, amongst others, Scott Dixon, Novak Djokovic, and most of Liverpool.

Dixon, high-achieving Kiwi racing driver, led the Indy 500 for 175 of the 200 laps before copping a ‘pit violation’ (he entered pit lane about one mph over the allowed speed) and being penalised to do an extra ‘drive-through’ – resulting in his demotion from 1st to back of the field, in front of more than 300,000 people, and five million more on TV.  Dixon has had crushingly bad luck previously in this race, so the disappointment was even greater for him.
“It’s just heartbreaking, to be honest,” Dixon told the millions afterwards.

I don’t need to go into Liverpool’s heart-stopping loss to Real Madrid, or Djokovic’s to Rafael Nadal, because this piece is about day-to-day disappointments that we mere mortals endure.  We feel ours just as much as the stars do, and we’re usually left to suffer alone in our own wounded headspace.  As “heart-breaking” suggests, your heart aches, you can feel it as a physical thing.  A failed job interview, a rejection when asking someone for a date, a positive Covid test on the eve of a long-awaited event, a rejection from an art curator or book publisher, losing to your grandson at chess or arm-wrestling …  Even just waking up not feeling well.  So many things, big and small, result in disappointment, and the subsequent inner groanings just exacerbate our blues …

What can you do, eh?  There’s not much.  You brood. You can reflect on it wryly, laugh at yourself a little and go eat something unhealthy. Or you can seek balance by thinking of the good things in life, something you’re thankful for, to force the disappointment into perspective.

Any other suggestions?

Usually there’s a failure of some kind involved – certainly a failure of expectations. I like Winston Churchill’s attitude:

(Actually, a look at Churchill’s response to his disastrous 1915 Gallipoli assault is hugely instructional.  See this Harvard Business Review article, for example.)

For mine, two fundamental attitudes of heart have helped me deal with disappointments and other failures and setbacks: accept, and redeem.

  • Accept: A thoroughly reliable go-to in such times is the so-called Serenity Prayer, attributed variously (but erroneously) to Thomas Aquinas, Cicero, Augustine, Francis of Assisi and Thomas More.  No, it was actually a more recent American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr: God, grant me the courage to change the things I can change, the serenity to accept the things I cannot, and wisdom to know the difference.  This philosophy has carried me many a time.
  • Redeem:  Redeem the moment!  (Redeem means to buy back, even, to set free from captivity.)  Any low moment can be redeemed.  Any failure or setback … in some creative way.  One tries to look the disappointment or failure in the face and see if some benefit can be found, a silver lining.  Redemption of some kind!

Then, turn your back on it and move forward. As, undoubtedly, will Dixon, Djokovic and the LFC.
Build a bridge and get over it!

Disillusionment, despair, defeat and degrading self-pity do not mend disappointment.  Going onward does … (V. Raymond Edman in The Disciplines of Life).

Ken F

Why stand ye gazing up?

by Sharon Marr and Chris Ison

(Based on Acts 1:1-18)

The book of Acts begins with a greeting from Luke to his friend Theophilus, as he shares his thoughts and observations of the most astounding news.  Today this reflection is brought to you via me, from our dear friend, mentor and teacher Chris Ison.  I hope you will find the same awe, wonder, challenge and excitement Chris’s words echo as I have, as he unravels Ascension for us today.

Farewells are some of the most difficult things we have to handle as human beings.  They evoke some of our strongest emotions, whether it is at the level of seeing a child off to school on their own for the first time, or that final farewell when someone close to us dies.  Farewells remind us that life is full of changes and they remind us also that life is finite; things will not go on for ever as they are.

We all experience many farewells. The reality is of course that without farewells there is no growth or development.  Children grow up, go to high school, leave home, go abroad (ours going as far away as they could, Otago, then Wales) and, at a more subjective level, I would argue that the only way we grow emotionally, intellectually and spiritually is to say farewell to those things that lock us into our comfort zones.  As St Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an end [said farewell] to childish ways.”

It is with some of these thoughts in mind that we can best understand what is going on in today’s readings.  One of things you may have already realised is that Luke’s Gospel closes and Acts opens with the same story, which gives you some idea of the importance with which the event of Jesus’s ascension was regarded in the early church.

As we speak of farewells we recall that Jesus’s disciples had, only a few weeks previously, suffered what they thought at the time was a catastrophic farewell, as the person they had set all their hopes on was brutally executed.

Then, in the most extraordinary event in human history, that man – the man they had set their hopes on as the Messiah, only to have them so conclusively dashed – returned to them as the resurrected Christ.  He talked to them, ate with them and showed them his wounds.  Then, as recorded in Luke, “he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

We see, with the benefit of hindsight, the Easter event as the turning point in human history, in God’s plan of salvation for humankind; but at this point in history it is not yet fully consummated. Jesus has returned to his disciples, but even yet they have not fully grasped the significance.  As Luke records in Acts they have not yet got the full picture. The wrong question is still being asked, or rather the full magnitude of the solution is not yet being comprehended: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  The significance is far beyond their current understanding – it is much bigger than them, and Israel.

The disciples have to grow up spiritually and intellectually to understand what this is all about.  And, of course, even the resurrected Jesus can only manifest himself in particular times and particular places.  The knowledge of God’s saving providence of all things cannot be trapped in particularity.

