A Sermon on Matthew 14:22-33
Before seminary, before college, before I first felt called to ministry, I learned a lot about what it means to offer pastoral care. I learned it in my first job, when I was in high school. I was a swimming teacher.
I know, you don’t think of swimming teachers as spiritual leaders. But I challenge you to watch the first day of preschool swimming classes someday, as the anxious parents start corralling anxious children toward the pool. Watch the panic and the fear and the tension, and tell me those children and those parents don’t need some spiritual comfort. Being a swimming teacher taught me something that Jesus definitely knew: getting in over your head – literally over your head – brings out your spiritual hunger, your brokenness, your need. And it also opens you up – opens you to relationship, opens you to trust, opens you to grace.
Jesus definitely knew about what happens spiritually when we get in over our heads, and we can see it in today’s Gospel lesson. The lesson picks up after Jesus has fed the five thousand, and we find Jesus anxious for a moment of solitude and prayer, hungry to be alone with God – for some time now, Matthew has been mentioning that Jesus was trying to get away to pray as the crowd followed him, but finally, in today’s lesson, Jesus has fed them with loaves and fish and good news, and sent them away, and he sends the disciples away as well – the Greek actually says he forced or compelled them to go away, he drove them away. And finally alone, he goes up to a mountain to pray while the disciples go ahead of him in a boat.
In the world of the Bible, water was seen as a place of swirling primordial chaos, as far from God as it is possible to be. Think of the Jonah in the belly of the whale, and of all the miracle stories of God pushing back the water. The water is a place of fear and danger, even for fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John. There they are, alone on a boat at sea in the middle of a storm, until the fourth watch of the night – the period from about three to six in the morning – until Jesus comes walking toward them over the waves. And in the midst of their terror, they don’t recognize him. They think he’s a ghost. And who can blame them? To the minds of people in the biblical world, they are in one of the spookiest possible places – a boat on a storm at sea in the eerie pre-dawn hours. It’s like a horror movie setting – they might as well be in an abandoned insane asylum.
The disciples begin to tremble with terror, and they cry out in fear. In this short little story, the word for fear is repeated three times – fear whispers and echoes throughout the story, and Jesus stands against fear over and over again. So the disciples cry out in fear, and Jesus calls to them across the waters: “Take courage! It is I! Fear not!”
Each of those sentences is resonant in the Greek. “Take courage” is a command Jesus uses frequently in healing stories: “take courage, your sins are forgiven.” “Take courage, your faith has made you well.” Those are warm words, words of blessing and comfort.
“It is I” in Greek is ego eimi. Ego eimi. Eimi, all by itself, means “I am.” Eimi is a complete sentence – it includes the “I” and the “am” all in one word. Ego means “I” – he repeats the I, emphasizing it by doubling it: “It is I!” Ego eimi is what Jesus says in the Gospel of John’s famous “I am” statements: “I am the bread of life”; “I am the good shepherd”; and so on.
But ego eimi is also the Greek translation of God’s declaration to Moses at the burning bush. When Moses encounters God and says, “who shall I say sent me,” God answers, “ehyeh asher ehyeh.” “I am that I am.” “Ego eimi.” Ego eimi evokes awe; it is a phrase that tries to capture the indescribable power and presence of God. IT. IS. I.
And then Jesus goes on: “Mei phobeisthe.” “Be not afraid.” If those words sound familiar, they should. Those are the words of the angel to Mary. They are the words of the angel to Joseph. They are the words of the angel to the shepherds. They are the words of the angel to Mary Magdalene at the tomb. They are the words of the resurrected Christ when the disciples see them. And here, they are the words of Jesus to the disciples as he walks toward them on the water.
Take heart. It is I. Be not afraid. Those words are not so different from the words swimming teachers use with children out in the middle of the water.
There’s a paradox about teaching swimming to a terrified child. You would think that the approach to take would be to let that child go gradually, let them become accustomed to the water, let them cling to the wall, let them sit on the side and stick their toes in, until they adjust and they’re ready. Well, that might be helpful for the first three minutes of class. But if you wait for a nervous kid to be ready to jump in, you might wait for years. If you have a really nervous kid in your swimming class, your only chance of helping them learn to swim is to get them out in the middle of the pool by themselves with nothing to cling to but you. So you pry them away from the wall, and you ignore their anxious mother who is sure he’ll be ready in a minute or two. And you go straight to the middle and you just stay there. And you say, over and over again, “I’m right here. I won’t let you go. You’re safe here with me. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. I’m right here.”
That nervous child has been thinking that he can stay safe through his own caution, that if he just clings to the wall tightly enough, just stays on the top step, just doesn’t venture out into the water, he can stay safe that way. My role as a swimming teacher is to lead the child to trust not in his own firm grip on the wall, but in me and my commitment to keeping him safe. And if that child will trust in me to not let him go, he will begin to relax his body, to stop resisting the water and start learning to move in the water. One day, to his utter shock, he will discover that the water is fully capable of supporting his weight. He will discover that water, like the grace of God, is able to hold him up if he will let it.
