Fr. Troy Beecham
Sermon, Pentecost A 2020
Today the Church celebrates the great Feast of Pentecost.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, God promised that in the “last days”, inaugurated by the coming of the Messiah, he would pour out his Spirit upon all people. In Acts (2:14 to 18) the apostle Peter quotes this promise to explain what is happening when the disciples of Jesus are suddenly, miraculously able to speak and understand multiple foreign languages starting on the day of Pentecost (Pentecost is the name given to the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot in Hebrew, by the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek some three centuries before Jesus’ birth). This outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost marks the beginning of the age of the Messiah promised so many centuries before.
But why would God mark this great new beginning, the beginning of the Messianic promise, the start of the Church, by giving Jesus’ disciples the supernatural ability to speak in all the many languages of the world of their time? Why this gift as the first mark of the new Church, and its mission in the world? Later, filled with the Spirit, the apostles would also heal the lame, cure the sick, and cast out demons, as a Jesus said. But why would God mark the beginning of the outpouring of his Spirit by the ability to communicate with others in their own language?
Just as he is ascending into the heavenly realm, Jesus commands his disciples, saying “As you go into the world, make disciples of all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." There it is, the Church’s reason for being, its essential identity, and it is all is about making disciples of all peoples and nations, bringing them into communion with God through Jesus. And this requires language, communication. This is why the first manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Jesus’ disciples has to do with the communication of truth.
Language, communication, is about so much more than simply understanding words. Language, spoken or otherwise, conveys the totality of a person’s identity, be it cultural, religious, economic, class, sex, and every other kind of social identity. At the surface level, language depends upon the spoken word and that word is always in a particular language: Hebrew, Greek, Chinese, Sign Language, etc. At this level words can express true things, but they can also deceive and lie. Beyond the spoken word, we communicate through body language, tone of voice, volume of voice. Our bodies, our unspoken communication, often speak louder and more honestly than our words. When our lives speak through our words, actions, affiliations....we are revealing what is true about us, truths that sometimes are not congruent with our words. Words can fail us just when we need them most, especially in situations where tragedy, death, and betrayal render us mute, especially in times of civil unrest as we are witnessing today in our country and around the world.
What will our mouths and our lives say in the midst of such fear, rage, hopelessness, and yes, for some, exultation in taking advantage of this maelstrom, stoking it to further their dark ambitions. This is why God gives us his Holy Spirit, that we might continuously be born again, sanctified moment to moment, so that our lives and our words are congruent, full of integrity, full of God’s love. It is only through the Holy Spirit that we have still yet a deeper language. By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God we are equally able to communicate with each other true things like compassion, humility, generosity of spirit, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity, even if we do no speak a common language. These speak through us more loudly and clearly, either in their presence or their absence, than do all our words and gestures. This is the language of God given to us by grace, a language that the human family so desperately needs to hear spoken with fluency by the Church, by each disciple of Jesus.
We deceive ourselves if we think that we are not fooled by each other. We all hear beyond spoken words, bodily gestures, and beyond what we believe that we intend to say to each other. The heart reads the heart and the Holy Spirit recognizes itself wherever it sees itself as manifest in us. Many of us talk passionately about our love for those who suffer: the poor, the alien in our midst, those living under generations of prejudice and violence. But they do not hear us, understand us, or gather round us, even when we think that we speak perfectly in their native tongue. Unless we are filled with the Holy Spirit of God, our words and our lives cannot speak as one of the love of God in Jesus. This is the language, the gift, given at Pentecost by God to all who will receive him.
God offers all people salvation from their sin, individually and corporately, through his Son Jesus, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this age of the Spirit-filled church, all people are invited into communion with the Lord and with each other, first communicated through God’s language of love, forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope. As we become part of the earthly Body of Jesus, his Church, through grace by faith and through the waters of Holy Baptism, we can discover the gift of mutual love, forgiveness, humility, and reconciliation. What God is asking for are people like you and me to be willing to give our lives wholeheartedly to him, that the Holy Spirit might live in us and through us, speaking the language of God through our lives and our lips. As we are witnessing the violence in our own country, or the violence perpetrated against the people of Hong Kong who are seeking liberty and freedom from oppression, or the ongoing plague of civil war and mass disease and starvation in Yemen, we need disciples who fluently speak and live the language of God more than ever.
I pray that God will touch your heart, and mine, and help us with his grace that we might be filled with his Holy Spirit for the sake of our human family that is so lost in the babble of our brokenness. Pray with me that God’s Holy Spirit will be felt, heard, and recurved by all who live, that we might truly come to love, respect, and honor each other.
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, to speak only the language of your Spirit, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen
