Pentecost

A sermon preached by Revd Robert Thompson

"All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance." (Acts 2)

"One may need to encounter another language, in order to be astonished, to be pushed into wonder again." (Oliver Sacks: Seeing Voices: A Journey into the world of the Deaf)

At the heart of the events of that first Day of Pentecost, as recorded in Acts 2, is the renewing and re-birthing potential of human language itself. In the first part of the reading the followers of Jesus are altogether and are overpowered by the advent of the Holy Spirit. This outpouring of the Spirit enabled them to speak in languages other than their own. In the second part of the reading the writer of Acts narrates how this ability of the disciples to speak to the many different nationalities was received with amazement and perplexity; or to use Oliver Sack's word "wonder."

For those of us who are good linguists, as well as for those of us who struggle in trying to learn another language, there is something potentially disheartening about this account of Pentecost: If only language acquisition and usage was as easy for each of us today!! It's as if we listen to the story standing right beside those 'Jews from every nation' utterly dumbfounded by the events that we are called again to witness. It's as if we are outside that house into which the Spirit came in the violent gush of wind and in the searing heat of flame. We are outside it, looking through a window at what is going on inside, and wondering if we will ever get to join in. Will such a cataclysmic change ever come over us? Will we be changed in the instantaneous blow-down from heaven?

For me the is identification with the perplexed Jews of the nation is no less heightened as I move away from the reading's miraculous account of instant linguistic mastery. If I shift to today's church I sometimes am perplexed, amazed and filled with wonder, as I encounter my fellow Christians who call themselves 'charismatic' or 'Pentecostal.' There are forms of Christian worship which emphasise the gifts of the Spirit, which St Paul more fully lists in 1 Corinthians: speaking in tongues, healing and prophecy among them. Again, I am at a window looking in at reported experiences that are simply outside my ken.

Pentecost, then for me, as I imagine it must be for some of you too, can be a difficult feast to celebrate. The stories we read from first century Palestine, and the experiences of charismatic Christians today, when set beside our own experiences of God can make us feel pretty much an outsider to our own faith tradition. Not the best place to be, especially if you are wearing dog-collar! It could be all too easy to become depressed about one's own seeming lack of special spiritual vitality or contra wise to become all too cynical about the different spiritual experiences of others.

Kei Miller's poem Speaking in Tongues may help us to avoid such extreme reaction. Miller is a young Jamaican poet who now teaches at the University of Glasgow, His poetry is saturated with the religious motifs of his culture, and, when read well; it has the rhythm and beat of ecstatic, visionary, Caribbean preaching. I will not read it so well...:

Speaking in Tongues
Kei Miller
From There is an Anger That Moves (Carcanet Press, 2007)

This poem begins in 1987.
My grandmother dragged us to meet the Lord
under a tent in St. Catherine. From here
I trace the heritage of standing spellbound
as women worship. Always I am on the outskirts.
I remember my grandmother unbecoming
the kind of woman who sets her table each Sunday,
who walks up from the river, water balanced easily
on her head. My grandmother became, instead,
all earthquake – tilt and twirl and spin,
her orchid-purple skirt blossoming.
She became grunt and rumble – sounds
you can only make when your shoes have fallen off
and you're on the ground
crying raba and yashundai, robosei and
bababababababba. Years later a friend tells me
tongues is nothing but gibberish - the deluded
pulling words out of dust. I want to ask him
what is language but a sound we christen?
I would invite him to a tent where women
are tearing their stockings, are on the ground
pulling up fresh words to offer as doves to Jehovah.
I would ask if he sees no meaning here
and if he never had the urge to grunt
an entirely new sound. The poem, always,
would like to do this, always wants to break
from its lines and let a strange language rise up.
Each poem is waiting on its own Day of Pentecost
to thrash, to robosei and yashundai,
and the poem will not care that some walk past,
afraid of the words we try out on our tongues
hoping this finally is the language of God,
that he might hear it and respond.

