“And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”

The Reverend Shirley Smith Graham,

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA,

Pentecost, May 11, 2008

            Perhaps you remember other Pentecost Sundays when the lesson we heard from the Acts of the Apostles was read by a diversity of people in a variety of languages.  Perhaps you remember feeling confused or clueless as you listened to something you did not understand.  Or perhaps you felt a re-emerging confidence as you heard a foreign language that you hadn’t studied since high school.  Maybe you were comforted to realize that you hadn’t forgotten all the vocabulary you’d learned.

            “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”

So on this momentous day the big group of disciples has assembled.  “And suddenly from heaven there [comes] a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it [fills] the entire house where they are sitting.  Now, had the disciples been in Virginia, we would have thought that a tornado had arrived.  But the disciples are in Jerusalem, and no tornados there.  Jerusalem is subject, however, to rushing winds storming from the east, and often these winds bring scorching heat and, sometimes, the stuff of plagues.  Devouring locusts have been known to come in on the sirocco of the east wind.

But such is not this wind.  No, this is the wind that rushes down on the disciples and fills the house.  This is the wind that fills the house with divided tongues, or flickers of light, which appear among, between and on the disciples.  And it is in this moment of the story where the language becomes very much more like the vision-scapes of the Biblical books of Ezekiel and Daniel and the Revelation to John; where the storyline disintegrates, the plot disappears and now word-pictures appear.  We see pictures that are more glimpses of things not understood than snapshots of objects we know and recognize.  Here, at this very moment in the Book of Acts, we fall out of the sequential narrative and fall into the mystical revelation of God.  And the direct revelation of God, such as the disciples encounter, is rarely experienced by human beings and never fully understood.

But not just the room is filled with the power of God but, we are told in verse four, all of the disciples, each one him or herself is filled with that power, filled with the Holy Spirit.  The evidence of this outpouring of blessing is that each person begins speaking intelligibly in a language he or she does not know.  In this unedited moment of the power of God, people are gifted to do something that is not in their skillset to do.  They are gifted to do something for which they have no ability or training.  They are filled by the Holy Spirit power, and that Holy Spirit power pours out of them and onto those who hear them, those very persons who say, in wonderment, “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”

How is it?  How can it be, that a person has the ability to do something in a moment that is not in their ability to do before?  Simply put, God imparts to the person the grace, the gift to be able to do that which is not naturally possible.  God equips the person to do that which otherwise would not be done.  In this case, God’s Holy Spirit so fills the disciples that they are able to make the Good News of God’s outreaching hand known to people of various languages, such that those who could not previously receive that good news now hear it in a way that they can receive and accept that good news.  This is none other than the action of God’s grace enabling people to do the will of God, which is, succinctly, to be reconciled to God, to love God, to love the neighbor and to treat others with justice and mercy.  In this moment of blessing, God gives people what they need in order to be able to live in right relationship with God and each other.

How marvelously consistent of God to do with the disciples on that day exactly what God had done to inaugurate that first celebration of Pentecost.  You will remember that I started this sermon by describing the Jewish observance of Pentecost as a commemoration of God’s giving of the Law to the Hebrews after they had come up out of slavery.  Making the people free was God’s miracle; the people keeping themselves free would require their own hard work.  Everywhere were temptations for the people to put themselves back into slavery: temptations to let other influences have power over them (that is, worshipping idols); temptations to neglect to honor father and mother (that is, so breaking apart the social fabric that adult children would not live in right relation with one another); temptations to give false witness (that is, lying, and as in all cases of lying, the consequences of the lie are always worse than the original lie).  In short, the people so recently freed from bondage were in danger of putting themselves back into shackles by their inability to do right.

So, God gave Moses the Law to give to the people, and the passage I’m speaking from is in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 24.  Now law in our culture has a negative hue that prejudices us to think that the giving of the Law was less gift and more an imposition of an unwonted constraint.  But remember with me that the Law from God’s hand is more appropriately thought of as God’s instruction, a roadmap, if you will, a way of navigating through so that one loves God and neighbor and lives in right relation with both.  God’s desire is that the people will succeed; that they will do good; that they will do good for each other; that they will live in harmony with God.  In the context of this historical moment, God has brought them out of slavery and is guiding them toward the promised land.  Yet the people have, in more than one case, failed in their faithfulness to God.  So God makes a covenant with them, promising his faithfulness to them, and they promise their faithfulness to him. 

But God knows that they, like us, are incapable of their own initiative of living up to this covenant, so God mercifully gives them a guidebook, the instructions, what we have come to know as The Ten Commandments – not as a way of imposing rules but as a way of revealing the secrets to success.  Thus we see in this giving of the Law and in the blessing of the disciples with the Holy Spirit the same attribute of God: such is God’s steadfast and faithful lovingkindness to his people that God will gift us with the grace to respond in God’s own manner, giving back to God the lovingkindness we have received from his own hand.

            One of the best examples of passionate response to God’s grace is in Psalm 119, where the Psalmist sings of his own hope, which results from his experience of God’s faithfulness, faithfulness that gets expressed through the Law.  Hear these words from Psalm 119:  Happy are those who keep his decrees,

It is this quality of faithfulness that the bystanders experience as they surround the disciples and hear the diversity of languages coming from them.  Just imagine the thousands of people who would have been milling around the Holy City for this big religious festival.  Jerusalem would have been as busy a place a Williamsburg this weekend – with  Mother’s Day, high school prom, William and Mary commencement, and the LPGA all rolled into one weekend.  And think of each of these thousands of people, all coming from different regions of the known world, each one now hearing in his or her own mother’s tongue the good news of God’s steadfast love, the curse of the Tower of Babel now undone. 

Simply put, it is the grace of God’s steadfast love for us and for all people.  Amen.