Love translates: a sermon for Pentecost

Portuguese, Polish, Punjabi – these are just some of the languages I hear when I walk around Leamington. They’re just the ones beginning with P. There’s a lot of people who speak Hindi. I know that there are Afghans, and so many others speaking in tongues other than English. Our language goes wherever we go. The languages we hear have been carried far from home, often through great hardship and danger.

Language is so important. Our words carry our meaning and find our understanding. The good news of Pentecost is a miracle of language and hearing. 

Filled with the Holy Spirit, they began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Their hearers were “amazed and astonished”. In their amazement and astonishment they asked, “are not all these speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”

How come, so many people, so far from home, from so many different places, could each tell what the disciples were saying in their own language? They came from as far apart as Libya, Cappadocia in Turkey, Egypt etc, etc. They weren’t near neighbours, they were Jews from different countries, even different continents, and they all heard the disciples speak in their own native languages, in their mother tongues, taking them back home. How come?

It shows what love can do.

These people were all staying in Jerusalem. They will have been using Greek to get by in the city because that was the common language of empire at the time. They will have known Hebrew from their scriptures. They would have only been using their mother tongue in their family groups. Their ears would have been picking up the Greek of commerce and the sound of foreign tongues – but NOW they heard and understood love speaking in their language. 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, young and old, men and women, members of sub cultures, gay and straight, slave and free – all of them heard love speaking to them in their own native language.

Luke tells us that there was a sound like the rush of a violent wind.
We talk about a breath of wind.
The Spirit came in a breath, like the wind, in a moment.
The disciples had been waiting for this moment.
They’d stayed together – all of them, not just the 12, but others with them, men and women together.
Then the promised moment came, like a breath of wind.
They breathed her in, and then breathed her out in words that carried on the wind all the meaning of love.

And their hearers breathed their words in, and they breathed out.
They breathed in the Spirit, and they breathed out their amazement and astonishment.
They breathed in their relief and breathed out their relief.
At last, they said, someone speaking my language.

One of our greetings is “The Lord is here”.
We hear that greeting.
We breathe it in and we breathe out our response: “His Spirit is with us”.
That breath, in and out, is full of joy. “The Lord is here”, “His Spirit is with us”.
We know his Spirit is with us when we hear love speaking our language, when we know we are understood.
Then we know love can hear our cries, our prayers, our broken hallelujahs.
The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us.

Here begins the life of the Spirit through the acts of the apostles and disciples of Jesus. In his book of Acts, Luke goes from this opening act to describe one act after another of the apostles and disciples engaging with the movement of God’s Spirit going out to people of all nations, accommodating their different diets and cultural practices, not demanding that converts come to them but bringing the good news of Jesus to meet everyone where they are – in the language of their heart and home.
Men, women, children, prisoners (and their jailers), soldiers, strangers, disabled, eunuchs – even murderers (because that was what Saul aka Paul was) – they’re all included in this mission of the Holy Spirit.

And here we stand, in this church, in this church in the heart of England, breathing in the Spirit of God.
The Lord is here.
His Spirit is with us. 

And we’re all speaking English.
And we speak it in a certain way.
For so much of our Christian history we have spoken in a certain way – the king’s English or the Latin language of Roman empire, rather than the vernacular.
People stay away.
The astonishment and amazement of those who hear us is often not the astonishment and amazement of the apostles’ hearers on that day of Pentecost.
Theirs was an astonishment of love.
Too often the astonishment of our hearers is one of confusion.
They can’t quite believe us.
“Toxic” is how one commentator described the church.
“The Conservative Party at prayer” is another damning description.

The call of the gospel is not to settle for the one language, but to translate God’s love into all the languages and ways of life.
This is the mission of the Holy Spirit and the mission of the church.
This is the reason for the church, and why God has a church, for the act of translation so others can know that they are seen and heard for who they are, so we can be seen and heard for who we are.

When I was first ordained I served in a church dedicated to Saint Aidan. It was in Sheffield, on CIty Road.

Aidan lived in the 7th century at a time when paganism had taken over from Christianity in large parts of Britain.
He was an Irish monk based in the Iona community founded by St Columba, another Irish monk.
Also there, there was a king-in-waiting, Oswald.
His aim was to bring Christianity back to his people.
His chance came when he was made king of Northumbria.
He requested monks from Iona to do this.

They sent Aidan.. He made Lindisfarne his base.
He walked everywhere.
He went from one village to the next, chatting politely with the people he met, gently and slowly interesting them in Christianity.
That way, he spread the gospel amongst the nobility and the socially deprived.

He was given a horse.
Presumably they thought he could get round more easily on a horse,  that he could get further and faster, that he could be more efficient.
But Aidan famously refused the horse. I think he gave it away. 
Going horseback would have put him out of touch, on a different level.
The way he was going to share the gospel was by being on the level with people, not on his high horse.
He refused the horse power and shared the gospel using the transport of the poor.

He had to learn their language to speak their language.
To do that, he needed to listen and learn from them.
There was a language barrier.
Aidan’s language was Irish, but he came to speak the language of their heart.

The name Aidan means “born of fire”.
He’s the “little fiery one”.

He wasn’t Iona’s first choice to send to Northumbria.
The first they sent was a bishop called Corman.
He returned to Iona a failure.
He alienated people by his harshness and returned to Iona complaining that the Northumbrians were too stubborn to be converted.
Aidan’s methods were so different and far more effective.

We take inspiration from “the fiery ones” when we celebrate Pentecost.
We are amongst those who have heard the apostles in our own language.
We have taken the gospel to heart.

The fiery ones show the way the gospel goes – not on the high horse of judgement or prestige.
Love makes her way gently by walking: listening and learning the language of the heart.

The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us.
She walks with us, alongside us,
the way we walk, the pace we walk,
as slow as we like.
She comes, like the wind,
rushing to us, never past
the slowest, the weakest,
the poorest and turns her mind
to where we’ve been,
the troubles we’ve seen,

in step along the path we tread,

less Corman, more Aidan
and Jesus on the way to Emmaus:

the wind beneath our wings.

Acts 2:1-21
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided 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.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 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 – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning, No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
Blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”