Learn To Speak The Language

"Learn To Speak The Language"
Acts 2:1-13


I’d like you to imagine something.  Close your eyes, if you would.  It’s a hot day out.  Hot like it’s been this week.  You’ve been working out in your yard for a couple of hours.  In the heat.  You’re feeling the redness in your cheeks and neck and arms.  You are hot and sweaty.

Unbeknownst to you, a little boy sneaks up behind you with a couple of ice cubes.  He presses those cubes into the skin on your hot back and shoulders.  He rubs it all around.  You squeal and scream and maybe even yell a little.

Now, open your eyes.  Did anyone feel their back arch a little as I described the ice cube hitting your hot skin?  Did your back muscles cringe and tighten?

That is the impact and power of language through the imagination.  I created an image.  You recreated that image in your imagination.  Maybe some of you even felt that image being played out on your skin as if it were actually happening.

I did all that through words.  It was simply the words I spoke that carried and controlled the power of those images.

What would happen if I said the same thing but in this way.  Close your eyes again, and see if you can imagine this image.

A young human male, holding a cube-shaped block of super refrigerated hydrogen and oxygen molecules, began dripping some of those molecules onto the anterior side of your anatomy, striking the solar heated epidermis of your physique and allowing those liquified molecules to run down latitudinally upon the surface of your epidermis.

OK, open your eyes.  Anyone get a cringe of excitement from those images?  A tingly feeling?  Why not?  I said the exact same thing as I did before.  I just used different words, was all.  But it all means the same.  But it just didn’t communicate as powerfully.  Maybe if I was one of the characters on the TV show, “Big Bang Theory,” the second image would have been more powerful.

Or what if I said the same thing as I did the first time, only in Russian or Norwegian.  How many of you know either of those two languages?

In order to create powerful images, in order to have impact with your words, you need to:
1.  know your own language
2.  know the language of the listener(s)
3.  if one and two are different, how to translate the one into the other.


In the first chapter of Acts, as Jesus is getting ready to go back to Father God, he tells his disciples, “But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power.  Then you will tell everyone about me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and everywhere in the world” (1:8).

I’d have liked to been there and seen the disciples faces.  Did they stop, even for a moment, and wonder what Jesus was actually saying to them?  Surely, one of them did.  Did they assume, like many who have never made it out of the continental United States, that there would be lots of people who speak the same language we do?  We’ll get along fine, we think; certainly there will be somebody who speaks English.  Even within our own country, within cities, with other English speaking people, really communicating can be difficult.

So did the disciples stop and think about Jesus’ statement?  How did they expect to communicate with people “everywhere in the world”?  Especially about the Good News of the Gospel.

I want you to put your imagination hats back on, and imagine another scenario.  Imagine that you are unchurched.  Some of you were, before you became a Christian.  You had no idea what “church” was.  You don’t know what people do there, on Sunday morning.  Someone says to you, maybe a family member, “You oughta go.  Check it out.  See how you like it.”

So you do.  The next Sunday morning, you wander into a sanctuary, much like this one, and sit down.  What is the “language” of the interior of the sanctuary?  The stained glass.  The pipe organ.  The pews.  The pulpit.  How is someone who has never been in here supposed to decipher the language, simply of the architecture?

And then the minister stands up and starts talking.  Words you have never heard before, in any other context, start coming out of his or her mouth.  It’s like you’ve been plopped down in a foreign country.

We who are here, who have been here for years, decades maybe, know the language.  We know the vocabulary of the Christian faith.  We have our own way of speaking and acting, that is unlike anything out there.  But we expect every visitor to understand what’s going on when they come in this place.  We expect that they just know the vocabulary and the language of what we are doing and what we are saying.  But it’s the same as if we traveled to inland China.  How out of place we would feel!

Many of us know our religious verbiage fairly well.  The problem is we cling to it so tightly, thinking this is the only way to speak religiously, or as a Christian, that we don’t find ways to “translate” it into other “languages” or contexts.

Anyone read the religious column in the paper?  I get frustrated with my comrades in ministry who fill that column with in-house religious verbiage that, in my mind, fails to communicate with impact.  Half of any community is unchurched.  So how is half of Pratt supposed to understand what’s written in that column?

Each person, each group of people, each organization, each “culture” if you will, 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.

In a couple of my summers between my college years, I worked construction as a laborer.  One summer day in Seattle, one of the carpenters said to me, “Hey! Hand me that international screwdriver over there!”  After about 5 minutes of searching through his tools, he finally got exasperated and said, “The hammer, you idiot.  Don’t they teach you nothin’ in college, college boy?”  Well, I knew some things.  I just didn’t know the language, and how to translate it.

There’s the old story about the prison inmates that numbered all their jokes.  One guy out in the yard would shout out a number and everyone would laugh.  A little while later, another number was called out and laughter would again erupted.  One of the new inmates thought he’d give it a try.  He shouted out a number, “19!”  No one laughed.  A little while later, he shouted out, “37!”  They just stared at him with straight faces.

The new guy went over to one of the lifers and said, “Why doesn’t anyone laugh when I call out a number?”
“Some people,” said the old guy, “just don’t know how to tell a joke.”

And there’s the problem.  Some people just don’t have any impact with their language because they either don’t know their own, don’t know any other ways to say things, or, if they do, aren’t willing to make the jump into saying it differently.  Think of the “cultures”, the different contexts in which you live each day.  How would you “tell everyone about Jesus” in those contexts so they’d understand?

Fortunately, we have help.  This is one of the main roles of the Holy Spirit, given at Pentecost.  The role of the Holy Spirit, all through the Bible, is the role of creativity.  The Spirit hovered over the chaos at creation and created something out of nothing.

So, are we willing to open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit who can speak something, even when we think there’s nothing within us to work with?  The Holy Spirit gives us the creative capability, even when there is no hint of ability.  Imagine being able to communicate with anyone, any where, just like that.

The reason for the Spirit’s help in this work is to tell people about Jesus.  It isn’t so we can go out and impress our friends:  “Hey, listen to this!”  The Holy Spirit doesn’t help us in this respect so we can order food in a fancy French restaurant.  This gift isn’t given so we can go out and get a job at the United Nations.

The Holy Spirit helps us communicate one thing:  Jesus Christ.  The Holy Spirit helps us say things, that when we are done saying them, wonder, Where did that come from?  That ever happen to you?  How did I ever think to say that? you may wonder.  Well wonder no more.  It’s all the Holy Spirit who is giving you the ability to speak across cultures about the wonders of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

We can have such an impact!  First, know your own language.  Know Christ.  Know the ways of Christ.  Know the message about Christ that we have to speak.  Secondly, know the language of your listeners.  Have the sensitivity to listen how they communicate, rather than expect them to first learn yours.  And lastly, with the special assistance of the Holy Spirit who gives us such remarkable abilities, translate our Good News of Jesus in a way that makes sense to those others.