SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE DAY OF PENTECOST
15 MAY 2005

 

"How is it then that we hear them, each of us in his own language?" (Acts 2:8)

 

 

It's been more than forty years since the curate at St. Philip's, Brooklyn, on a recruiting mission for priests, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be an interpreter at the United Nations. I thought of that boyhood wish, with some nostalgia but no regret, when I saw a new suspense-thriller-action movie recently, called "The Interpreter." In the only film ever shot at the United Nations, we could see and hear interpreters at work, simultaneously translating important speeches, their words channeled into earphones on the heads of the delegates. It's hard work. Some years ago, through a series of serendipitous events, I actually functioned once as an unofficial and unpaid interpreter in the West African country of Mauritania, translating the English words of the national director of the Peace Corps and the French words of an assemblage of tribal chieftains. Since no international incident ensued, I assume that I did not make any egregious faux pas in my attempt to bridge the chasm between American English and the Gallic tongue.

 

Without interpreters, language can be an insuperable barrier. Ugly Americans abroad learn this the hard way, when, to their surprise, shouting English and speaking it slowly fails to achieve the desired effect when conversing with a bus driver in Mexico City or a policeman in Berlin. In the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis, we read a story about such a barrier. At that time, we are told, there was but one language and only a few words. Some enterprising men got together and said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.' And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.' The story of the Tower of Babel, then, relates an attempt on the part of a group of people to establish themselves as lords of the world, as little gods, if you will, but they failed miserably after God confuses their language, whereupon the whole project grinds to a sudden halt. On the surface, the Tower of Babel is a story explaining the origin of different languages. On a deeper level, though, it's a story about humanity's lust for power and God's opposition to the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Fast forward, if you will, to today's story in the Book of Acts. Jesus, followers, Galileans, were all assembled in what was probably the Upper Room, but it wasn't just "the usual suspects." They were joined by all the ethnic groups mentioned in today's lessons --- Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Arabs, people from the uttermost parts of the then known world. But miraculously, because of the descent of the Holy Spirit, they find they are all able, without benefit of earphones, to converse with one another, and to understand the different languages they were speaking. So whereas at Babel, the babble of languages confuses and frustrates; on the Day of Pentecost, the speaking in various languages serves to enlighten and inspire. The confusion inflicted by God at Babel was a punishment on a people who thought they were equal to God. Those who had been given the task of tilling the ground had lost their perspective. The tower represented the heights to which they would go to prove their power. The ability to speak given to the disciples at Pentecost, on the other hand, was a reward for their faithfulness, a gift bestowed on the people of God, the ekklesia, the community whom God called out to be God's fledgling church. The same Lord who had commanded his disciples to go into all nations to baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, was now conferring on them the gift of languages so that there would be no barriers in their way. Pentecost was the birthday of the church, and this gift of communication was the disciples' birthday present.

 

My sisters and brothers in Christ, it would appear that the church has squandered that gift. Here we are in the first decade of the third millennium, and our lives as members of the Church seem to be more akin to the discord of Babel than the harmony of Pentecost. First of all, there seems to be more and more evidence that we are presuming to act like God. How else can we explain the actions of a Baptist minister in North Carolina who announced one fine Sunday from the pulpit that he was excommunicating every one of his congregants who was not a Republican? Democrats who were unwilling to switch gears and swear their allegiance to President Bush were simply drummed from the rolls. How else can we explain the presumptuous claim of a congressman that his party has cornered the market on religion and that members of the other party, because of their votes on certain issues, are godless?

 

Like the people in the Book of Genesis before the Tower of Babel was constructed, the people of God seem to be drifting toward one language, and that is a language of exclusion. Jesus, who died to bring the whole world to himself, is weeping over a church which is being whittled away. How else can we explain that a bishop in the Province of the West Indies has withdrawn an invitation to preach from a priest on the Presiding Bishop's staff simply because she said she believed that the church should participate in a dialogue on same-sex unions --- the most recent example of how one's opinion on one theological issue has been used for a litmus test not only for one's orthodoxy but for one's fitness for ministry? How else can we explain the increasing number of pronouncements, edicts and promulgations which have the effect of pruning the branches of our Lord's Vine, by declaring this and that group to be unorthodox, apostate, unbiblical or faithless, thereby rendering the church to be smaller and smaller?

 

Those responsible for the pruning have apparently never read "Mending Walls" by Robert Frost, in which he wrote:

Before I built a wall

I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.

Richard Hooker, the 17th century Anglican theologian who brought us the famous three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, expressed the spirit of that first Pentecost when he wrote, "Pray that none will be offended if I make the Christian religion an inn where all are received joyously, rather than a cottage where some few friends of the family are to be received." Today, we welcome into the fellowship of Christ's Church through the sacrament of Baptism Tomohiro, Kian, Alexis and Yutaka. It is our prayer that their church+ will be a commodious inn and not some tiny, cramped cottage in a gated community. We pray that their church, imbued with the grace of the Holy Spirit, will be one in which all sorts and conditions of men and women are able to converse with one another, whose multiplicity of languages, cultures and customs enrich the whole. We pray that each may be able to hear the other in his own language.

 

Let us pray:
Holy Spirit, ever living, as the Church's very life;
Holy Spirit, ever striving, through her in a ceaseless strife;
Holy Spirit, ever forming, in the Church the mind of Christ,
Thee we praise with endless worship, for thy fruits and gifts unpriced. AMEN. (The Hymnal 1982, 511)