Listening in Tongues

Sermon for Pentecost, May 19, 2024
Acts 2:1-21
Walking the Way of Love preaching series, week 7

With the wonderful problem of having several baptisms this morning, I want to give you back at least some of our typical sermon time.  So, if I’m a little more focused than usual, you’ll know why.

The reason for the baptisms is that we’re celebrating Pentecost, as we heard in the reading from Acts.  Jesus had promised his friends several times that, once he returned to his heavenly glory, he would send the Holy Spirit to continue his work here – guiding, teaching, inspiring, and empowering his followers in this new moment of salvation history.  Traditionally, we’ve called the time that starts with Pentecost the period of the Church – but that conjures images of institutions and bureaucracies, and who wants to imagine salvation as one committee meeting after another?  Instead, more recently, you’ve heard our presiding bishop call this current time of salvation history “the Jesus Movement,” with The Episcopal Church being one branch of it.  I like that – that our baptismal candidates will step out of the water and into a movement, not a meeting.

So, in our Pentecost story this morning, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just come on the scene but takes it over, and the disciples are blown away, almost literally.  A great wind whirls through the room (in Hebrew and Greek, the same word meant both “wind” and “sprit”).  Flames of fire dance on their heads.  And the disciples receive a gift – maybe the last gift they would have expected.  Pentecost was already a festival for the Jewish people, a time they gave thanks for Israel’s unique and exclusive covenant with the Almighty.¹ Well, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, God opened up that covenant to include everyone on the planet, potentially.  This new covenant of eternal life wasn’t just for the people who already had a special relationship with God; it invited everyone into a special relationship with God.  So, the first gift of the Holy Spirit to this new Jesus Movement was just what his followers needed if they were going to expand the circle of blessing – the gift of languages.  Suddenly, these Galilean fishermen and laborers could communicate with people from across the known world.  If you want to share good news with someone, it’s handy to be able to speak in that person’s tongue.

In fact, this gift of the Holy Spirit is often called “the gift of tongues.”  And in our culture, since the Pentecostal movement began in the early 1900s, that “gift of tongues” has had a more specific meaning – one different from what the apostles were experiencing on Pentecost morning.  In the Pentecostal church tradition, a mark of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is the ability to speak in a language no one else knows, a language of prayer and praise and maybe prophetic witness, too.  This gift goes back to the early Church, when the apostle Paul set guidelines for how Christians should speak and interpret spiritual tongues in worship.  It may not be our vibe as Episcopalians, but it’s a spiritual gift with a long history.

But – that kind of speaking in tongues is not what the apostles are doing in today’s reading.  What the Holy Spirit gives the apostles is the ability to communicate not in special divine speech but in everyday talk – everybody’s everyday talk.  As the story says, the foreigners there in Jerusalem were “amazed and astonished” to hear about “God’s deeds of power” in the words of their own lands (Acts 2:7,11).

But, if you think about it, this first gift of the Holy Spirit empowered the apostles with something even greater than the ability to speak to people they didn’t know or understand.  It empowered them to listen to people they didn’t know or understand. 

When we think about sharing the good news of the Jesus Movement, we usually picture people speaking, right? – on a street corner, or at your front door, telling you what they think is good for you.  That’s what institutions do: They tell you what they think you need to hear.  But a real movement is different.  A movement connects with real, live people about their real, lived experience.  A movement comes alongside folks, and learns about them, and helps free them from what holds them back so they can build a better life.  First and foremost, a movement listens. 

Today, we’re wrapping up our preaching series on walking Jesus’ Way of Love.  So far, we’ve looked at six spiritual practices to help us go deeper in our relationship with God – turning, resting, blessing, learning, worshiping, and praying.  And today, on this birthday of the Jesus Movement, we come to the last of these seven practices, which is to go – to cross boundaries, listen deeply, and live like Jesus.  It’s another way to state the last promise in the Baptismal Covenant that we’ll affirm in a few minutes – that pesky promise to strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being.  To me, that baptismal promise has always seemed the hardest one to keep.  How am I supposed to bring about justice and peace?  How can I respect the dignity of everyone? 

Of course, the first break we get is that God isn’t expecting us to do the whole job by ourselves.  And the second break we get is that we promise to do this impossible task “with God’s help.”  But what really makes possible this spiritual practice of going toward others and living like Jesus is the fact that striving for justice and peace begins not with an open mouth or even an open hand but with an open ear.  When we come alongside people whose lives we don’t understand and really listen to their stories, we’re respecting their dignity in the most powerful way there is.

We have lots of opportunities to do that – getting to know a family through Andie’s Pantry, or gardening alongside kids at Banneker Elementary, or reading to kids at Gordon Parks Elementary.  The best outreach ministries are the ones that take us beyond our usual circles and move us out into someone else’s experience.

But there’s also an opportunity to go and respect people’s dignity right here, going no farther than the friendly confines of the Jewell Room.  It’s our Listening in Love series, when we gather to look each other in the eye and hear why on earth that person in the next pew believes something so different from what I believe.  Each person who comes gets three minutes to share our hearts about a topic that’s dividing us, while the others in the room practice the spiritual gift of listening to languages they never thought they could understand.  And each person speaking receives the gift of being heard, one of the greatest moments of dignity anyone can know.

On Tuesday the 28^th, at 7 p.m., we’ll put this gift of listening to a tough test as we consider the war between Israel and Hamas and ask, “Where’s my tribe?”  That’s a tall order, listening in love about such a divisive reality.  But it shows us something important about this spiritual practice of going – of crossing boundaries, listening deeply, and living like Jesus.  Even if the “others” don’t live far away or look much different from you, the differences that separate us can seem vast indeed.  But when we choose to go, and listen to those others speaking in “the native language of each” (Acts 2:6), and honor the dignity of their experience, we find ourselves seeing them not as an “other” but as a fellow pilgrim. 

In fact, we might even find ourselves wondering, “Hmmm.  Where else could we go together in this movement to live like Jesus?”

1.       VanderKam, James C. “Festival of Weeks.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 6. David Noel Freedman, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 895-897.