Tell Them What They Want to Hear

The world is changing. Did you know that? I got the following e-mail from Rachel, my daughter, not too long ago:
“i still didnt get 2 c the pic. it never loaded. youll have 2 help me when u get back. c u l8ter alligator”

Now I had started to see characters like this showing up in my e-mails before. I knew that when someone wrote “haha” it meant that they thought something I had written before was funny. If they wrote “ROTFL” they thought it was really funny because they were “Rolling On The Floor Laughing.” And if they wrote “ROTFLUTS” it was so hysterical that they were “Rolling On The Floor Laughing Unable to Speak.” If they wrote “IMHO” in front of what they were saying it meant “In My Humble Opinion” and if we are chatting online and they write “brb” it means that I shouldn’t expect anything from them for awhile because they will “be right back” and if they say “gtg” it means that they are leaving because they have “got to go.”

But when Rachel wrote me this note, I realized that the texting generation had really moved beyond me. It was not just a stray abbreviation here and there – it was whole messages that were written in a language that bore some resemblance to English, but that were really some new way of communicating. I had to face the fact that our youth are bilingual and that I may not be able to speak the same language.

This can be a good thing. I mean, God obviously likes diversity. Do you remember what happened early on in the Bible when the people decided they were going to build a city and a tower up to heaven? They all had the same language at that point and they decided to make a name for themselves by building the world’s first skyscraper.

It was not very successful. I mean they got up there. It was a major structure and they were putting a whole lot of energy and resources into it, but God is not happy with what they’re up to. And the result of their efforts is so pitiful that God is still looking down on it when the decision is made to stop the construction and to scatter the people throughout the earth. One additional consequence of this story is that God gives the people a whole lot of different languages and the tower they tried to build is called, as a result, the tower of…Babel. We have been a babble of languages ever since.

So God likes diversity. The fact that we have unique ways of communicating and speaking and giving expression to wonder and life and mystery is one of our great gifts, even though it sometimes feels like a curse. But God likes something else even more. God likes to disturb us.

I mean, how else do you explain it? God takes an old man and woman, a couple with no children who thought their wandering days were done, and send them off to start a new people and a new life in a new land. We know them as Abraham and Sarah. God takes a reluctant prophet and pulls him out of the belly of a great fish that had swallowed him in the sea and sends him off to preach repentance to the godless people of an enemy nation. We know him as Jonah. God takes a Jewish queen in a Persian court and asks her to jeopardize her position and her life to stop a slaughter. We know her as Esther. Jesus takes fisherman with a perfectly good livelihood and tells them to leave their nets behind. Jesus tells a young man with a comfortable income to sell it all and follow him. Jesus tells you and me, “You love your life? Give it up for God.” Oh, yes, this God we talk about every week? This is a disturbing God who doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone.

So you weren’t really surprised by that reading from Acts today, were you? The disciples are there in Jerusalem, huddled together, unsure about what step they’re supposed to take next. The disciples, even after spending so much time with Jesus, after listening to his teaching, after watching him heal and welcome and challenge and speak to the deepest needs of those he met, after witnessing his death and disbelieving his resurrection and then sharing in awe and wonder for forty days with the risen Jesus…after all of this, they were ready for a little stability. They didn’t like all of this uncertainty.

Shortly before this, Jesus had ascended into the skies and they had stood there, looking up after him, and you can just hear the wheels in their heads spinning, “Oh, man. What do we do now?” They stare so long that two angels have to come along and nudge them along saying, “O.K. folks, why are you still looking up in the sky? Jesus will come back in the same way but in the meantime, focus, people.”

So they come to their senses, just a little bit, and they wander back into Jerusalem, and they do what any good Methodists would do considering the circumstances, they pray and have a nominations committee meeting to elect a replacement for Judas, the disciple they had lost. It’s not bad, what they do, but you get the sense that God is going to disturb them a little more.

Then God does just that. It’s Pentecost. They’re sitting there in Jerusalem, which is filled with Jews from all over the known world. And then there’s wind and there are tongues as of flames resting on their heads and they are speaking in tongues that they have never spoken before and the visitors to the city hear them and they can understand. They hear them praising God. They hear them in their own languages praising God. And they are amazed and astonished…well, all of them except those who think they’re just drunk.

“But no,” Peter says, “no, they aren’t drunk.” In fact what they are is possessed. They are possessed by the Spirit of God who is proclaiming a new day like the day the prophet Joel proclaimed when he said that God’s Spirit would be poured out on all flesh…on donkeys and platypuses…and people with no earthly wisdom…sons and daughters would prophesy….people on the margins of society, old people would dream dreams…people with no status and no freedom, slaves would proclaim the good news. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord would be saved.