That might be what’s going on when Jesus sends the disciples out into a storm at sea and then comes to them over the waves with his words of comfort: he is asking them to trust in him, to know that anywhere they go, no matter how terrifying, they are not alone; they can rely on him to be with them, to come to them; they do not need to be afraid. And so he calls out to them, “Take heart! It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Peter takes that leap of faith. He replies, calling out to Jesus across the waters, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies “Come!” and Peter steps down, over the side of the boat, and begins to walk along the surface of the water toward Jesus. But suddenly, his focus wavers. He notices the strong winds around him, and Simon Peter, the one whom Jesus called petros, the rock, begins to sink like the stone he is named after. “Lord,” Peter cries out, “save me!” And before Peter’s head even goes under, Jesus reaches out his hand, catches him, and brings him back to the boat.
When they arrive at the boat, Jesus speaks to Peter: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” As a child, I was taught that Peter lacks faith because he takes his eyes off of Jesus; he lets the wind and waves distract him; he allows his focus to waver and he notices the storm crashing around him. Peter sinks because he lacks faith. Maybe so. But I wonder if that is the moment that Jesus is talking about when he calls Peter one of “little faith”? These bodies of flesh and bone are not made to skim along the water’s surface like whirligig beetles, after all. I wonder if Peter’s moment of doubt was not the moment before he began to sink, but the moment after it. I wonder if Jesus reprimands Peter not for beginning to sink, but for doubting that Jesus would catch him. What if Jesus is chiding Peter not for sinking like a stone, but for thinking that Jesus might let him drown?
Often, we hear the story of Peter walking on the water as a story urging us on to better faith. If we just try harder than Peter, have more faith than Peter, than we will do better than Peter. We will walk across the water, like a skipping stone, and we will make it to Jesus. But I don’t think that’s the point of this story. I think we are called not to flawless faith, but to faith in a God who will not let us go under. We are called not to walk on water, but to learn to trust the grace of God to hold us up, like a child learning to swim. We do not need to do better than Peter and make it to Jesus – Jesus will come to us.
Working as a hospital chaplain last summer, I often found myself in over my head. I felt like I was in over my head as I stood by the bed of a child recovering from spinal surgery, in more pain than a person should have to experience, and I tried to find the words to say to her mother, who could do nothing to relieve her daughter’s pain. I felt like I was in over my head when a woman who clearly needed love and support and pastoral care began to insult me and my family, bringing me almost to tears with hurtful words and refusing to talk about herself. I felt like I was in over my head when I talked with a family fighting about whether to take their beloved grandmother off of life support. The needs were huge, and the people’s stories were heartbreaking, and I felt like I had so little to offer.
One day, a fellow chaplain reminded me of this very story, the story of Peter walking to Jesus over the waves. “Maybe,” the chaplain said, “all we need to do is offer a hand. Just a hand is all it takes, sometimes, to keep people from going under.” That was true – and it was a reminder that offering a little could mean a lot. But hearing that was like a hand keeping me from going under. And I began to see, in my work, all the ways that grace was sustaining me, all the ways that God was holding me up, all the ways that hands reached out to me to keep me from drowning. When a wonderful, wise patient asked if she could say a blessing for me and my work before she went home, God was holding me up. When a colleague met me for coffee to share stories and support one another, God was holding me up. When I heard words of grace and comfort echoing through worship services and scripture readings, God was holding me up.
God’s call to us is not to walk on water. God’s call to us is to get out of the boat. God calls us out of all kinds of boats. Maybe getting out of the boat means offering some kind words to people you see on the street. Maybe getting out of the boat means speaking up when you hear hateful language or jokes based on stereotypes. Maybe getting out of the boat means working toward tithing. During the shooting in Norway that took place a couple of weeks ago, getting out of the boat actually meant getting into a boat for two women, as they paddled into gunfire to save children fleeing the massacre. Getting out of the boat is a leap of faith out of our own comfort zones, the places that seem safe and secure, to follow Jesus wherever he calls us. But getting out of the boat does not mean we need to walk on the water without failing or falling. We are not called to perfection, but we are called to follow Jesus.
