Sunday, May 19th, 2024: "The Words We Don't Say"

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First United Presbyterian Church

“The Words We Don’t Say”

Rev. Amy Morgan

May 19, 2024

Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 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. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17 ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

    and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

    and your old men shall dream dreams.

18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

    in those days I will pour out my Spirit,

        and they shall prophesy.

19 And I will show portents in the heaven above

    and signs on the earth below,

        blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

20 The sun shall be turned to darkness

    and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ 

There are some words you will never hear me use in a sermon. And they’re not the ones you’re thinking of right now. I will try to avoid those, too, but the words I’m talking about are words like “woke” and “patriot,” “identity politics” and “critical race theory.” I won’t say “Black Lives Matter” or “Make America Great Again.” Okay, I guess technically, I just said all those words in this sermon. But these are not words I would use to address what scripture has to say about justice, peace, or righteousness. I would not employ these words to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

And that is because we don’t all agree on what these words mean. Our definitions and even feelings about certain words are shaped by our environment and influences – the media we consume, the groups we affiliate with, the experiences we’ve had. In fact, a 2020 research study showed that our political leanings shape how our brains process information. Conservatives and progressives shown the same news story react in totally different ways and different parts of their brains were activated. No wonder we often feel in this country like we are not even speaking the same language. 

So especially when certain words or phrases are used that identify us with a political or cultural tribe, we misunderstand or misinterpret one another, offend each other, and stop listening to each other. And this can inhibit our ability to hear the good news of what God has done and is doing in the world. If we have stopped listening to each other because we can’t understand each other, we are not going to do the vulnerable and really challenging work of sharing our experiences of God. 

Because talking about God is hard. I talk about God professionally, people, but if I’m on an airplane and the stranger next to me asks about what I do for a living, I tell them I’m an actuary. And I don’t even really know what an actuary is. I take the risk that the other person doesn’t know either and will be too embarrassed to admit it so the conversation will abruptly end and I can go back to watching Netflix on my phone. 

Because I don’t want to talk about God with strangers. And as soon as I’m outed as a pastor, that’s all people want to talk about. They want to know how I became a minister; they want to know why anyone still goes to church these days; they want to know how I think God is going to intervene in all the suffering in the world. In other words, they want me to tell them about my experiences of God – how God called me into ministry, how God is at work in the Body of Christ, where God is showing up in the midst of suffering. These are fine things to talk about when I’ve had time to study scripture and think it through and write it down, but it’s horrifying to talk about these things with random people you don’t know. 

Because we don’t know how to talk about God. We know that there are so many different languages for spiritual experience, that we don’t all agree on the definitions of religious words, so we can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted. We don’t want to offend people who may believe differently. We don’t want them to feel like we’re trying to push our religion on them. But we also don’t want to be judged. We don’t want people to think we’re fanatical, or one of “those” Christians. We don’t know if we’re going to say the “right” things about God. Maybe we don’t even completely trust our own experiences. 

In a workshop I attended this week at Presbytery, Luther Seminary Professor Dr. Andy Root shared research he had done with mainline Protestant Christians. He interviewed them to find out about their experiences of God, to hear their stories about when God showed up in their lives in a real and tangible way. Everyone he interviewed had a story about this kind of experience. And most of them had never told another living soul about it. Not one. Not their closest family members or friends, not their fellow church-members, not even their pastor. 

Because, as Dr. Root explained, we feel like faith is a private matter, something we think about and decide as individuals what we feel and believe about God. We live in a world that worships what we can sense and test and prove. There is no place for our transcendent experiences in this culture – not even in church. We are all experiencing God, we might even say we are encountering the risen Christ or moved by the Holy Spirit. But we are not talking about it because we don’t know how to speak in a way we trust others will be able to hear and understand us. 

The book of Acts tells us that on the day of Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples were all in a room together. Jesus had told them to go to Jerusalem and wait. So they were waiting. 

Picture the scene: eleven guys sitting around for days, weeks, more than a month. Maybe they talk about who is going to grocery shop this week and who is going to cook. Maybe they talk about repainting the walls and what color they should go with. Maybe they talk about the heat, the rain, the need for better footwear. 

I can’t say for sure, but I’m betting that they talked a lot in those 50 days between Passover and Pentecost. And I’m betting they did not talk a lot about God. 

Because how could they? What language did they have? How could these eleven first-century Jews possibly put into words this experience they had gone through? The miracles they had witnessed, the teachings they had heard. The terror and the grief of the crucifixion. And the impossible – the very, very impossible resurrection. 

They were doing what Jesus told them to do, but they didn’t know what any of it meant. They had no theological language to describe it. They couldn’t even talk to each other about it for fear that it hadn’t really happened to all of them. They didn’t trust their own experience. And they certainly couldn’t tell other Jews about it. It would feel like they were trying to convert them to some other religion. Or they might be labeled as lunatics. Or, as it turns out, wasted drunks. 

Outside the room where the disciples waited, thousands of Jews from all over the known world were gathering. Some of them had traveled over 4,000 miles, a months-long journey on foot. Now, these folks could all communicate. They could ask where to buy bread and find lodging. There were several common languages spoken throughout large swaths of the Roman Empire – Greek and Latin, of course – and within the Jewish diaspora – Hebrew and Aramaic. These common languages enabled them to communicate information, but they couldn’t really tell stories or share meaningful experiences. The nuances and idioms of any language are difficult to translate. It is always easier to build relationships, to share stories, and to communicating meaningful insights in our native tongue.

