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Sunday, May 23, 2010

A Community Giving Witness

Romans 8:14-17; Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost, 2010

Reverend Richard E. Allen Jr.

In a recent book written for scholars of languages, linguist Pat Nichols explores the influences of various languages on the dominant American English that emerged in colonial South Carolina.  To pique our interest, she begins by inviting us on an imaginary tour around Charles Town in 1715.  There, she says, “we might hear the voices of three continents mingled together in gossip, trade, labor, and nurture. Imagine] … some American Indian headmen might be found in the governor’s chambers speaking through and interpreter about the disreputable practices of Scots and English traders….  Out on the streets a German family is talking with their Dutch neighbors….  Above the street in an upstairs office, Huguenot merchants are talking together in French about the arrival of a new shipment of enslaved people from Angola…  [On the docks], Africans speaking together in Gullah … are loading a cargo … for shipment to Barbados.  [Later, back in the governor’s mansion, a visiting Anglican missionary talks] with the governor about his difficulties … [while their] food is served by a young Glasgow woman [working to fulfill the terms of her indentured service].” (Patricia Causey Nichols, Voices of Our Ancestors:  Language Contact in Early South Carolina, pages 1 and 2.)

A similar picture could be drawn of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia in the early days of our country’s life.  Nichols makes the point that the language we speak today has been shaped by a wide diversity of culture, experience, words, and grammar.  Our country, including our language, is a mix of greater variety than we remember.  As a people made up almost entirely of immigrants, a common language unites us. Yet ours is a language that was shaped by more diverse influences than we readily imagine.  Even our common language points to our roots as very different people, from very different places.

For me, Nichols’ imaginary eavesdropping on diverse languages in a colonial seaport, hearing words by native Americans, English, German, French, Scot, and African speakers recalled Luke’s description of the language mix in Jerusalem on Pentecost at the moment when the church was born.  The names of the countries are different, but the diverse mix of cultures, languages, and ethnic backgrounds is evoked by Luke.  He catalogues them for us:  Parthians, Medes, Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, people from Rome and Egypt and Lybia and Arabia.  In other words, they are from the whole known world:  including various parts of what we now call Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

I take the time to catalog the diversity partly because Luke does so.  He’s making a point, to his first listeners and to us.  The church, he says, is born not nationally but ecumenically – the Christian faith doesn’t belong to any one nation, but to the whole world.  Since the beginning, Luke tells us, the church transcends cultures and binds the diverse human family in one greater community:  the family of faith. Paul echoes the same teaching at the beginning of the lesson from Romans 8:  “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”  “… ALL who are led by the Spirit. . .” says Paul, all of us are God’s children.  (Romans 8:14)

What that means, of course, is as a diverse, world-wide community, our Christian community transcends nation.  The flag of our faith, symbolically, flies above our nation’s flag, at least in our hearts.

At Pentecost, the lessons for today remind us, the church is born among people with different languages.  These very different people come together because they experience a common Spirit binding them to a common purpose.  They experience salvation, the wholeness of life.  While some nearby mock them, they soon find themselves going home back home to tell the story and to invite others, whatever their language, to share the story of Jesus, the experience of God’s Holy Spirit, and a transformed life.  In short, they experience the gospel of Jesus and then they give witness to that gospel in their own language and their own lives.

That’s what we hope to do for Claire, whom we baptize today, and for her friends and our friends; for her neighbors and our neighbors.  We hope to live with her and with each other the truth of Pentecost:  we are all different, and we all speak different languages in different accents.  But God, in Christ our Lord, brings us together to witness to the truth of God’s.  With Claire, we remember that Paul speaks for us Americans even as he spoke for the Romans whom he addressed in his letter.  Paul is from a different culture, spoke a different language, and had a different history from ours.   Still, we are a common family.  It is God’s Spirit, says Paul, “bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ….” (Romans 8:16-17)

What a promise we make with Claire, a promise that we remember with her.  God claims us, loves us, and makes us a community with each other, with Christ and therefore with God.

Pentecost is a celebration for the church, because it confirms our status as citizens of heaven, not merely of this world, this country, or our own unique and special families.  At Pentecost, we are come into a larger family.  At Pentecost we receive a new language, the language of faith in Christ.  It is a language that binds us together and it is a language that sends us out to the world. 

We go out today, I pray, with a new appreciation for the truth that God forms us differently, and affirms our differences, but incorporates our uniqueness into the common community we call “the church.” We are the church, together.  The Spirit makes us one, for one world.

Amen.

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