And the good news is that, when we start to falter, when we feel that we have gotten in over our heads, when we don’t know whether we can go on, the grace of God will catch us and hold us up. Like water supporting a swimming child, like Jesus catching the hand of Peter, God reaches out to buoy us up. God buoys us up through scripture, as we turn to words of comfort and strength, stories that remind us of God’s grace and love. God buoys us up through glimpses of grace in our lives and the world around us, through dinners with friends and cool breezes on hot days. God buoys us up through community, through kind words from friends and smiles from strangers. God buoys us up through that still, small voice that speaks in our hearts in moments of prayer and contemplation, in moments of celebration and rejoicing. And knowing that we can trust in a God who does not expect perfection, a God who is always ready to reach out, to take us by the hand, to support us in our need, we are called, with Peter, to get out of the boat.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Showing posts with label cpe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cpe. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Sermon: Five Stages of Resurrection
John 20:19-31
Second Sunday of Easter, May 1 2011
Last summer, while working as a chaplain at a hospital, I received a page about a pastoral emergency. A patient had come in the night before for a routine hip replacement, and gone into surgery early in the morning. Her surgery went perfectly. But while she was under anesthesia, her sister died suddenly and unexpectedly. The patient, Gina, woke up in the recovery room to find her children crying. Not long after, she sent her children away to start making her sister’s funeral arrangements, and not long after that, her nurse paged me because she was distressed and agitated.
I sat with Gina several times during her time in the hospital, but I remember that first day most clearly. I sat with her for nearly an hour, mostly just listening as she said over and over, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this is happening. This isn’t happening. I just can’t believe it. It’s not happening. I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s true.”
In the book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the idea that there are five stages of grief. She divided the emotional experience of terminal illness into five phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kubler-Ross only studied the terminally ill for her research, but these stages of grief ring so true that they are now used to understand all kinds of experiences of loss: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship. Every person is unique, and every grieving process is different, so people can go through those five stages in a different order, or skip some stages, or move back and forth between different stages, but those stages offer a good framework for thinking about how we grieve. And that day when I sat with Gina as she expressed her disbelief over and over and over again, I got my first clear picture of what it means to be in the “denial” stage of grieving.
In our Gospel text for today, I hear Gina’s words ringing back, but in a very different way: “I cannot believe it.” It was not that Gina thought her children were lying to her. It was not that she had assessed the evidence and decided that her sister was actually alive. It was that she had gotten a piece of news so huge, so unexpected, so life-changing, that she could not wrap her mind around it. She knew that it was true, but she couldn’t quite believe it. And so I thought about Gina and those five stages of grief as I imagined what it might be like to go through the emotional journey that Thomas goes through in our Gospel lesson for today.
At the beginning of the reading, it is the night of the day when Mary Magdalene saw the Risen Christ, but none of the disciples have seen him yet – they have only seen the empty tomb. And all of the disciples except for Thomas are gathered together in a locked house, afraid that the same religious authorities who orchestrated Jesus’ execution will turn against them. (By the way, the text says that they have locked themselves in “for fear of the Jews,” but all of the disciples are Jewish themselves.)
Jesus appears among them, and actually shows them his hands and side before vanishing. When the disciples tell Thomas what they have seen, he says this: “Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my fingers in the marks, and put my hand in the wound on his side, I will not believe.” Ick.
On one hand, that statement is just so viscerally gross that it just sounds wrong. “I will not believe it unless I put my finger in the nail holes.” On the other hand, this just sounds so human to me – the human need to see it for ourselves is one of the reasons that, when someone dies, we display their body at a wake. The human need to see it for ourselves is the reason that my hospital patients were always getting scolded by the nurses for peeping under their bandages to look at their wounds and stitches. When I hear Thomas saying, “I won’t believe it unless I see it and touch it,” I’m not sure I hear faithlessness. I hear someone trying to wrap his mind around the incomprehensible. I hear denial. Perhaps those stages of grief could help us understand how the disciples, and how we, respond to the good news of resurrection.
Of course, the stages Thomas goes through as he wrestles with the resurrection and what it means don’t line up perfectly with the five stages of grief, but I think there’s something there, something about how we deal with huge, life-changing, world-transforming moments. The five stages of grief teach us that bad news is hard to come to terms with; it is hard to wrap our minds around; it is hard to accept and understand and integrate into our lives. Moving forward from a huge loss or change is not instantaneous – it is a process.
A couple of years ago, shortly after I first studied the five stages of grief, I had a kitchen accident, in which I cut off the very last little bit of the end of my thumb. It was not a huge tragedy. But it did hurt a lot, and it was scary, and I went to the emergency room to get it looked at. The doctor told me that it would heal, but it was unlikely that the nerves would regrow, so I probably would not ever have sensation in the end of my thumb again. And I thought, “I don’t believe that.” And then I thought, “wait a minute, Emily, that’s denial.” Over the next several days, I noticed myself going through those five stages of grief. “I can’t believe I did that! What sort of stupid idiot am I?” – anger. “If I’m really careful from now on and practice better knife safety, maybe my thumb will be fine” – bargaining. I knew exactly what they were, but even though I recognized them, I couldn’t jump straight to acceptance.
It can be like that to deal with good news, as well – a friend of mine who is awaiting the birth of a baby this summer spoke of the emotional process of comprehending the pregnancy – the process that started with hearing the good news, but didn’t end until they saw tiny hands on the ultrasound image. Even when the news is good and joyful – news of new life, news of hope, news of transformation, we cannot always accept it right away.
