Watch Your Language! May 27, 2012 Pentecost/Whitsunday, Year B: Acts 2.1-21

            Every two weeks a language dies.

            The National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages report that extinction threatens roughly half of the planet's seven thousand distinct tongues. As globalism and technology expand cultural interaction, bully-languages like English, Spanish, and Russian crowd out Magati Ke and Yawuru in Australia and Siletz Dee-ni in Oregon.

            The miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone spoke the same language, but that everyone heard the Gospel in his native language.

            Words aren’t just names for things; they shape us. An old story records that Frederick the Great (or James V of Scottland or Psamtik I of Egypt) kept two infants in isolation and forbade their nurses to talk to them so that he could see what language they would speak and thus discover the very roots of speech. They both died.

            When the Holy Spirit blitzkriegs the disciple band God does not zap their audience with some apostolic Esperanto so that a homogenized homily can celebrate sameness. Instead, the Lord conforms the speech of the preachers to fit the hearts of the hearers. “How is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born?” No infant believer should ever perish from a lack of the Lord’s praise in her own tongue.

            In Revelation 14.6 John beholds a barnstorming angel who streaks across the skies with a commission to preach the gospel to every tribe and tongue. If even one speaker of each of Australia’s two hundred and thirty one languages remains alive, she will hear the Good News in the code of her deepest heart.

            Maybe the true miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone could understand the church, but that the church learned to understand everyone. And maybe Whitsunday teaches us that the ideal flow of faith is not from the world into the church, but the other way ‘round. And maybe if the Spirit doesn’t miraculously wrap our tongues around the irregular verbs of a foreign dialect, the Spirit will instead wrap our hearts around the people who speak it.

Say What?

Doug