Speaking The Language

"Speaking The Language"
Acts 2:1-13

I want you to close your eyes.  Get your imagination ready.  Take a deep breath.  Now, imagine a hot day.  You are working out in your yard in the hot sun.  There is no shade.  You feel your arms reddening.  The back of your neck is getting red, and gritty, and sweaty.  You feel the intensity of the heat on your face.  Your t-shirt is sticking to your back with sweat.  It's hot.  It's hard to breathe in the heat.

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 neck.  Then that child drops the whole ice cube down down your shirt.  The child presses that solid, frozen piece of ice against the skin of your back and rubs it all around.  Then runs away.

Now, open your eyes.  Did anyone feel the heat as I described it?  And did your back arch a bit as I described the ice water dripping down your back?  Did it make you cringe a little?

The power and impact of that guided imagery certainly had to do with your imaginations.  Your imagination can almost make 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.

Because, what would have happened if I had 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 said 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.  What if I did the guided imagery all over again, but spoke Norwegian?  How many know Norwegian?  It would have been lost on you.

I spoke in last weeks sermon about words and the power of words to build worlds—how vital words are to what we perceive, and how we form reality.  How we decide what is true and what is false.  I want to build on last week's message, and take it a different direction, by talking about what kind of impact we can have on others through our language.

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.  When I was on a mission trip to Guatemala, we went into the northern mountain region of that country.  The native people still cooked over open fires, and we were building very basic cook stoves for them out of pre-formed cinder blocks.

These people are descendants from the Mayans, and the language they spoke was an ancient Mayan dialect called Coxtial.  I knew some Spanish, and a few on our team spoke Spanish fluently, but it didn't help.  We still needed a translator who, after we translated our English into Spanish, had to then translate the Spanish into Coxtial.  In order to communicate, we needed someone with knowledge of three different languages.

Which brings me to the third thing you have to have in order to make impact with your language, is that if the language of the speaker is different from the listener, you need to know how to translate the one into the other.

I want to expand this beyond just different languages like French, German, Norwegian, 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 through the doors?  We throw out words like grace, salvation, gospel, good news, baptism, communion, Savior, prayer, lord, Pentecost, repentance, righteousness, worship, sin, blood, God, Trinity, judgement, etc. etc.  We just expect that everyone who comes in here has some kind of instantaneous, magical understanding of all that religious verbiage.  But we in the church speak a foreign language compared to our Monday morning world.

In her great book, 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 of communicating with impact.  How well do you all understand the words we use when we come in here?  How real are the words to you?  Because, if the words we use in here aren't real to you, you are not going to communicate them with any impact to another person out there.

And we also have to understand the language of everyone who comes in here, including the people in our Monday morning world.  That's the second rule of communicating with impact.  If our languages don't measure up, we need to find a way to make what we're saying understandable to those who don't.  That's on us to be understandable.

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 a Roman ruler?  No.  Did he speak like a rabbi?  Sort of.  How did he speak to people?  He told stories.  Parables.  In language and imagery that spoke to everyday 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.

I've said this before, probably the hardest thing I do every week in worship is the Children's story.  A lot of the kids have been 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 they might be able to understand?  It's the thing I agonize over the most, every week.

Many in the church know their 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, it's like we feel we're sinning if we use regular words.  It's like we don't want to do the work of learning how others speak, putting what we've got into their words so they'll understand.

For example, when I read the religious column in the newspaper, I ache for Christianity and the church.  Why can't we ministers learn to speak a different language?  Why do we think everyone understands our religious gobbildy gook?  Why do we think everyone else has to learn our language first before they can be one of us?

Each person, each group, each organization, each "culture" of people, no matter how large or small have their own language.  Hospitals, schools, computer business', even construction workers.

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.  Do any of you know what he meant?  I looked through all 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 a carpenter.  He had to translate so I'd get it, and 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.  But 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.