Thomas could not jump straight to acceptance, either. Jesus had promised the resurrection. The disciples had told him of the resurrection. But it would take time for Thomas to wrap his mind around the resurrection. The scripture reading today says that a week passed between the day the other disciples saw the risen Christ and told Thomas about it, and the day when Jesus appeared to Thomas, showing his hands and inviting Thomas to inspect his wounds. I wonder what that week was like for Thomas? I imagine he spent a lot of time wrestling and praying, as glimmers of hope began to overtake the despair of having watched his friend and teacher die.
And maybe it’s like that for us, sometimes, too. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the good news that God’s love is stronger than death. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the good news that hope can conquer fear. On Easter, we greet the Risen Christ with trumpets and lilies and feasting. We greet each other with the words “Christ is risen!” and reply with the words, “Christ is risen indeed!” But after the lilies have wilted and the trumpet players have gone home, we sometimes find ourselves asking, “Really?” “Is he?” We might find ourselves saying, “I think it might be true, but I can’t quite understand it.” We might find ourselves asking, with Thomas, “How can I know? What can you show me?”
Lots of churches and sermons and Sunday school lessons condemn those kinds of questions – and condemn anyone who admits to asking them. But Jesus doesn’t condemn them. In fact, in today’s reading, he answers them: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe.” Jesus doesn’t condemn Thomas for being doubtful; instead he meets Thomas in the middle of his doubt and invites him to faith.
The good news of the resurrection is not just for people who have their theological ducks in a row. It’s not just for people who have moved past fear and denial and doubt. It’s not just for people with both feet firmly planted in hope and rejoicing. The good news is for you and me, even when we can’t quite believe it, don’t quite understand it, can’t quite accept it – especially then. When we are trapped behind the locked doors of fear, lost in the depths of despair, wrestling with doubt and disbelief, that is a moment when we can encounter the Risen Christ for ourselves, as we move, for the first time or the thousandth, from death to life, from despair to hope, from fear to trust. That is a moment when we experience resurrection in our own lives.
When we are doubtful, when we are uncertain, when we cannot quite accept or comprehend the good news of resurrection, we are not condemned – like Thomas, we are invited. We are invited to the communion table to taste and see that God is good. We are invited to gather with one another in loving community to hear the stories and sing the songs that proclaim hope and love and peace and justice. We are invited to go out into the world to love and serve our brothers and sisters. We are invited to meet the risen Christ.
Thanks be to God.
Second Sunday of Easter, May 1 2011
Last summer, while working as a chaplain at a hospital, I received a page about a pastoral emergency. A patient had come in the night before for a routine hip replacement, and gone into surgery early in the morning. Her surgery went perfectly. But while she was under anesthesia, her sister died suddenly and unexpectedly. The patient, Gina, woke up in the recovery room to find her children crying. Not long after, she sent her children away to start making her sister’s funeral arrangements, and not long after that, her nurse paged me because she was distressed and agitated.
I sat with Gina several times during her time in the hospital, but I remember that first day most clearly. I sat with her for nearly an hour, mostly just listening as she said over and over, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this is happening. This isn’t happening. I just can’t believe it. It’s not happening. I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s true.”
In the book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the idea that there are five stages of grief. She divided the emotional experience of terminal illness into five phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kubler-Ross only studied the terminally ill for her research, but these stages of grief ring so true that they are now used to understand all kinds of experiences of loss: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship. Every person is unique, and every grieving process is different, so people can go through those five stages in a different order, or skip some stages, or move back and forth between different stages, but those stages offer a good framework for thinking about how we grieve. And that day when I sat with Gina as she expressed her disbelief over and over and over again, I got my first clear picture of what it means to be in the “denial” stage of grieving.
In our Gospel text for today, I hear Gina’s words ringing back, but in a very different way: “I cannot believe it.” It was not that Gina thought her children were lying to her. It was not that she had assessed the evidence and decided that her sister was actually alive. It was that she had gotten a piece of news so huge, so unexpected, so life-changing, that she could not wrap her mind around it. She knew that it was true, but she couldn’t quite believe it. And so I thought about Gina and those five stages of grief as I imagined what it might be like to go through the emotional journey that Thomas goes through in our Gospel lesson for today.
At the beginning of the reading, it is the night of the day when Mary Magdalene saw the Risen Christ, but none of the disciples have seen him yet – they have only seen the empty tomb. And all of the disciples except for Thomas are gathered together in a locked house, afraid that the same religious authorities who orchestrated Jesus’ execution will turn against them. (By the way, the text says that they have locked themselves in “for fear of the Jews,” but all of the disciples are Jewish themselves.)
Jesus appears among them, and actually shows them his hands and side before vanishing. When the disciples tell Thomas what they have seen, he says this: “Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my fingers in the marks, and put my hand in the wound on his side, I will not believe.” Ick.
