spirituality
spirituality button
spirituality title
spirituality title2
..."A diverse, spirit-growing, justice-seeking community"


 

spacer PAST SERMONS

"Found in Translation"
June 6, 2004
Rev. Robert M. Hardies

READING

I want to share with you today one of the most colorful stories from the Bible. A story that, on first glance, may appear to have nothing to do with Unitarian Universalism. But which, upon reflection, has everything to do with Unitarian Universalism and All Souls Church and the world that we find ourselves living in at the beginning of the 21st century. It's the story Pentecost, from the Book of Acts, 2:1-13.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in their own native language. Amazed an astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asis, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to the Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs -- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God. All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."

SERMON

So what IS this crazy story? Who ARE these crazy people, speaking utter nonsense, drunk on new wine? And what DOES our crazy pastor think we can learn from this story?

Well, let's look more closely at what happens here. Basically, a group of Jesus' followers gathers together after his death. And no sooner have they met than the wind starts kicking up, wreaking all kinds of havoc. And then fire flashes down from out of the heavens in the form of forked tongues, each of the tongues resting on the heads of those who are gathered. And the people start to speak in strange languages. Languages that no on has ever heard before. Languages that shouldn't be making any sense.

Now all this ruckus begins to attract attention: people start to gather 'round to see what's going on. And this being Jerusalem -- a crossroads of the Roman Empire -- it's a fairly diverse group who stops to watch. Hence the names of all those ancient, unpronounceable cities that I had to read. They all gathered 'round to watch these disciples, trying to discern whether they had been anointed by the Holy Spirit, or touched by new wine.

Now it's often said that the miracle of Pentecost is this Spirit-given ability to speak in tongues. To this day speaking in tongues is seen as a gift from God. This is the story from which the ecstatic religious movement called Pentecostalism derives its name and its inspiration.

But the wind and the fire and the strange languages, these are not the miracles of Pentecost. The miracle of Pentecost is that here you have all these people talking about God in some strange tongue, but EVERYONE who is listening hears them in his or her OWN language. The Parthian. The Mede. The Judean. The Cappadocia. The Mesopotamian. They all ask: "How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?" What happened at Pentecost is sort of like what happens at the United Nations building. You know, one person speaks, but everyone else has those little earpieces on so they can hear in their own language... thanks to those frantic translators sitting in the glass booths. But in THIS story, it's the Spirit that's doing the translating. That's the miracle. The miracle of Pentecost is that a diverse group of people started talking about God in different languages, but they all understood one another. The miracle is the understanding. Not the tongues, the understanding.

Now, if the Pentecostals want to claim this story as their creation myth, I won't begrudge them that. But I think Pentecost is actually the creation myth of Unitarian Universalism. I mean, think about it; think about this church. Here at All Souls, are we not a diverse group of people, speaking about God in different languages? Are we not believers and agnostics? Don't some of us pray, while others of us meditate? Isn't Jesus central to some, while others have a fondness for the Buddha? Don't some of our families celebrate Passover while others honor Easter? Aren't we just like the folks at Pentecost? A quirky mix of people, all jabbering away in our unique tongues, all trying to make sense out of life?

Yet we come together with a Pentecost faith that though we speak many tongues, we will all be understood. We will all understand. We come together with the faith that spiritual diversity is not a hindrance to our spiritual growth, but rather an asset. That because of the multiplicity of our experiences and our languages, we will discover a fuller -- a richer -- sense of the Spirit. Some fear that God can get watered down in translation from one language to another. It is our faith that God gets more multi-faceted in translation. Some fear that the Spirit is lost in translation. We at All Souls have faith that the Spirit is found in translation.

Fro me, that faith is confirmed as I look around the church and see people in the classes I teach, in the covenant groups I've observed. I've seen them come around a table from radically different perspectives and commit to listening and understanding. They commit to a Pentecost discipline. And what is so gratifying are the moments when the understanding happens across difference. You can feel it when those moments happen. You can feel the "ah-ha" moment. You can feel a sense of connection in the room. You can see it on people's faces. That's the miracle of Pentecost happening all over again.