What this means is that God was going to turn everything upside down. Things were going to change. People who thought they had no power were going to receive power. People who thought they had no community were going to be in a new community. People who thought God was done with them or that they were done with God, were going to discover that the Spirit had other ideas. God likes to disturb us.

Finally, though, God wants to transform us. The people who saw the disciples on that first Christian Pentecost were fascinated by the fact that they were hearing in their own language. This group of mostly uneducated folks from a backwater of Palestine was suddenly speaking in all the languages of the known world. That was amazing but the truly amazing thing was what they were saying. They weren’t just telling these visitors what they wanted to hear. They were telling them what they needed to hear.

There was a point in the history of Western cultures when Christianity really needed to grapple with this phenomenon again. About three hundred years ago, we entered the age of Enlightenment and suddenly the culture started to talk about the world in some very different ways and some new languages developed. Isaac Newton had started talking about the natural laws that ordered the universe in the new language of empirical science. Thomas Jefferson and John Locke had begun to talk about the natural rights of human beings in the language of political liberalism. Immanuel Kant was talking about the ways reason could lead us to a greater sense of morality and ethics. It was an exciting time and exciting things were happening, but what all of these writers found was that they could talk about all of these things without any reference to God. Whereas before the church provided the framework for all these new languages, now something else did.

So the church responded by trying to speak the new languages around them. It was a movement called liberal theology, though that’s a little confusing since it’s not the kind of liberals we think of today. At its heart it accepted that God was at work in a more hidden way than we were used to thinking. And perhaps if we could just learn to talk like the world we could help it discover how God was still there.

There were some great liberal theologians. Still are. We learned a lot by not shutting ourselves off from the languages of the world. But the great temptation of a church that tries too hard to learn other languages is that it will forget its own language and that it will start to tell the world what it wants to hear. Then when the world is in trouble and it is looking for the unique thing that the church has to say, the church may have forgotten how to say it.

You’ve heard me talk about Karl Barth before and he is someone who makes me think very hard about what it is that we have to say to the world. Barth was a Swiss preacher who had studied in Germany in the early part of the last century. He started out as one of these liberal theologians, believing that the Age of Enlightenment had brought great progress to the world. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Western world it really felt like “Every day, in every way, we are getting better and better.” So perhaps the world and the church were moving along hand in hand – informing each other.

His sermons drew a lot on the current events of the day. I was recently reading a sermon he wrote on the sinking of the Titanic. It really was his text for the day.

But then the Great War broke out, the war we now call World War 1. And all that talk about progress seemed a bunch of baloney. People were not acting more humanely towards each other – they were slaughtering each other with machine guns in trenches and developing mustard gas and other weapons of mass destruction. They were not behaving more rationally; they were still motivated by base instincts and corrupted by power.

Barth, the liberal preacher, looked around him in horror at what the world had become. And he read a report that shook him to the core. His old professors at the seminary, the ones who had taught him how to listen for God in the world, had gotten together and publicly signed a statement in favor of the German Kaiser and his war policy. When push came to shove they had no language with which to resist evil in the world. They had forgotten who they were and who they were called to serve.

Later Barth would see the same thing happen again as Christians and people he had studied with would throw in their support with Hitler and the Nazis. But Barth would not. He knew now that the language the world needed was not what it thought it needed – not the trendy words of the day – but the gospel that had been handed down to it. Christians still needed to live in the world, but they needed to draw their identity and their strength from what he called “the strange new world of the Bible.”

So, yes, God loves diversity and delights in the myriad ways people look and talk and are. Yes, God wants to disturb us by sending the Holy Spirit to make us uncomfortable with the way things are and to start living like we’re already in the kingdom that is coming. And yes, God wants to transform us so that we don’t listen only for what affirms us and we don’t seek out only what the world tells us that we need. Is a new hoodie really going to make us the people we need to be? Will a new car? A new house? No, as Bishop Will Willimon puts it, most of us don’t have needs worth having. The gospel comes to give us needs we really need.

As transformed people we will look different. We will talk funny. We may stick out. Maybe we won’t be so quiet when people want to denigrate the sanctity of life by the way we debate things like abortion and capital punishment and genetic engineering. Maybe we won’t be so quiet when the world casually accepts torture without an outcry. Maybe we won’t be so quiet when other nations (or our own) force women to live as ghosts in their own streets beneath burkas or to undergo genital mutilation. Maybe we won’t be so quiet when someone asks us the reason for the hope that is within us.

We will know and we will say, in whatever language we have, that reason alone cannot save us. Only God can do that. And God has come. And God has opened the way through the body of Jesus. And Christ will come again. Who can say that? Only Christians. Only you and me. And the world needs to hear it. Thanks be to God.

Acts 2:1-21 (NRSV)
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 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. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs -- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"

But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."

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

'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. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'