On one hand, that statement is just so viscerally gross that it just sounds wrong. “I will not believe it unless I put my finger in the nail holes.” On the other hand, this just sounds so human to me – the human need to see it for ourselves is one of the reasons that, when someone dies, we display their body at a wake. The human need to see it for ourselves is the reason that my hospital patients were always getting scolded by the nurses for peeping under their bandages to look at their wounds and stitches. When I hear Thomas saying, “I won’t believe it unless I see it and touch it,” I’m not sure I hear faithlessness. I hear someone trying to wrap his mind around the incomprehensible. I hear denial. Perhaps those stages of grief could help us understand how the disciples, and how we, respond to the good news of resurrection.
Of course, the stages Thomas goes through as he wrestles with the resurrection and what it means don’t line up perfectly with the five stages of grief, but I think there’s something there, something about how we deal with huge, life-changing, world-transforming moments. The five stages of grief teach us that bad news is hard to come to terms with; it is hard to wrap our minds around; it is hard to accept and understand and integrate into our lives. Moving forward from a huge loss or change is not instantaneous – it is a process.
A couple of years ago, shortly after I first studied the five stages of grief, I had a kitchen accident, in which I cut off the very last little bit of the end of my thumb. It was not a huge tragedy. But it did hurt a lot, and it was scary, and I went to the emergency room to get it looked at. The doctor told me that it would heal, but it was unlikely that the nerves would regrow, so I probably would not ever have sensation in the end of my thumb again. And I thought, “I don’t believe that.” And then I thought, “wait a minute, Emily, that’s denial.” Over the next several days, I noticed myself going through those five stages of grief. “I can’t believe I did that! What sort of stupid idiot am I?” – anger. “If I’m really careful from now on and practice better knife safety, maybe my thumb will be fine” – bargaining. I knew exactly what they were, but even though I recognized them, I couldn’t jump straight to acceptance.
It can be like that to deal with good news, as well – a friend of mine who is awaiting the birth of a baby this summer spoke of the emotional process of comprehending the pregnancy – the process that started with hearing the good news, but didn’t end until they saw tiny hands on the ultrasound image. Even when the news is good and joyful – news of new life, news of hope, news of transformation, we cannot always accept it right away.
Thomas could not jump straight to acceptance, either. Jesus had promised the resurrection. The disciples had told him of the resurrection. But it would take time for Thomas to wrap his mind around the resurrection. The scripture reading today says that a week passed between the day the other disciples saw the risen Christ and told Thomas about it, and the day when Jesus appeared to Thomas, showing his hands and inviting Thomas to inspect his wounds. I wonder what that week was like for Thomas? I imagine he spent a lot of time wrestling and praying, as glimmers of hope began to overtake the despair of having watched his friend and teacher die.
And maybe it’s like that for us, sometimes, too. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the good news that God’s love is stronger than death. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the good news that hope can conquer fear. On Easter, we greet the Risen Christ with trumpets and lilies and feasting. We greet each other with the words “Christ is risen!” and reply with the words, “Christ is risen indeed!” But after the lilies have wilted and the trumpet players have gone home, we sometimes find ourselves asking, “Really?” “Is he?” We might find ourselves saying, “I think it might be true, but I can’t quite understand it.” We might find ourselves asking, with Thomas, “How can I know? What can you show me?”
Lots of churches and sermons and Sunday school lessons condemn those kinds of questions – and condemn anyone who admits to asking them. But Jesus doesn’t condemn them. In fact, in today’s reading, he answers them: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe.” Jesus doesn’t condemn Thomas for being doubtful; instead he meets Thomas in the middle of his doubt and invites him to faith.
The good news of the resurrection is not just for people who have their theological ducks in a row. It’s not just for people who have moved past fear and denial and doubt. It’s not just for people with both feet firmly planted in hope and rejoicing. The good news is for you and me, even when we can’t quite believe it, don’t quite understand it, can’t quite accept it – especially then. When we are trapped behind the locked doors of fear, lost in the depths of despair, wrestling with doubt and disbelief, that is a moment when we can encounter the Risen Christ for ourselves, as we move, for the first time or the thousandth, from death to life, from despair to hope, from fear to trust. That is a moment when we experience resurrection in our own lives.
When we are doubtful, when we are uncertain, when we cannot quite accept or comprehend the good news of resurrection, we are not condemned – like Thomas, we are invited. We are invited to the communion table to taste and see that God is good. We are invited to gather with one another in loving community to hear the stories and sing the songs that proclaim hope and love and peace and justice. We are invited to go out into the world to love and serve our brothers and sisters. We are invited to meet the risen Christ.
Thanks be to God.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sermon: Lost in Translation
A Sermon for Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21
There are two ways for an American to order dinner in France, writes the humorist David Sedaris. The first way is to learn the proper conjugations for all the verbs and the correct genders for all the nouns, to study idioms and social customs until she or he is able to understand the menu and correctly use the conditional tense which is considered polite when requesting a meal. The second way goes like this: “I… WANT… A… STEAK.”
