Language

Scriptures:       Genesis 11:1-9, Numbers 11:24-30,

Acts 2:1-21, John 20:19-23 

Today is Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, whom Jesus promised would come to his disciples after his departure.    Pentecost is called “the birthday of the church”, because it was really the Holy Spirit that brought together a ragtag, disorganized handful of Jesus’ disciples to come together and form the church.  The Holy Spirit not only formed the church, but empowered the church to go and spread the good news.  We might think of Peter, who, during Jesus ‘ time on earth, put his foot in his mouth with almost every word he said….and after the coming of the Spirit, preached a sermon which led some 3000 people to become followers of the Risen Christ.

Pentecost is not original with the Christian church.  It was originally a Jewish festival, connected both with harvest and, most strongly, with God’s giving the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  By Jewish tradition, the giving of the law happened 50 days after the exodus from Egypt – hence Greek speaking Jews came to call the festival Pentecost, after the number for “50”.   And there are lots of parallels between the two festivals – for Jews, God’s giving of the law; for Christians, God’s giving of the Spirit, which would write the law into the hearts of believers; for Jews, God’s giving of the law around which the Hebrews escaping Egypt united into one people, the chosen people; for Christians, God’s giving of the Holy Spirit that would unite the followers of Jesus into the church.

We remember that on the day of Pentecost, the followers of Jesus were all in one place, and there were devout Jews from every nation on earth in Jerusalem.    When we think of Pentecost, we remember the sound effects and visuals – the Spirit coming with a sound like that of a mighty wind, and tongues of flame over the heads of each believer.   But perhaps even more importantly was that each of those devout Jews from every nation on earth heard from Jesus’ disciples the Gospel in their own language.  We may miss the point of the mention of the words, “Aren’t all of these speaking – meaning Jesus’ disciples – Galileans?”  We may think – yeah, they were all from Galilee, so what.  But folks in Jerusalem saw folks from Galilee as uneducated country bumpkins, hayseeds, hicks – indeed, they probably viewed Jesus himself as some country preacher.  For those in Jerusalem, it would be as if the Beverly Hillbillies walked into the United Nations and suddenly started preaching the Gospel in fluent Spanish, French, German and so forth.

This ability of everyone to hear the Gospel in their own languages, through the power of the Holy Spirit, brings us back to another Old Testament story that took place long before the giving of the law to Moses.  Remember the story of the tower of Babel, when the people were trying to build a tower to look into heaven, and God confused their languages, so that they couldn’t understand one another, and therefore walked away from their building project.   On Pentecost, it’s like the Tower of Babel story in reverse –the power of God enabling people to understand each other across lines of language, race, and nationality.

Another week, another school shooting, this time at a private Christian school in Seattle. Aaron Ybarra, age 26, not a student of the school, walked onto campus, entered one of the buildings, and started shooting, killing one and injuring several.  Had he not been tackled by a student monitor, the carnage could have been much worse.   His motives are as yet unknown, though apparently in the past he had complained at times about being overwhelmed by feelings of rage.  Elliot Rodgers at the end of May, Aaron Ybarra in the first week of June.  And while these cases are high profile, there’s also a steady drumbeat of gun violence right here on the streets of Philadelphia, with some 200-300 people a year killed by guns…..of course, many of these take place in Philadelphia’s more impoverished neighborhoods, and so they don’t make the news.   I think we have to be asking ourselves what’s going on that young people – in Seattle or Isla Vista or Philadelphia or anywhere else turn to gunfire as a way to resolve their frustrations.  In fact, the direction of the rest of this sermon, in part, was inspired by a Facebook post by Kris Davis asking that very question.  Some point to the violence in video games and online roleplaying games – Elliot Rodgers was big into World of Warcraft, for example, and two girls in Wisconsin were motivated by an internet character called Slender Man to stab one of their friends.   Our movie culture isn’t much different, as the plotlines of many of our movies since time immemorial has been that the good guy kills the bad guys and gets the girl in the end – and even someone like Elliot Rodgers saw himself as a good guy battling a world of evil.  Others point out that our society is awash in guns.  Supposedly there are between 250 and 300 million guns in America….almost one for every man, woman and child in the country.   Inevitably with that many guns around, some are going to get into the wrong hands.  Change needs to happen.  But I think the spate of violence speaks of a sickness in our culture that includes, but goes beyond, video games, internet culture and guns.

