Sermon

June 4, 2006

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on June 4, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

In my first congregation in upstate New York , a parishioner came up to me at coffee hour and pointed out an elderly lady I’d never seen before. “You should meet the new lady who was in church this morning,” she said. “But be careful. I think she’s a little nutty. I heard her muttering nonsense during the service.” So later I had a conversation with the newcomer. She turned out to be a Russian émigré, Elena Johnston, whose family escaped the Bolshevik Revolution when she was a teenager and who had fascinating stories to tell. But before I ever got to any of the stories I heard the explanation for what had been identified as nutty behavior. “I have been in this country for many years,” she said in a thick accent, “but it still seems most natural to me to pray in Russian. The prayers of your service are almost exactly the same as the prayers of the Russian church, so I hope you don’t mind, but as you say the prayers in English, I say them in Russian. I hope that is acceptable.” So began many years in which Elena Johnston worshipped with us in Russian as the rest of us worshipped in English. For the most part, her prayers were very quiet, but every Sunday when the congregation joined in the Lord’s Prayer, I could hear Mrs. Johnston in the back joining in loudly in Russian.

It was, I suppose, a little bit of the experience of Pentecost: when the apostles spoke altogether in the languages of “every nation under heaven.” It is an experience we’ll have later this morning when the church school students will pray the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and then all of you will be asked to offer the prayer in other languages. It is an experience you can hear practically every Sunday, without contrivance, at Newark ’s House of Prayer where spontaneously congregants from different part of the world may join in familiar hymns, each singing in her own language.

The Pentecost experience as we read about it in our first reading this morning is a reversal of the experience of the Tower of Babel . In that Genesis story, God creates all the languages of the earth as a punishment for human pride. The different languages are a barrier to communication, a wall that separates nations and peoples and prevents them from coming together as brothers and sisters and partners. The Pentecost experience is just the reverse. Here, by the grace of God, people who are divided by language and culture are suddenly able to understand each other. Reading on a few verses, we’re told that as a result, some three thousand people—presumably of every nation under heaven—were baptized as members of one church family.

Many people celebrate this Pentecost moment as the real birthday of the Church: the moment in which twelve frightened people who had locked themselves in an upper room, suddenly began to touch the lives of others and to welcome into their household people of every tribe and language and nation. It is the defining moment in the Christian Church. From this moment on it is clear that the job of the church is to break down the barriers that separate people and to welcome everyone into the family. Every time we celebrate a baptism, we do our job in a ceremonial way by taking persons who were born in different households—often in different places—from different walks of life—sometimes speaking different languages—and we make those persons our brothers and our sisters. We’ll do that here this morning as we welcome into our family Ashley Rose Egan and Maura Jane Grazioso. Somewhere in heaven there are Gaelic speaking Egan ancestors and Italian speaking Grazioso ancestors who are a little bit amused that their offspring are being baptized in an English ceremony.

But those ancestors are enjoying this event from a vantage point in which it is clear that the point of the church all along has been that it doesn’t matter where you come from, what language you speak or what culture you grew up with, we are all children of one God. That is nature of the Church and our message to the world.

It is not a message we’ve always proclaimed very well, because we have not always practiced it very well. There are plenty of chapters of intolerance and exclusion in our history as Christians. We have hated Christians of other cultures. We have excluded black Christians. We have refused to ordain women. We have refused to recognize as holy the unions of homosexual Christians. Remnants of these attitudes persist. We do not break down the walls that separate us. We do not work hard enough at negotiation and we work too hard at war.

We’re bad at accepting others for the same reason the first apostles locked themselves in an upper room: we are afraid. We reject others who are different from ourselves, not just because it makes us feel superior to put other people down, but because it hurts so much when other people don’t like us that we pull back in fear. It takes something really important, something really compelling to get us out of our shells and to make us willing to overcome our differences and at least make a start at trying to understand each other.

The good news of Pentecost is that something that compelling is afoot. The powerful spirit of God is the spirit that compels us to overcome differences and to become one—because to God we already are one. Last week on the radio I heard an interview with a woman who lost a son in Iraq . She has written a book about the experience in an attempt to reach out to and support other bereaved mothers. Near the end of the interview she was asked a poignant question: whether her zeal to reach out to mothers who have lost children in the war would ever lead her to embrace the mother of a dead Iraqi soldier as she would a sister. There was silence for a moment, and then in a voice with greater humility and emotion than she’d displayed before, she answered, “Yes, I believe I know what that mother is going through.” On some level, our differences just don’t matter any more.

Pentecost asks us to live more of our lives at that level. Pentecost is a level at which different languages don’t put you off, and different cultures don’t seem weird. It is a level at which different lifestyles may be attempts to express common values. It is a level at which we are moved to embrace those who might be enemies. It is a level at which we encounter the spirit of the God who calls each of us, “my beloved child.” AMEN