I’ve heard a lot of jokes like this: self-deprecation by Americans who are ashamed that so few of us are fluent in any language but English. I used to agree – how arrogant, I thought, to go to a foreign country and expect everyone to speak English! But my perspective changed a few weeks ago, while I was in Israel with the story of Pentecost on my mind. My husband and I sat down to eat in a little restaurant in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. At the table next to us was an Italian family. And I discovered that when an Italian family eats at an Armenian restaurant in Israel, they use English to communicate with the waitress.
We are fortunate to live in an era in which English is the lingua franca, the shared language that people use to communicate with one another in cross-cultural situations – even when an Italian family is speaking with an Armenian-Israeli waitress. When everyone speaks a little English, it makes it easier to buy and sell things, to give directions, to order food or make a little small talk. But when Israelis and Italians and Germans and Argentinians are communicating with one another in grammar-school English, a lot gets lost in translation – it can be hard to communicate nuance, or emotion, or humor; the sentences are as simple as possible, and figures of speech are avoided altogether. The English that tourists speak to one another is practical, but it doesn’t have much soul.
That is not so different from the situation of the people in today’s story from Acts. The disciples are in Jerusalem after witnessing Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Jerusalem is filled with pilgrims celebrating the Jewish festival of Shavuot. Shavuot, which takes place fifty days after Passover, just as our Pentecost takes place fifty days after Easter, is timed to coincide with the “first fruits” of the growing season, and it celebrates the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. So every year in Jerusalem, people would come from north and south, east and west, to bring their first fruits to the temple. There were a few different ways people might be able to speak to each other: perhaps some of them would be familiar with Latin, the language of the colonizing Roman empire; the Aramaic spoken in the region might have sounded familiar to them as the language of scripture and liturgy. Most likely, though, they would have communicated in Koine Greek. Just like English is the lingua franca of our era, Greek was the lingua franca of Jesus’ life and the early church. It allowed the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to be written down and shared; it allowed the Apostle Paul to communicate with Corinthians and Ephesians and Galatians. Nowadays, when we don’t understand something, we say, “It’s all Greek to me,” but in that day, Greek was the language that allowed for communication across cultural boundaries.
I wonder if the way we talk about God in church can sometimes be a little bit like a lingua franca? Something brings us here, to church on a Sunday morning – perhaps a profound experience of God, perhaps a sense that there is something happening in our lives that we cannot quite understand, perhaps a desire for a deeper spiritual life. It can be hard to put words to what is happening with our hearts and minds and souls, hard to describe what it is about the story of Jesus that draws us in and gets us up on a Sunday morning. But here in church, we’ve found some language that lets us share a little bit of what God is doing in our lives. We use hymns and prayers and scriptures; we speak of sin and grace and salvation. We use terms that would sound very strange to someone who wasn’t familiar with Christianity: we talk about kingdoms and mustard seeds and tax collectors. Sometimes it really works for us – we walk out of church saying YES! Other times, it doesn’t quite connect. Something has been lost in translation. Our communication about God isn’t always perfect, but we make do. Drawn together by a God who is too big for words, we have found a way to speak to one another about it – our lingua franca; our Greek. With a little bit of religious education, we can talk to one another about God and we can all understand it.
But in our Pentecost story, the miracle is not that the disciples speak in a language that everyone can understand – that would have been easy enough. They could have spoken Greek. No, the miracle is that through the Holy Spirit, each member of the crowd hears the good news in their own mother tongue. The biblical account lists an astounding number of regions – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the list goes on. These are people from modern-day Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and more – pilgrims from all over the known world. Every single one of these people, the story says, hears the good news in their own language – the language that their parents spoke to them in childhood, the language that they use to soothe an infant or joke around with a friend, the language in which they whisper to their wives or husbands. Maybe you believe in literal miracles – that the Parthians actually heard words in Parthian – or maybe you hear this story metaphorically. Either way, I think it has something vital to say to us today.
It is not always enough, this miracle story seems to suggest, for us to struggle along in our lingua franca. That will do most of the time, but God wants to speak to us in our own language. I think that this story of pilgrims hearing the good news in their own language can lead us to think about how we hear God’s voice speaking to us in the languages of our hearts. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you are far away from this city, walking through some beautiful wilderness and admiring the beauty of creation. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when an achingly beautiful piece of music fills you with awe. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you play with a child or grandchild. Maybe for some of you, the voice of God speaks through poetry or in silent prayer or when you’re gardening. This story reminds us to listen for the voice of God, not just in the shared language that we speak in church, but in the deepest language of our hearts – whatever that is for each of us. This story of Parthians, Medes and Elamites reminds us that God’s word for us speaks to the heart of our being, speaks to us deeply and intimately, in ways ordinary and extraordinary, in burning bushes and quiet conversations.
