Pentecost – morning
Sunday 9th June 2019
Pentecost – morning
Acts 2.1-21
John 14.8-17,25-27
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?
As a linguist in my earlier life, the story of Pentecost has always fascinated me. The coming of the Spirit is the grand finale to God really ramping up his involvement with and commitment to humanity.
Not content with creating a wonderful world and populating it with plants, animals and then human beings, God incarnates godself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. God gets to share in our human life – what it is like to experience the forces of nature and the forces of human emotion. God even shares in betrayal, abandonment and death so that they can be defeated for all time. And then finally God sends us the Spirit, to inspire, to enthuse, to comfort and disturb us.
And the sign that this should be so is marked with wind and fire, but also with language – that great gift of God to humanity that marks us out from the other animals. All creatures – even plants – are able to communicate with their environment in some way – but only human beings have evolved language. Language that enables us to communicate in theoretical terms as well as concrete ones. That allows us to speak of our inner as well as of our outer needs and preferences.
Indeed the Bible tells us in Genesis that not only did human beings get good at communicating ideas to each other, but they began to get ideas of rivalling God, and to the end they got together to build a tall tower, stretching to the heavens.
This so concerned God that he was forced to frustrate their means of communication by giving them different tongues to speak – making them strangers to each other.
And now at the feast of Pentecost we remember a time when God seems to have reversed his earlier actions and allowed people from many different nations and cultures to understand each other.
Oh, I don’t believe that the story of Babel and the story of Pentecost can necessarily be taken completely at face value …
Who was it that said, history take facts and makes of them over time a lie; myths take lies and makes of them over time the truth?
Both stories have a mythic quality to them and are an attempt to explain something that seems – on the face of it – mystifying.
My recent trip to Russia was fascinating as an exercise in seeing how language changes over time. Now although I did try to do a little revision of my language skills before we went, I need not have worried too much. Partly thanks to the recent Football World Cup, the whole of Moscow is peppered with signs in English as well as Russian, and the announcements on the metro and in busses are made in both languages too. So it is now very easy for foreigners – particularly English-speaking foreigners to get around the city.
What I found even more astonishing was to realise how many English or American words have now passed into Russian and seem to be preferred to using their own perfectly good word.
It is a bit like the language of a “Clockwork Orange” for those of you who remember that film(?) taken in reverse. So now, for example, there are many instances where the word market is used in Russia. Food market, Hypermarket, Supermarket etc is used in preference to the Russian term rynokh.
Many, many brand names are transliterated into Russian Cyrillic script – you will have heard of the spread of Macdonalds and Burger King and multiple pizza chains … They are even busy building a Moscow Disneyworld would you believe?! As I have already told one or two of you – this could lead to some confusion on my part as I saw strange new words written up outside shops and could not work out what they were, until I pronounced them in my head and realised they were English… Flat white,(flet ouite) outside a coffee stall being one of the best!
Sharing a language does not always help with understanding a culture of course … just think about ourselves and Mr Trump!
The great achievement of the Spirit was a spreading of the Gospel message of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection accomplished for the benefit of all people. Not just the Jews; not just the Jews and the Greeks; not even just the Jews, Greeks and Romans – but for all people. It has proved a message that crosses boundaries of state, of language, of culture..
75 years ago thousands of young men and women were fighting on foreign soil for the freedom of all. Many of them could not speak French. Probably fewer still could speak German. But the message they fought for and still represent for us today is understood by people of every nation and language. Political freedom is a precious concept and one that I pray we do not lose sight of.
Spiritual freedom however, is priceless. Nothing short of our eternal life depends on it. Thanks be to God for his anointing Spirit. Amen.