Monday, May 21, 2018

Sermon from Acts 2:1-13 for May 20 Pentecost


Other languages are so cool. How many of you speak or can read another language? Did you know that almost everyone speaks at least one other language?

Any new moms or dads in the house? What the heck is a baby Keurig?  

Any musicians in the house? Why would music written in concert C be a problem for trumpet players in a group?

Any nurses in the house? Why would an up and coming grandpa need a Tdap booster, and where exactly am I going to get that shot?

Any movie watchers in the house? Why would I want to go see Dead Pool, and will I live through it?

Any contemporary music people in the house? Do you use Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora or something else, and why would Christina Agulera and Demi Lovato singing a song together be really big?

Language is the way we communicate. It allows us to talk back and forth to each other. But language can also take us deeper; it can give us insight into another person’s culture.

And there, in that intersection between language and culture, those of us who have come to believe that Jesus is in fact the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior of the world, and the Lord of hope and joy, and all things that ultimately matter, can share that good news with others.

But talking to others about Jesus in languages they don’t understand, into cultures that separate us, using ideas and images that don’t translate doesn’t work. The reality is, the King James version of the bible was translated in 1592 and most people in our world no longer speak, “church”!

So along comes the Spirit, to blow away the separations.

Rabbi Marcus Rubenstein of Temple Sinai in Middletown spoke this week at the Middletown Kiwanis Clergy lunch talk about a trip the synagogue took to Israel. He also talked about the Hebrew language.

He said that after the Babylonian captivity, the Jewish people began speaking a language known as Aramaic, a mixture of Semitic languages, with Hebrew know by a relative few as a spoken language. Then, in 70 AD with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Vespasian and Titus and the Roman legions, Hebrew became basically an unspoken language.

The people of Israel were dispersed across the Roman Empire, even more so then they had been before, and in their new places of living, Aramaic slowly became mixed with other languages, like Russian/German becoming Yiddish, with Spanish becoming Ladino, and with Arabic, producing Yameni, Djerbian Arabic, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.

Hebrew was read but not spoken. That is, until a language lost was resurrected as Jews from across the diaspora came home to Israel. Hebrew became a living language again, so that now, as the Rabbi noted, there is a Hebrew word for Coca Cola and for cell phones.

Language is necessary for humans to communicate. But it also gives us shared culture. It is the way we share information, as well as feelings, ideas, and even truth.

So, on Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came and filled every believer, what becomes the sign of God’s presence, even more than tongues of fire on the disciple’s heads, is the ability to communicate across the divide of language and culture.

“And at this sound (Luke tells us) the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.”

There is nothing more disconcerting that have someone try to explain something to you in a language you don’t understand.

Have you ever gotten a new unassembled piece of furniture, or an electronic device, or most recently a baby stroller or car seat or high chair and realized the instructions were in Japanese, or Swedish, or Russian? Or in what is purported to be English?

To understand what the disciples were sharing about the death and resurrection of Jesus needed to be shared in plain understandable words, not in Aramaic to people who spoke Greek or Latin or Arabic.

Think about it. One recommendation to all youth groups is that some adult in the group’s leadership speak movie (what did you learn about faith and mercy and leadership in Black Panther) and someone speak contemporary music, like why are Katy Perry and Taylor Swift at war, and someone to speak social media (what does it say about our world that of the top ten tweeters, six are pop music stars – Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake, and the other four are Barrack Obama, Ellen Degeneres, Christian Renaldo the soccer/football player, and Youtube)?

For sure, to share your faith, you need to understand it.

But to share your faith, you also need to be able to make it clear and simple and plain to others who most likely don’t speak “church”, but instead speak microbrewery.

Did you know that many of the hymns of the church during the Reformation and then in the Great Awakening were converted drinking songs? The Spirit speaking to contemporary culture about Jesus.

And that is exactly where the Spirit is at work today, in our community, enabling believers in Jesus to speak in new languages, to new cultures, so that they can share the good news that Jesus!

And that is why we have an app. Just saying!

Amen.

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