And maybe it does more than that. Maybe, when we think about this story and how it connects to our lives, we’re not only the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites. Maybe, friends, we’re the disciples. Perhaps this story invites us not just to hear God’s voice speaking to us in our own languages, but to speak in ways that allow God to speak through us. Perhaps this story invites us to speak boldly, with actions and words, about the love of God we have experienced in our own lives, to witness, as the scripture says, to God’s deeds of power. That might mean letting God speak through you when you tell family and friends about why you go to church and what your relationship with God means to you. But it could be other things, as well: it could mean letting God speak through you when you offer a kind word or a listening ear to someone in distress. It could mean letting God speak through you as you give of your time and talent at a food pantry or a youth center. It could mean letting God speak through you as you share your gift for music or art or writing with your church or your community. It could mean letting God speak through you when you speak up against hurtful comments or jokes based on racism or sexism or homophobia. The story of Pentecost tells us that the Holy Spirit can speak not only to us, but through us.
Last summer I worked as a chaplain at a hospital, doing an internship that fulfills one of the requirements for ordination. In my first few days, I visited a patient named Rosa who had just had a hip replacement. Rosa’s English wasn’t so good, and I speak no Spanish at all, but we managed – she showed me her rosary and her picture of the Virgin Mary, and I smiled and nodded. I was very new at chaplaincy, and very unaccustomed to praying with people, especially in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the hospital, but I offered to pray with her, and I stumbled through a prayer for her healing, and then asked her to say the Lord’s Prayer with me. Rosa’s recovery was difficult, with complication after complication, and as my internship went on and I grew in confidence, Rosa’s discharge date was pushed back and back and back. I kept visiting her, and we kept stumbling through those conversations and those prayers. Eventually, it was the last day of my ten-week internship and Rosa was still there. We stumbled through one last conversation as I tried to explain that it was my last day, and then I said, “Let’s pray.” And she said, “This time, I pray.” And she began to lead me through first the Hail Mary and then the Lord’s Prayer in strong, clear Spanish. I realized how much it meant to me for this strong and faithful woman to give me the gift of letting me be her chaplain, and I realized that she was now chaplaining me through the difficult task of letting go and saying goodbye. It was Rosa who spoke those prayers that day, and she said them in Spanish. But in that moment, it was as if God was speaking to me in my own language. And if that was not a Pentecost miracle, I don’t know what is. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Acts 2:1-21
There are two ways for an American to order dinner in France, writes the humorist David Sedaris. The first way is to learn the proper conjugations for all the verbs and the correct genders for all the nouns, to study idioms and social customs until she or he is able to understand the menu and correctly use the conditional tense which is considered polite when requesting a meal. The second way goes like this: “I… WANT… A… STEAK.”
I’ve heard a lot of jokes like this: self-deprecation by Americans who are ashamed that so few of us are fluent in any language but English. I used to agree – how arrogant, I thought, to go to a foreign country and expect everyone to speak English! But my perspective changed a few weeks ago, while I was in Israel with the story of Pentecost on my mind. My husband and I sat down to eat in a little restaurant in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. At the table next to us was an Italian family. And I discovered that when an Italian family eats at an Armenian restaurant in Israel, they use English to communicate with the waitress.
We are fortunate to live in an era in which English is the lingua franca, the shared language that people use to communicate with one another in cross-cultural situations – even when an Italian family is speaking with an Armenian-Israeli waitress. When everyone speaks a little English, it makes it easier to buy and sell things, to give directions, to order food or make a little small talk. But when Israelis and Italians and Germans and Argentinians are communicating with one another in grammar-school English, a lot gets lost in translation – it can be hard to communicate nuance, or emotion, or humor; the sentences are as simple as possible, and figures of speech are avoided altogether. The English that tourists speak to one another is practical, but it doesn’t have much soul.
That is not so different from the situation of the people in today’s story from Acts. The disciples are in Jerusalem after witnessing Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Jerusalem is filled with pilgrims celebrating the Jewish festival of Shavuot. Shavuot, which takes place fifty days after Passover, just as our Pentecost takes place fifty days after Easter, is timed to coincide with the “first fruits” of the growing season, and it celebrates the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. So every year in Jerusalem, people would come from north and south, east and west, to bring their first fruits to the temple. There were a few different ways people might be able to speak to each other: perhaps some of them would be familiar with Latin, the language of the colonizing Roman empire; the Aramaic spoken in the region might have sounded familiar to them as the language of scripture and liturgy. Most likely, though, they would have communicated in Koine Greek. Just like English is the lingua franca of our era, Greek was the lingua franca of Jesus’ life and the early church. It allowed the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to be written down and shared; it allowed the Apostle Paul to communicate with Corinthians and Ephesians and Galatians. Nowadays, when we don’t understand something, we say, “It’s all Greek to me,” but in that day, Greek was the language that allowed for communication across cultural boundaries.