So part of what I wanted to say today is that I believe we are on the right path when we come together as a diverse community of faith. Every once in a while we get anxious that maybe we can't hold all the pluralism in the church. That perhaps this little experiment in Pentecost is getting to be too much. Today, I want to affirm the spiritual diversity we have here at the church, an to encourage us along the path of spiritual deepening that comes through small group dialogue across difference.

But I want to make a larger point today, too. I want to argue that this Pentecost faith has implications beyond the walls of the church. But before I make that argument I need to share with you another biblical story that illustrates a radically different way of understanding the issues of diversity and pluralism. It's the story of the Curse of Babel. A long time ago, human beings, it seems, had gotten a little full of themselves. They thought they could match the Gods in power and prestige, so they undertook to build a tower that would reach all the way to heaven. According to the biblical account, as a punishment for their pride, a curse was placed on the human race. The curse of many languages. So that a people who had previously been of one race, speaking one language, were now given many languages, each unintelligible to the other. "That'll teach them," said the Gods, "for believing they can be like us." They decreed that the human race would forevermore be divided."

So, we have before us two stories written hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Yet, I can't help but believe that these two stories frame for us the essential predicament of our contemporary, post-modern world. We live in the age of many languages. Not because there is more diversity than before, but because different cultures and peoples have been brought into closer contact with one another by our global culture. We have this situation where neighbors possess not only a different SPOKEN language, but different cultural and moral languages as wel. So we don't just have different ways of saying the words: "right" and "wrong." We have different UNDERSTANDINGS of what right and wrong mean. WE have different moral vocabularies.

I believe that at the beginning of the 21st century, the human race faces the choice of EITHER living into the miracle of Pentecost, or suffering the Curse of Babel. The question is whether we will find a way to respect difference and bridge it through listening and understanding, or whether we will allow difference to divide us. And curse us. And turn us against one another.

Right now when I look around, I see a lot of signs pointing toward Babel. America is divided into red and blue. Barbed wire separates Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Churches across the globe are facing schism due to profound cultural differences. Phrases like "the clash of civilizations" have become acceptable ways of talking about the geopolitical situation.

And what are the avenues available to us as a culture to bridge these divides? To foster dialogue and understanding in spite of our different languages? Well: Crossfire; Hannity and Colmes; AM Talk Radio. Friends, if we don't change course soon, we will have brought he Curse of Babel down upon our own heads. Not to mention the heads of our children.

You guys probably get sick of me repeating the William Ellery Channing line: "I am a living member of the great family of all souls." But I repeat it so often because I believe that this is the central affirmation that we need to be able to make in our post-modern world. That's got to be the statement of faith. We all must live into the reality that we are one family. We all must live into the miracle that is Pentecost, by committing ourselves to practices that foster listening and understanding across difference.

I like to say that we can't just say we're member of the great family of all souls, we have to take responsibility for our membership in that family: seeking out diverse communities and working to make them laboratories of reconciliation and justice; working to dismantle systems of oppression; cultivating practices of dialogue across difference; learning the arts of listening and sharing of ourselves.

We must engage in this reconciling work not only to avoid the Curse of Babel. Not only to save our world from cultural and ethnic and religious conflict, though that's a good reason to do the work, too.

But we commit ourselves to being responsible members of the great family of all souls because of the promise of the miracle of Pentecost. Out of the belief that we have much to learn from our particularities and our differences; that we can blossom into richer selves because of this work; that we can be saved from insularity, saved from selfishness. Delivered into a fuller sense of our humanity.

In other words, we seek community amidst the chaos of the post modern world; not simply to avoid being lost in translation, but out of a deep and abiding faithÑa Unitarian Universalist faith -- that our deepest selves, our truest selves, will indeed be found in translation.

May it be so. Amen.