Now, I imagine the Holy Spirit could have worked any number of miracles to announce herself to the disciples and get the church rolling. She could have enabled everyone to speak the same language, like pre-tower of Bable. She could have given birth to the church through a mass of miracle healings. Or she could have miraculously produced baskets full of grain and jugs full of wine to augment the Jewish Pentecost celebrations. 

But instead, the Holy Spirit empowered the disciples of Jesus Christ to talk about their experiences of God in the native languages of people who lived hundreds or even thousands of miles away from Jerusalem. This miracle amazes, astonishes, and perplexes some in the crowd. It’s like this time when we were in Greece, trying to find our way to a remote hotel in the middle of the night, and we stopped into a bakery to ask for directions. Nobody on the night shift spoke a word of English, and, believe it or not, biblical Greek does not get you very far in modern-day Greece. We were desperately trying to hand-gesture our way into explaining how we needed directions when these two young Greek men walked in and started speaking to us in perfect English. We were amazed, astonished, and perplexed. And also extremely relieved. It turned out that these fellows had been studying English in college and were extremely excited to get to practice on us. One of their favorite phrases was “have fun and go make babies.”

We were so grateful to miraculously encounter these English-speaking Greeks. But some of the folks in the crowd around Jesus’s disciples were less enthusiastic. People speaking a language that didn’t belong to them raised suspicion. Like if your right-wing uncle showed up to the Memorial Day picnic talking about systemic racism and the intersectionality of gender and disability, or your left-wing niece showed up at your door in a MAGA hat to tell you about the patriot militia she’s planning to join. 

It was easier to believe they were just speaking drunken gibberish than to believe what they were hearing, to believe in the miracle of sharing stories about God’s activity in the lives of real human beings across boundaries of language. And apparently, even in first-century Jerusalem, it was indecent to be drunk at nine in the morning.

But it also wasn’t entirely implausible. Pentecost, or Shavuot in Hebrew, was a celebration of the harvest. There was food and wine and possibly a fair amount of partying involved. This was a celebration of the tangible blessings of God. The Jews knew that God was with them because they could eat and drink, because they had what they needed to live and enjoy life. This was a celebration that embodied the kind of experiences of God we’re comfortable talking about – liturgy, music, and how much we are #blessed.

And then Peter addresses the crowd and talks about experiencing God in a very different way. Peter quotes the prophet Joel to describe their experience, saying that God has poured out the Spirit - not just on those who please God and follow all the commandments and plant and harvest at the right time; not just people of a certain gender or a certain age or a certain status – but ALL FLESH. And what this looks like is, well, it’s hard to describe. They will prophesy, see visions, dream dreams. They will see what God is doing, they will experience God not just in tangible things but in transcendent ways. And this inaugurates a new era, the fulfillment of God’s plan for salvation. 

The Spirit enables Peter to speak to each of the people in this diverse crowd in their native language. But she also enables him to share this indescribable, unbelievable, transcendent experience of God in words that culturally have meaning for all of them. He takes this ancient prophesy they are all familiar with and says, “look – this is it, here and now.”

Every Sunday, we gather in this place together. Maybe we talk about God. But we restrict that talk to liturgy and hymns, reading the Bible, maybe interpreting its historical meaning and the implications for society today. We talk and about what we’re grateful for and what we want God to do, what we need to live and enjoy life. There are ways of talking about God that are comfortable for us.

And then there are those things that make us uncomfortable. There are words that feel like a foreign language, words whose meaning we don’t all agree on. Words like salvation, grace, atonement, redemption, love, justice, righteousness. Maybe those words don’t make sense of the actual experiences of God we have had.

And so we don’t talk about those experiences. Those times when something mysterious or transcendent came over us. Those times when we know God was intervening in our lives in a powerful way. Those things that have happened that we can’t explain scientifically, that we can’t prove or quantify, those things that felt so real but that we just don’t have language for. Those things that sound so fantastical we’re certain people won’t believe us, won’t understand us, or will think we fanatics. 

But what if the Holy Spirit is still working miracles today? Maybe she’s not empowering us to all speak the same language, or magically heal people, or increase our material resources. But maybe she is still empowering us to share the gospel, the good news of God’s deeds of power, those experiences of God we haven’t told anyone about except very late at night around a campfire.

God’s Spirit has been poured out on all flesh – not just those with proper religious training, not just those in the religious in-crowd, not just people of a certain age or gender or status. Everyone has a story to tell about experiencing God in their lives, experiencing something transcendent, inexplicable, sacred. It may be hard to describe, these intangible experiences of God. But we are a part of this new era, inaugurated 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. If we allow the Spirit to move through us, we can speak in languages that connect us like natives of the same land, breaking out of our insular vocabulary to realize how someone might understand our words differently than we do. We might take the time to listen, to translate, to speak in a way that allows everyone to hear of God’s deeds of power, God’s action in our lives. And if we continue to do this, if we continue to participate in the Pentecost Church, we will see God’s salvation, we will be able to say, “look – this is it, here and now.”

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.

There are so many barriers we experience to talking about God. And I don’t mean talking about how much we love our church or our Christian values or how #blessed we are. We can talk about those things. But talking about how we’ve actually experienced God showing up in our lives or in the world – that’s another matter entirely.