This sermon was preached for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 2:1-21, John 14:8-17, (25-27), and Psalm 104:25-35, 37.
When I lived in the Middle East for the first time, I was part of an immersive language program. We took a pledge to only speak, read, and write in Arabic for four months. So during that time of no English, I got to know a Jordanian university student purely in his native tongue. He was extraordinarily patient with my bumbling Arabic and taught me a great deal about his city, his culture, and most importantly to both of us, his Islamic faith. My new friend was a caring guide to a foreign world with strange perspectives that stretched my mind and heart. I knew him as intelligent, hilarious, and exceedingly chivalrous.
Then, on that last day in Amman, after our final ceremony releasing us from the pledge, I turned to my friend to have my first conversation with him in English. As soon as he began attempting to form words in my native language, my perception of this guy that I gotten to know so well over the course of months, instantly shifted. Suddenly, it was he who was bumbling, ignorant, devoid of humor. It was as if a switched had been flipped. He seemed an entirely different person in a different language.
I realized in that instant if I had only known him in English, I would have missed out on so much of what he had to say and teach me. It hurt to admit to myself that with his heavy accent and halting speech, I would probably have simply dismissed him. How much do I lose out on when I let barriers to understanding hide the fullness of another person? Or when I insist they only communicate in a way with which I am most comfortable?
A key part of the original story of our branch of the Jesus movement, the Episcopal Church, is the right of the people to get to know God and God’s story, to worship, pray, and read scripture in their native language. Martin Luther insisted that the Bible be translated into the common tongue so that the clergy would no longer hold a monopoly over the meaning of scripture. Thomas Cranmer gave the Church of England its first book of liturgy, psalms, and prayer in English meant for the common people. Even now, we are constantly listening for how our language, prayers, and theology can be updated and refreshed so as to speak to the world and times we live in. This desire to hear and know God in our mother tongues sets us apart from our sister faiths, Islam and Judaism, who have carefully guarded the original Arabic and Hebrew of their scriptures and prayers for generations. We can trace this Christian impulse of translation back to this moment, here, in the story of Acts, back to the birth of the church. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, all the people gathered around the disciples heard Good News in their own language, came to know the story of God in a way that spoke to them.
The Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs did not have to change who they were in order to access God. They didn’t need to study a whole ancient language to belong and understand. The Holy Spirit came to them, met them as they were, where they were.
This June, Episcopal clergy all across this country will be marching in pride parades in rainbow stoles, posting on social media, and preaching sermon after sermon hoping to spread the Good News that so many people still have never been told: you can be true to yourself and be Christian. You can embrace the uniqueness of your gender and sexual identity while following Jesus. In fact, for you, following God’s call on your life might look exactly like loving yourself and others the way that is most true to who you are. God may ask you to grow as you journey in the faith - you may be challenged and stretched and convicted - but you should never be asked to betray what love authentically means to you or who God has created you to be. If the church is ever a place you are required to artificially conform and curtail who you are, we all miss out. We’re all deprived of the preciousness that is your gifts, your self. We lose out on all the church could be, is meant to be.
This conviction is grounded in the sacrament we are all about to take part in and renew for ourselves: baptism. Charlie and Molly don’t have to do anything to be embraced by God, this church, and the wider Christian family. Baptism proclaims they are loved right now and always, wholly and completely, just the way they are and as they will become. This ritual affirms that their belovedness is permanent and irrefutable. Nothing, no one, can take away their identity in God’s love.
As their aunt, it’s been such a delight to watch Charlie and Molly learn to speak English. At the same time, my sister and brother-in-law - and everyone who loves them - have been learning to speak Charlie and Molly. We are learning who they are, at their core, their gifts and quirks, who God created them to be.
Their belovedness does not depend on fitting themselves into what’s most comfortable or convenient to the rest of us. And thank God! Because we would really be missing out.
In this ritual of baptism, don’t be fooled by all of us speaking in unison and answering yes and no together. Pay attention instead to the promises. Baptism is the commitment to discovering what each of them mean for you in your life. In just a moment, we will promise to strive to love our neighbors, ourselves, and God, to respect the dignity of every human being. We will reject the lies and evil that try to convince us of our and others’ worthlessness, or that we need to betray who we are in order to belong. We will pledge to find Jesus in our own lives in the language that meets us where we are now - and invites us to grow into what we are called to be. We will commit to the journey of discovering what following God means for each of us in our lives, in our own bodies and languages and vocations.
What makes us a community is not that we are all the same or even that we believe the exact same things. What makes us a community is that we all commit to the same promises.
Whenever we prayed the Lord’s Prayer together in my seminary’s chapel, we were invited to pray the prayer “in the language of our heart.” I came to love that chaotic cacophony of each person praying the same prayer in the version they first learned - in Spanish and Portuguese and Mandarin and Lakota, King James English and contemporary English. That piece of the liturgy brought us back to the beginning: to baptism and Pentecostal birth of the church.
Unity in diversity, one from many. Striving toward the same commandment of love in so many different ways.
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