"Person To Person"

"Person To Person"
Acts 2:1-18


Today opens the doorway to the church season of Pentecost.  It’s a long season, as church seasons go.  Pentecost will take us all the way up to the last Sunday in November.

The church season of Pentecost is sometimes called, “ordinary time.”  It’s called “ordinary” because there are no special days toward which it points.  Advent is a four week season that points to and prepares us for Christmas.  Then comes Lent, which points to and prepares us for Easter Day.  But in Pentecost, we start with the event of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and like a summer heat-depleted river, slows down considerably after that.

This description of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie.  It’s mysterious; it’s surreal; it borders on the bizarre.  First there is the noisy wind from heaven that blows through the house where the disciples are gathered.  There was no wind outside.  Just inside.  Then there is a fire that descends and splits into many little fires that come to rest on each disciple’s head.  No hair gets burned.  The little fires that are flying all over the room are in the shape of little tongues.  Then everyone starts talking at once, but in different languages.

If you were having breakfast at the 54 Cafe with the guys and told them this story as if it had just happened to you, I think everyone would get up and move a few stools away.

There was a Steven Spielberg type of character who lived back in the sixteenth century named Lorenzo D’Medici.  They called him “Lorenzo the Magnificent” because he was a celebrator of the first magnitude.  He would stage huge pageants and public spectacles at religious festival times.  All the people in the City of Florence where he lived would become involved in the celebration.

On one occasion, he decided to stage the pageant of Pentecost in one of the city’s great churches.  He liked realism in his drama.  So he arranged for a system of wires and pulleys to come down from the ceiling so that, at a given time, real fire would come swooshing down.  As the great play unfolded, on the day of Pentecost, the fire came swinging down right on cue.  But it brushed against some flimsy stage hangings, igniting them on fire.  The church burned to the ground.

We celebrate the giving birth part today.  The push outward.  The strong, driving force that births the Christians out into the world.  There’s a transformation of the faithful that moves them from a bunch of disorganized believers who become a living, breathing church.  At Pentecost, it is the believers, once hidden and submerged, who now emerge to tell about the great things our God has done.

Think of what kinds of people were gathered in that house on Pentecost.  Those whom Jesus had chosen were everyday people.  Hardworking laborers and professional people.  Fishermen and tax collectors.  Men and women.  They, at this time of Pentecost, 40 days after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, were a lost bunch.  Without vision.  Without courage.  Feeling powerless.  With the coming of the God’s Spirit, they became invigorated.  They found a new firmness in their spiritual backbone.  God had inflamed them with tenacity, and an outreach that was transformed from timidity to boldness.

The  Power of Pentecost, for me, as I read this story, has to do with the good news that the gospel message was intended to be carried from person-to-person.  The gospel was never intended to be mass marketed like used cars or new windows and siding for you home.  No glossy ads for the gospel in women’s magazines.  No Christianity section in Walmart.  No pop up ad for Jesus on your PC while surfing the internet.  No Facebook page for Jesus (although, I should check that; I’m sure someone’s probably posted one there.  I wonder how many “friends” Jesus would have on a Facebook page.)

Instead, through the quick knowledge of other languages, the God’s Spirit equipped these ordinary people with the ability to share and portray the Good News person-to-person.  The ability God’s Spirit gave the believers was to speak in other languages.  The everyday language of the people, spoken person-to-person was going to be the way God wanted the good news to go out.

Language.  I’m going to make some fairly obvious statements.  We talk in language.  We think in language.  The power of imagery is carried through language.  The power of imagination is in the ability and use of language.

I want you to close your eyes.  Get your imagination ready.  Take a deep breath.  Now, imagine a hot day.  It doesn’t take much to imagine that, since we’ve just lived through some very hot days.  Feel the intensity of heat on your face.  Feel your face, and the back of your neck turning red from the heat.  Your skin begins to sweat.  The heat makes it hard to breathe.

Now, imagine a child sneaks up behind you.  They have an ice cube.  The child begins dripping the icy water off the ice cube down your back.  Then that child drops the whole ice cube down your shirt.  The child presses that solid, frozen piece of ice against the skin of your back and rubs it all around.

Now, open your eyes.  Did anyone feel the heat on their face as I described it.  And did your back arch a little as I described the ice water dripping down your back, or feel that cold cube on your hot back?  Did it make you cringe a little?

The power and impact of that guided imagery certainly had to do with your imagination.  Your imagination almost made those sensations real.  But mostly it had to do with words.  With language.  The words I spoke, in the way I spoke them, evoked the image and sensations you were feeling.  The language was the power behind what your were feeling and imagining.

What would happen if I said the same thing this way:
A young human male, holding a cube of super refrigerated hydrogen and oxygen molecules, began dripping some of those molecules onto the anterior side of your body, striking the over-heated epidermis and allowing the liquid molecules to run down latitudinally upon the surface of that epidermis.

Would that have created the same effect as my first description?  I basically said the same thing.  I just used different verbiage, different language, different words, in each instance.  The key is not only what I said, but how I said it.  The language I used.

Or, what if I had done the same guided imagery, but spoke to you in Norwegian?  How many of you know Norwegian?  Thus, my speaking, my language would have had no impact.

