LET THE MASSIVE & MYSTERIOUS CONVERSATION BEGIN

1.  A Miracle For All Speaking

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak…”

I over-heard a mother talking with her child.  In the Garden Section of Fred Meyer last week, I over-heard her talking with someone who couldn’t have been more than one year old.   His chubby legs dangled from his stroller.  His eyes sparkled with all the colors swirling around him.   And this is what he said:  breeem… And this is the way his mother responded:  breeem… In fact, whenever he gurgled or made some incoherent noise, the mother would repeat it back.   And, of course, as often happens, that “conversation” became quite animated.  I am fairly certain that no quantifiable information passed between them, but clearly some kind of emotional, or dare I say it, some kind of spiritual connection was being forged.   And as I eavesdropped on that garden-speech I imagined that all the conversations that have ever taken place throughout history—all of them–started in this way.    Weird, inchoate flips of the tongue, vibrations of the vocal cords, throbbing of the throat.  Into a moment we let them slip.   And if we’re lucky another person is there to hear and to affirm what we say… and the rest is history.

History, I think, is made up of things combined with the sounds that we make in reference to those things.   The sounds that we make about things, of course, have to be submitted for approval.   A word is nothing more or nothing less than the sounds which have been agreed upon by a certain group of people—and then assigned to things like sunshine, dirt, water and flowers.    And, you see, on Pentecost, in first century Jerusalem, that’s what the Jews in the temple courts had been celebrating.  They celebrated the history of God giving the Law to Moses and how the people agreed upon that Law.   But here’s the glitch.   The glitch of Pentecost is that the people of faith had been scattered to the far corners of the earth; there were Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia…  And although they all had come to Jerusalem to gather around the same thing, none of them would use the same word to refer to that thing.

2.  A Miracle of Each Hearing

Think about how lonely that is.   Think about how cliquish that is.  Think about how alienating that is.   A few weeks ago, I had to take my car for an emissions inspection and I got there a little early.   So, after parking strategically along the street, I sat in the car and noticed an elderly man with a cap ambling toward me.  He had just parked his car as well, and as he approached my window, he spoke with a strange accent,  “Aaahh, we wait…”  I nodded.   “Yes, it’s not time yet,” I said.   “I Moldavia,” he responded.   “Moldavia?   How did you get to Spokane from Moldavia?  Where exactly is Moldavia?   Is it part of Russia?  Are you Russian?”   “Aaahh,” he stammered, looking at his watch.  “We wait…”

Now, I don’t mind telling you:   it annoyed me that the man didn’t understand my question.   And almost immediately I could sense his frustration too.   But what if by some miracle of speech, or by some miracle of hearing, I would have been able to cut through all the emissions chit-chat and talk about Jesus Christ?  And what if, by some miracle, he could talk to me?   This is just a subtle hint of what Pentecost in the first century must have been like.

“At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each…”

You see, corresponding to the miracle of all of the Galilean Jews speaking is the miracle of each one hearing in the native language of each…  I’ve been wracking my brain to consider the implications of this miracle for Latah Valley and here goes:  although you and I speak predominately in English, each one of us may have a peculiar way of using the language that the Holy Spirit would like to affirm.   That’s what the Holy Spirit does in providing us with this two-fold miracle; suddenly we are forced to realize that God has something to say and only we can say it.   We are also forced to admit that God’s wondrous deeds of power cannot be contained by one person’s patterns of speech, or by one group’s special lingo.

Not too long ago, the Public Broadcasting System aired a special on a particular teacher from Iowa.   She was known as Mrs. Eliot, and as a way of teaching her students about racism and prejudice, she divided the class along the lines of  brown-eyed children and blue-eyed children.   Well, at first, this assignment seemed like a joke, and the mid-western kids didn’t take it very seriously.   But the next day they each received arm-bands with insignia’s on them—one for brown eyed children and one for blue-eyed children.   Then, Mrs. Eliot made this bold statement to the class; she said, “Statistics prove that Brown-eyed children are more intelligent than Blue-eyed Children.”   And along those lines she began to favor some of the students over others.   When a brown-eyed girl raised her hand to answer the teacher’s question, Mrs. Eliot made a special point of praising the girl.   When a blue-eyed boy raised his hand, she chastised him for not listening, and then lectured to the class about the clear superiority of Brown-eyed people.   This is how things went for over a week, and then, without warning, Mrs. Eliot reversed course and proclaimed that truly Blue-eyed Children were better.   Thinking at that point that the Blue-eyed Children would remember how they had been treated, even Mrs. Eliot was amazed when a fight broke out at recess.   “Why were you fighting?” demanded the principal.   “Because he called me a name.”   “What name did he call you?”   “Brown-eyes.”

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the house where they were sitting.   Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”

You see, what we often don’t realize is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t make everyone the same.   The Holy Spirit actually reinforces our uniqueness, our particularity.  But the Holy Spirit also obliterates the way we use our uniqueness as a weapon.   We are suddenly disarmed, and all the old excuses in which we once took refuge—all of them—are burned away.    So, let me press us here on this point.    Have the tongues of God’s fire taught you to sit down and submit to the loudest person in the room?   Or do those tongues of fire truly teach each of us to speak and to listen?

3.  A Miracle of Meaning For One Another

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

When I read through Acts 2:13 I immediately thought of something that happened at the National Spelling Bee Championship.  Maybe you saw it too.   Last Thursday night, twelve and thirteen year olds competed with one another, and nearly all of them, upon hearing a word, being pronounced, would ask for a series of questions.  One of the questions had to do with the language of origin, usually Greek, or Latin, or French, or German or some dynamic combination of them all.   But, you see, another question frequently asked by the middle-schoolers went like this:   Could I have a definition please? Or, more directly, What does it mean? Over and over again they asked these questions and quite often nailed these words without a blink of an eye.   And yet, here’s what took place at approximately 10 p.m. our time:   Kavya Shivashanker, a 13 year old girl from California, got a word that I recognized from the Bible.   The word was Laodicean, and means “Lukewarm or indifferent in matters of religion or politics.”

Now, as you may know, Kavya Shivashanker spelled the word correctly and won the last spelling bee competition in which she will ever compete.   And yet, as the competition for correct spelling is over, the meaning of the word still lingers.   It still lingers, doesn’t it?   In fact, after a word like Laodicean has been used and re-used for centuries, it’s still a miracle that people ask, “What does this mean?”

Well, let me tell you.  It doesn’t just mean “Lukewarm.”  Laodicean refers to a church.   And according to Revelation 3:15, it was once a congregation in Asia Minor that Jesus reproved.   He said to them, “Listen, I am standing at the door and knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come to you and eat with you and you with me…”

And now, I am imagining a child-prodigy in approximately fifty to one hundred years.   She’s given the word, LATAH.   What does it mean?  Can I have a definition please?

It means, “Passionate” and “Deeply involved.”

Let the massive and mysterious conversation begin.   Amen.