We live in a Tower of Babel society.  Not that there’s an actual tower.  But we live in a society in which we don’t speak the same language, don’t understand one another, and don’t even try especially hard to do so.   Our political system is polarized, with political pundits on TV screaming talking points at one another, and ranters on talk radio conjuring up all manner of dark fantasies and wild conspiracy theories.    Our media is fragmented.   Once upon a time, everybody watched the same news on channels 3, 6, and 10.  Now TV news is divided along political lines – conservatives watch Fox news; liberals watch MSNBC, and many just get their news from the internet – and the internet uses our past browsing history to serve up stories and advertisements tailored to our supposed interests.  Increasingly each of us has not only our own opinions, but our own supposed “facts”.   There’s little in the way of shared experience.  So we’re isolated from one another, each in our own echo chamber, hearing only what we want to hear.  Should voices with differing views break into our bubble, we dismiss them out of hand.  If we’re not careful, we can allow this endless media feedback loop to make our views more and more hardened and extreme, and thinking of those who disagree not only as wrong, but as evil, subhuman, as animals.  And our children are watching all this, and grow up thinking that this is the way humans relate to one another.

In years past, there were spaces in which kids and adult learned to talk to one another – churches, youth groups, 4-H clubs, lodges, bowling leagues, baseball teams, National Honor Society, sewing circles, on and on.  In these places, even though they centered around common interests, people were bound to encounter people of differing views and to develop the social skills to work past these differences.   And let’s face it, church youth groups were a great place for teens to meet and strike up friendships and maybe something more.  But those spaces are largely gone or greatly diminished….school sports are so hypercompetitive that the parents are almost as likely as the kids to become violent and out of control, and other school activities are cut due to lack of funding.  To quote the title of a book by Robert Putnam, who did an immense study of what he called the decrease of “social capital” in our society, instead of belonging to leagues, we are bowling alone.  And increasingly our youth are isolated, hooked into internet culture but disconnected from classmates, and often frustrated and angry.  Being frustrated and angry is part of being a teenager…..comes with the territory…..but being an isolated, frustrated, angry teenager or young adult who is hooked into online communities of equally angry, frustrated teenagers and adults and who has access to a gun is a recipe for a school shooting.

Ours is an extremely individualistic, extremely materialistic, extremely militaristic, and extremely violent society, in which we are taught to view one another as commodities, as market share, or alternately as bad guys to be killed.   Certainly, Elliot Rodgers, Aaron Ybarra and many of the other school shooters were and are mentally ill, but they reflect our society. Our society, our whole system, is sick.  Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker movement, was quoted as saying that “our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

Those gathered in Jerusalem on that long-ago day of Pentecost heard the Gospel, each in his or her own language, and 3000 were added to the church.  We need a visitation of the Holy Spirit, to teach us how to speak to others in their own language, to speak to those outside the church in language that touches their hearts and minds.  We need a visitation of the Holy Spirit to remind each of us that we – and those around us, even those with whom we disagree – are children of God, created in God’s image, precious in God’s sight.  And we need to model this to our youth and to youth in the community.  Emanuel Church needs to be part of the solution, providing a safe space for children and youth to connect to God and neighbor, providing a safe space in which adults of differing experiences and viewpoints can join together in loving and serving God and neighbor. 

The Holy Spirit can break through the most hardened barriers.  We remember Saul, the violent persecutor of the early church, through the work of the Spirit becoming Paul, the early church’s greatest missionary.   But I’d like to mention another, much more recent change of heart that I believe was the work of the Holy Spirit.  I think most of us have heard of Fred Phelps, the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church.  Fred Phelps had done great legal work on behalf of the civil rights movement in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, but over the last several decades became virulently anti-gay, to the point of obsession.  He with his congregation – which was mostly his extended family - were famous for picketing funerals of prominent gay people, and more recently picketing military funerals with signs that said “God hates fags”.  There were often counter-protestors who tried to reach out with messages of acceptance, sometimes offering lemonade and cookies to the Phelps family, sometimes coming up with creative ways to block out the sight of those awful signs and the sounds of their hateful chants.  But the pickets continued.

Fred Phelps died earlier this year, in March, and while on his deathbed had been excommunicated by his own children from the very church he had started.  There are varying accounts as to why.   One of Phelps’ grandsons, who left the church about a month before Phelps died, said that, in his final days, Phelps began taking a gentler tone.    The grandson speculates that Phelps was shaken by the death of his wife, and began to see things in a different perspective.   His grief over the death of his wife gave him a measure of empathy for the grief of others.  A group advocating equality for the LGBT community had built Equality House, decked out in rainbow colors, directly across the street from the Phelps church.  And, as the grandson tells it, at some point, Phelps hobbled over to some of those at Equality House and said, “You are good people.”   The grandson said that some church members overheard Phelps’ words, and felt that this merited excommunication. (Note 1, below)  The church members were stuck on hate.  But, if the grandson’s words are true, the Holy Spirit even managed to open Fred Phelps’ heart, just a crack, to those he long had vilified. 

On the day of Pentecost, each heard in his own language the saving Gospel of Christ.  May Emanuel Church be a place where each hears the Gospel in language that can be understood….and may we share the Gospel with all with whom we come in contact.  Amen. 

NOte 1:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/fred-phelps-equality_n_5378433.html