In order to have some kind of impact with language, you need to know at least three different things.  First, you need to know your own language.  You need to know how to speak.  How to form the correct sounds into words; and then form those words into sentences so that you can communicate sensibly with another human being.  Secondly, you need to know the language of the person you are talking to.  I’m not sure how well Adam and Brooke did over in Europe the last couple of weeks, but I’m sure there were some awkward moments when the language of a speaker and the language of a listener were different, and communication was difficult.  And thirdly, if the language of the speaker and the language of the listener is different, you need to know how to translate the one into the other.

When I was on a mission trip in Guatemala, we went into the northern mountain area of that country.  The native people there still cooked over open fires.  They spoke a language called Coxtial.  These people are descendants from the Mayans, and the language they spoke was an ancient Mayan dialect.  I knew some Spanish, and a few of the people on our team spoke Spanish fluently, but it didn’t help.  We still needed a translator who, after we translated our English into Spanish, she had to then translate the Spanish into Coxtial.  In order to communicate, we needed someone with knowledge of three different languages.

You’ll remember from last week’s message we looked at the first chapter of Acts where Jesus told his disciples, “You will be witnesses for me in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  You would think that the disciples would have stopped Jesus, if for just a moment, and wonder about how they were going to do that.  The disciples must have assumed that going to “the ends of the the earth” would bring them into contact with people who don’t speak Hebrew or Aramaic.  How were they going to accomplish that task, being at a disadvantage, because they don’t speak the language?

Now I want to expand this beyond just different languages like French, German, Spanish, English, or Coxtial.  Let’s pretend we in the church are like a foreign country to those who are unchurched or barely in the church.  Don’t we have our own language, our own vocabulary, that we just expect every visitor to understand when they walk in the door?  We throw out words like grace, salvation, gospel, good news, baptism, communion/Eucharist, savior, prayer, lord, Pentecost, eschatology, repentance, righteousness, worship, sin, blood, God, trinity, judgment, etc. etc.  We just expect that everyone who comes in here has some kind of instantaneous, magical understanding of all that religious verbiage and language.  But we in the church speak a foreign language compared to our Monday morning world.

In her great book, A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris wrote:
When I began attending church...I felt bombarded by the vocabulary of the Christian church.  Words...seemed dauntingly abstract to me, even vaguely threatening.  They carried an enormous weight of emotional baggage from my childhood... For reasons I did not comprehend, church seemed a place I needed to be.  But in order to inhabit it, to claim it as mine, I had to rebuild my religious vocabulary.  The words had to become real to me...

We do have our own language in this place don’t we.  We have to understand our language.  That’s the first rule.  But we also have to understand the language of everyone who comes in here.  That’s the second rule.  And if our languages don’t measure up, we need to find a way to make what we’re saying is understandable to those who don’t use our language.

Look at how Jesus used these three rules.  How did he speak to people?  Did he speak like a priest in the temple?  No.  Did he speak like the rabbi’s?  Kind of.  How did he speak to people?  He told stories.  Parables.  In language and with imagery that spoke to the people.  He didn’t make them first learn the language of Jewish religiosity.  He spoke in a language that they knew and could understand.  Story language.

Probably the hardest thing I do every week in worship is the Children’s Story.  Most of the kids are pre-schoolers.  Pre-schoolers speak a different language.  How do I translate religious language into everyday language and then again into pre-school language?  How do I tell a parable-like story so that it conveys a Godly truth that they might be able to understand?  It’s the thing I agonize over the most, every week.

Many of us know our religious language fairly well.  But the problem is, we want to cling to it so badly we don’t find ways to “translate” it into other “languages” or situations.  We are so stuck on trying to keep our religious verbiage that we don’t learn how others speak, putting what we’ve got into their words so they’ll understand it.  I read the religious column in the newspaper and I ache for the church.  Why can’t we learn to speak a different language?  Why do we think everyone understands?  Why do we think everyone else has to learn our language first before they can be one of us?

Each person, each group of people, each organization, each “culture” of people, no matter how large or how small, have their own language.  Each has not only its own vocabulary, but also its own way or style of communicating that vocabulary.  Hospitals, schools, computer business, construction workers, legal offices, politicians.

A couple of summers, when off from college, I worked as a laborer on a construction crew in Seattle.  One time, one of the carpenters said to me, “Hand me that international screwdriver over there.”  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I looked all through his tools.  Finally, in exasperation, he yelled at me, “The hammer, you idiot!  Don’t they teach you anything, college boy?”  I knew some things.  I just didn’t know the language of the construction worker.  I learned really fast.

Some people just don’t have any impact with their language because they either don’t know their own language; or, they don’t know any other way to say things; or, if they do, they aren’t willing to make the translation.

Think of the different “cultures,’ the different language contexts in which you live every day.  How would you communicate “the great things God has done” in those contexts, and in those languages?

This is the wonder of Pentecost.  That God’s Spirit came upon the believers and gave them the knowledge of a different language so they could speak about God to other people.  They were given a new language not so they could impress their friends.  Not so they could order food at a foreign restaurant.  Not so they could get a job at the United Nations.  It was to tell others, in a way that could be understood, about our amazing God.

We can have such an impact.  We need to know our own language--which is the message we have to speak.  We need to know the language of those who listen to us.  We need to have the patience and sensitivity to listen to how others communicate, to learn those ways.  And thirdly, we need the special assistance from God’s Spirit to give us the remarkable ability to translate the Christian message in a way that makes sense to others.  That’s our mission.