I wonder if the way we talk about God in church can sometimes be a little bit like a lingua franca? Something brings us here, to church on a Sunday morning – perhaps a profound experience of God, perhaps a sense that there is something happening in our lives that we cannot quite understand, perhaps a desire for a deeper spiritual life. It can be hard to put words to what is happening with our hearts and minds and souls, hard to describe what it is about the story of Jesus that draws us in and gets us up on a Sunday morning. But here in church, we’ve found some language that lets us share a little bit of what God is doing in our lives. We use hymns and prayers and scriptures; we speak of sin and grace and salvation. We use terms that would sound very strange to someone who wasn’t familiar with Christianity: we talk about kingdoms and mustard seeds and tax collectors. Sometimes it really works for us – we walk out of church saying YES! Other times, it doesn’t quite connect. Something has been lost in translation. Our communication about God isn’t always perfect, but we make do. Drawn together by a God who is too big for words, we have found a way to speak to one another about it – our lingua franca; our Greek. With a little bit of religious education, we can talk to one another about God and we can all understand it.
But in our Pentecost story, the miracle is not that the disciples speak in a language that everyone can understand – that would have been easy enough. They could have spoken Greek. No, the miracle is that through the Holy Spirit, each member of the crowd hears the good news in their own mother tongue. The biblical account lists an astounding number of regions – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the list goes on. These are people from modern-day Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and more – pilgrims from all over the known world. Every single one of these people, the story says, hears the good news in their own language – the language that their parents spoke to them in childhood, the language that they use to soothe an infant or joke around with a friend, the language in which they whisper to their wives or husbands. Maybe you believe in literal miracles – that the Parthians actually heard words in Parthian – or maybe you hear this story metaphorically. Either way, I think it has something vital to say to us today.
It is not always enough, this miracle story seems to suggest, for us to struggle along in our lingua franca. That will do most of the time, but God wants to speak to us in our own language. I think that this story of pilgrims hearing the good news in their own language can lead us to think about how we hear God’s voice speaking to us in the languages of our hearts. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you are far away from this city, walking through some beautiful wilderness and admiring the beauty of creation. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when an achingly beautiful piece of music fills you with awe. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you play with a child or grandchild. Maybe for some of you, the voice of God speaks through poetry or in silent prayer or when you’re gardening. This story reminds us to listen for the voice of God, not just in the shared language that we speak in church, but in the deepest language of our hearts – whatever that is for each of us. This story of Parthians, Medes and Elamites reminds us that God’s word for us speaks to the heart of our being, speaks to us deeply and intimately, in ways ordinary and extraordinary, in burning bushes and quiet conversations.
And maybe it does more than that. Maybe, when we think about this story and how it connects to our lives, we’re not only the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites. Maybe, friends, we’re the disciples. Perhaps this story invites us not just to hear God’s voice speaking to us in our own languages, but to speak in ways that allow God to speak through us. Perhaps this story invites us to speak boldly, with actions and words, about the love of God we have experienced in our own lives, to witness, as the scripture says, to God’s deeds of power. That might mean letting God speak through you when you tell family and friends about why you go to church and what your relationship with God means to you. But it could be other things, as well: it could mean letting God speak through you when you offer a kind word or a listening ear to someone in distress. It could mean letting God speak through you as you give of your time and talent at a food pantry or a youth center. It could mean letting God speak through you as you share your gift for music or art or writing with your church or your community. It could mean letting God speak through you when you speak up against hurtful comments or jokes based on racism or sexism or homophobia. The story of Pentecost tells us that the Holy Spirit can speak not only to us, but through us.
Last summer I worked as a chaplain at a hospital, doing an internship that fulfills one of the requirements for ordination. In my first few days, I visited a patient named Rosa who had just had a hip replacement. Rosa’s English wasn’t so good, and I speak no Spanish at all, but we managed – she showed me her rosary and her picture of the Virgin Mary, and I smiled and nodded. I was very new at chaplaincy, and very unaccustomed to praying with people, especially in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the hospital, but I offered to pray with her, and I stumbled through a prayer for her healing, and then asked her to say the Lord’s Prayer with me. Rosa’s recovery was difficult, with complication after complication, and as my internship went on and I grew in confidence, Rosa’s discharge date was pushed back and back and back. I kept visiting her, and we kept stumbling through those conversations and those prayers. Eventually, it was the last day of my ten-week internship and Rosa was still there. We stumbled through one last conversation as I tried to explain that it was my last day, and then I said, “Let’s pray.” And she said, “This time, I pray.” And she began to lead me through first the Hail Mary and then the Lord’s Prayer in strong, clear Spanish. I realized how much it meant to me for this strong and faithful woman to give me the gift of letting me be her chaplain, and I realized that she was now chaplaining me through the difficult task of letting go and saying goodbye. It was Rosa who spoke those prayers that day, and she said them in Spanish. But in that moment, it was as if God was speaking to me in my own language. And if that was not a Pentecost miracle, I don’t know what is. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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