It is time for another farewell, but this time with a ‘date in the diary’.  “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
“Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them.  While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.  And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”

Christ’s work on earth is now complete.  He returns to the Father, risen, ascended and glorified.  The baton has passed, as it were, to his followers, who are as yet not fully equipped.  That is still to come at Pentecost.  For then, as he has promised, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

The significance of Ascension Day cannot be underestimated.  It sets the scene for Pentecost and is a major point of transition – a farewell.  But a farewell, as I said before, with a date in the diary.  This though is not just a date. It will be a point where the disciples’ faith is transformed, matured, from a limited view of God’s purposes … to an understanding of their promise for everyone.  This is not, as they thought, about restoring the kingdom to Israel, but so they may be, “my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

This is now our charge, our responsibility, as the Church.  We are called upon to be witnesses, if not to the ends of the earth then to this entire community.

And what does it mean to be witnesses?

To be a witness is to testify to something we have seen and experienced – the gospel of Jesus Christ – and the gospel is not something of which we can say, ‘fine, got that’ and rush of busily with our own plans for social or religious transformation or just the busyness of our daily lives.  The gospel is something that confronts us – something we can’t possess but that we are always re-learning.

And how do we re-learn it?

Notice what happened with the disciples: Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” and then they were ordered to wait for the Spirit, and what they did was, “they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”

So, being confronted by and re-learning the gospel is something that has to take place in our church community as we gather together for the proclamation of the Scriptures, for prayer, fellowship and to share the sacraments.

This is the start point and the basis for our witness; that which nourishes our faith and empowers our witness.

Witness is not an invitation to frenetic activity but it does confront us with uncomfortable realities.  Witnessing involves being sent.  As Martin Luther King said, church is not a place you come to – it’s a place you go from. But it will involve us in going possibly where we don’t want to go and doing things we didn’t think we could do; but always rooted in fellowship, prayer, proclamation and the sacraments.  Only in this way can we bring the gospel of Christ – risen, ascended and glorified – to those in our community who so desperately need good news; the news of God’s saving love and grace for all.

So my dear friends, with these wonderful, challenging, reassuring words ringing in our ears from Chris, let us not be caught as the disciples were at first – standing, looking up towards heaven. But instead be found out in our communities sharing the Good News of the liberating love of God by being his hands and feet – but most of all his heart – here in this place.  

I leave Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes to conclude for us today.

The Ascension is not about Jesus’s body rising above the earth, but about Jesus expanding beyond his body.
        He didn’t go up, he went out. Into all of us.
        The disciple stand there, almost ready to believe (they won’t until Pentecost) that the body is not there but here: we are the body, the body of the risen Christ.
        Christ is not just an individual but a community. You are not an individual but a member of that community.
        When Jesus prays “May they all be one,” it isn’t about opinions. It’s that we’re all cells of one body.

See that way. Act that way. Love that way …

Global and Personal

by Bruce Gilberd

(Based on John 14:23-29; Psalm 67; Acts 16:9-15)

What a rich vein of truths are offered us this morning in today’s three readings.  It is as if the white light of God’s truth has passed through a prism and split into its many coloured components – a profusion of variety and connectedness – like a rainbow too.

In these three texts there are global and personal dimensions …

  • How the nations need to know and follow God – the big picture
  • How each person needs to know and follow God – the intimate picture

The Global Mission of God

The psalmist asks God to be gracious, to shine on the Hebrew people, so Israel can point the way, so God is known on all the earth and among all nations.  This is what God’s call is to Israel, to be a glad vehicle of God’s presence.
Israel was called, or “chosen”, not to be privileged but to be the mission agent of God … and to bring the whole world, all nations, the light of the one true God.  Israel is to serve the nations!  [How has she done on that count?]

The Christian worldwide church now inherits this calling, to bring the nations to a point where, as the psalmist writes, “… they joyfully revere God”.  We certainly aren’t there yet, are we.  Yet, by prayer and prophetic action and loving service, we participate and work with God to make it so.  We face the fact that at this present time less than 40% of the world’s over 200 nations are democracies – and many of these are deeply flawed.

Yet we will, we must, continue to pray, speak and act for equity, justice and reverence – that the nations and their leadership may know God.

The Personal Mission of God

Then, alongside the global mission, there is a great need for individuals to know God, receive his call to live for him, and be generous in love and hospitality.  In Acts 16, author Luke describes an example of this: Lydia.  She had her “heart opened by the Lord”, as she listened to Paul.  She received what God was offering by “listening eagerly”, and offered generous hospitality.

John’s Gospel, in today’s Chapter 14 reading, then builds on heart-felt initial discipleship …

  • We are to keep living in this way – the way of costly love – grow!
  • We become hosts to the Lord.  God makes his home in us.  Amazing.  He abides in us.
  • The Holy Spirit, re-gifted to the church and each member every day, will keep teaching, guiding, strengthening us, and reminding us of Jesus’s words and deeds so they continue to inspire us as we face the multiple complexities of global and local hurt and dislocation:
    • the warming of the planet
    • the pandemics and diseases of the people on the planet
    • the wars and violence and conflicts on the planet

Anchored in the limitless love of God in Christ, we sustain hope and play our part to ensure the reign of God’s love grows: globally and personally … as God works his purpose out through tragedy and triumph.

And, brothers and sisters, we are his co-workers.