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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