Sunday, June 9, 2019

Pentecost: Unity As Harmony in Difference

Day of Pentecost C   June 9, 2019
Gen. 11:1-9 Ps. 104: 25-32
Acts 2:1-11      John 14:8-17, 25-17 
  Imagine a young girl in ancient times who had a new experience which needed an explanation.  What new experience?  She was traveling with her nomadic tribe and they arrived at an oasis with a watering hole and it was a place where people gathered to set up to sell items.  And as this young girl went through the market, she heard people speaking languages different from her own and she was baffled and surprised.  To her, the people seemed strange and they seem to be making some very strange sounds and noises.
  So at night around the campfire, this little girl asked her grandmother, "Why were those people making those strange sounds in the market?  They sounded like chattering monkeys.  I could not understand the meaning of their sounds.  It sounded like gobbledygook or babble,babble, babble."
  And what would grandmother say?  "Dear, I'm not sure but this is the story that my grandmother told me.  Long time ago people only spoke one and the same language.  Everyone could understand that one language.  And their king was so proud that he organized his people to build a great city and a great tower, a ziggarat, like a pyramid but it was a building with squared shaped stories built on top of each other until the top floor was the smallest square and in that top floor was a temple for sacrifices and perhaps on the ceiling there was a picture of the sky with the stars.  The king thought that he was so great and that he knew the stars that he could be like god and control the world.  But the one true Great God did not approve, so the Great God suddenly said, "Let all of the people begin to speak different languages."  And that is what happened.  People began to speak different language and so they couldn't understand each other.  They couldn't live together in the city because they just heard each other Babbling at each other.  The people had to move away from each other and live with just the people who spoke their own language.  But sometimes we have to meet other people when we go to the market at the oasis.  So God sent all of the languages as a curse upon people who wanted to use the one language as a way of trying to think that they were greater than God."
  The story of the tower of Babel, an onamatopoetic word, has a very simple causal answer to the diversity of languages among the people of the earth.  Diversity of language was a curse by God to keep people from arrogant pride.
  So the Hebrew Scriptures record how the Hebrew people became distinct speaking Hebrew, both a sacred and liturgical language, as a way of being different from the other people in the world where other people spoke other languages and had other gods.
  But is this an expression of a universal fairness of God toward all of the other people of the earth who did not speak Hebrew?  The prophets did not think so.  Elisha healed the foreign General Naaman.  Jonah proclaimed the message of God to the foreign Ninevites.  The Psalmist proclaimed, "let all of the people of the earth praise God."  The prophet Isaiah said that God's house was to be a house of prayer for all people.
  When people fear for their survival and existence, they clamp down and try to shield themselves from diversity.  Outsiders become regarded as a threat.  Only Hebrew speakers allowed.  Or as some in our country think, "Only English speakers allowed," even as we know that we took over our land from people who did not speak English and in our history we have received many non-English speakers to be integrated into our country, most of whom have come to learn English.
  Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost.  This feast highlights the great dilemma of life.  How do we honor diversity and still live in a unity of relationship?  This dilemma has been the great American experience, expressed in our "non-English motto," "e pluribus unum," or from the many, One.  We could also reverse the Latin and say, "ab Uno, in plures," or from the One, many.
  The feast of Pentecost is a feast to celebrate the healing of the ancient perceived curse of diverse languages and diverse cultures.  Finally, God as the great conductor of the symphony said, "It's too limited to make music with just an orchestra of harps; we are now going to admit violins, violas, tubas, horns and reeds of many kinds and percussion and we are going to the blend the many different sounds into the beauty of the unity, called harmony."
  Pentecost is the feast of the unity of harmony.  To limit God and the message of the Gospel to a forced unity ends up in totalitarian tyranny; it ends up excommunicating and persecuting the vast majority of people.
  In the feast of Pentecost, we have the calling of the Jesus Movement to a different mission than the Jews who remained in the synagogue.  The message of the love of God was to be made accessible to the people of all language.  When people speak a language, embedded in their language are also lots of cultural habits, like their dress and eating habits.
  The Jesus Movement made the love of God in Christ accessible to many people who spoke different languages.  The New Testament is written in  the lingua franca of the time, koine Greek,  a language that was accessible to the widest possible audience of those who lived in the Roman Empire.  The message of the Gospel was not limited to people who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, the language of Jesus.  
  The Feast of Pentecost is statement that the life of the Risen Christ can be translated into every language and culture of humanity, because of the Holy Spirit of God.  God's Holy Spirit is the great translator of the Risen Christ into the life of everyone.  Do not be afraid of diversity; let all who are different embrace Christ and translate the meaning of Christ into their own lives.
  Pentecost is not about the unity of language; it is about the unity of Spirit.  Perhaps you heard the George Bernard Shaw phrase also quoted by Oscar Wilde, "The English people and Americans are people divided by having a common language."
  Christianity has different communions, denominations and churches; one could say that Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Catholics, Amish and Presbyterians are people divided by having a common Savior.  And it may sound painfully funny, but the division of differences mean that we each have different missions and callings in our world.  We as a parish family have a calling that other Christians do not have.  We do not have to regard difference as a threat; it is the experience of the equality of difference that on the universal level can be known as harmony.
  On the level of our parish family, you and I can be people who are divided by having a common parish, St. John the Divine.  Each of us is different, but each of us have a different ministry to be harmonized with the unified mission our parish here in Morgan Hill.
  In the days ahead, do not forget the meaning of Pentecost, locally applied in our parish mission.  God has called each of us with different ministries for the building up of our parish here.  And what is the role of the Spirit?  One of the symbols of the Spirit is fire.  The fire of the Holy Spirit helps us to melt our egos so that we do not magnify our individual differences as being more important than the harmony of unity in our mission here.
  Let us embrace today harmony in our ministries as the divine work of God's Holy Spirit in blending the differences which contribute to the beauty of holiness.  May God the Holy Spirit bless us today as a Pentecostal parish, knowing the blending of differences of callings into the beautiful mission of harmony.  Amen.
   

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