The poem is in three parts. It begins with the recollection of his Grandmothers' charismatic religious experiences from when the poet was about seven or eight. The second part then presents Miller's discussion with a friend (another poet or an academic?) about the validity of speaking in tongues. Finally Miller moves to equating Pentecost and poetry: what his grandmother did and he does.

Like my own feeling of being outside the room of Pentecost, and all the rooms of contemporary charismatic activity, Miller in the first part says: "Always I am on the outskirts": a wonderful word for the young small boy in the presence of a group of older women. These older women he describes as becoming something completely different and other from their work and home existence: tilt, twirl, spin, grunt and rumble; all thrashing about on church floors. Not very St George's! We are on the outskirts here too.

Miller's skeptical and cynical friend of the second part labels such reported experiences as "gibberish." But the poet responds that there is meaning here for language is simply a sound that we christen, so why not baptize a grunting new sound? Perhaps bits of us are with Miller's friend, some of us more fully than others, still on the outskirts even of Miller's thought.

But Miller then tries to gather us under those Caribbean skirts in part 3. The poem wants to break from its lines. The poem wants to let a strange language rise up. The poem wants it's own Pentecost. The poem wants its own thrashing about. The poem wants to aspire to Divine language. The poem wants us to stop and to listen and to respond.

What Miller does beautifully in this poem is point to the transformative power of the poem in particular and, by association, to the transformative power of language and art in general. These too want to change us. They want to rebirth and renew us, they want us to cut loose and let go - just as his groaning granny withed on that Caribbean church floor speaking in tongues. And the truest beauty of this poem is that Miller argues for the liberating and transforming power of art without any whiff of condescension to his grandmother's experience. For Miller there are many languages of the Sprit: his granny's tongues is one, his poetry is another.

And so we return to the text of Act. Acts tells us that those disciples in that room spoke in many languages. The problem that I have in feeling outside such a room is that in some charismatic and Pentecostal interpretations of the strange goings on of the Acts of the Apostles the polyglot nature of the text is often brought to a crushing mono-glottal stop. Or to put it another way, the emphasis on speaking different languages in this text can all too quickly become, in our contemporary context, an emphasis on speaking only one kind of religious language and of affirming and validating only one sort religious experience. And we expect others to speak our language as much as they expect us to speak ours.

The issue of language is highlighted when we remember the linguistic politics of the Roman Empire. That great list of places from which these Jews of Jerusalem had scme equates to a roll call of geographical regions conquered by Rome. Each had their own homeland; each their own language. But under the Imperium their national and social identities were subsumed into the monolithic Empire. All of these people would have had to learn Greek and Latin, on top of their own languages, in order to make a living, to trade and to survive. The languages of the Empire were used in public, whilst the languages of the homeland were confined in the private sphere of domestic life. Such linguistic politics are not foreign to those of us who live in the wake of the British Empire, or to those in twentieth century Spain under Franco.

But Pentecost can be understood as the public out breaking and use of repressed languages. The good news of the liberating gospel of forgiveness and peace is to be preached in all known languages. Such proclamation itself already constitutes emancipation from linguistic tyranny and imperialism. The God of Pentecost is a polyglot divinity who sanctions the emerging church both to multilingualism and to translation. God is a linguistic and a cultural pluralist.

The coming of the Holy Spirit frees us all to hear and to respond to God's love in our own language. The coming of the Holy Spirit always brings the end of all forms of linguistic, political, cultural and religious imperialism. The coming of the Holy Spirit marks a breaking apart of all idolatry of religious thought; idolatry that makes churches and Christians into repositories of the truth and right action rather than living communities built around the presence and practice of Jesus Christ. God speaks many languages and the Church should speak many languages too.

So I stand looking into that house of Pentecostal and charismatic experience feeling like Kei Miller on the outskirts of the action. But Pentecost teaches us that God is a linguistic and cultural pluralist who does not expect us all to be inside a single room. If only we could all learn that, in our churches, in our families, in our places of work: For the encounter with any other human being and their different language is always one that should lead us to astonishment and wonder at ourselves and God. At its best it should lead us to be transformed by the poetry that constitutes the language of God, so that we might hear it and respond to it.

So come Holy Sprit, come.