Pentecost Sermon at First Baptist Church, Asheville, NC

In Their Own Language: What Does This Mean?
Acts 2:1-21

May 24, 2015

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“What does this mean?” they said in Acts 2:12. “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” they asked in Acts 2:8. It was an amazing event—a miracle, even—this first-century Pentecost in which persons of Asian and African and European extraction heard the apostles “declaring the wonders of God” in their own languages. This morning, on this twenty-first century Pentecost, I want to suggest that as important as it is in the life of the church to celebrate Pentecost as a miracle—as it is being celebrated by the faithful all over the world this morning—it is even more important in the life of the church to appropriate Pentecost as a model, as a model to be put into practice in all of the church’s missions and ministries. “What does this mean?” they ask. “In our own language,” they say.

 

In the structure of the book of Acts, this miracle and model in chapter 2 is the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise of the words of Jesus in the first chapter of Acts. According to Acts 1:8, Jesus said, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The church’s first Pentecost signaled the beginning of the ends-of-the-earth witness of the apostles and the church. But from a “God’s-eye-view,” it was not a beginning at all but a continuation—a continuation of God’s self-revelation and self-communication “in their own language.” According to the opening words of the book Hebrews: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days God has spoken to us by a Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). God used the words and songs and dramatic actions and the shape of the lives of the prophets to communicate God’s self,  God’s essential nature, and God’s call and claim on our lives. “In the beginning was the Word,” says John 1:1, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth,” says John 1:14. It has always been the way of God to “use language we can understand,” as Robert Frost put it in his marvelous and largely underappreciated poem, “Choose Something Like a Star.” In the life and ministry and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God communicated God’s self and God’s call and claim on our lives in our own language.

 

So, if it is the way of God in the world to communicate in our language, then every mission and ministry of the church must begin with “their own language.” The effectiveness of the gospel witness of the church in all of its missions and its ministries depends on the church’s ability—the ability of all of us in this room—to communicate in the native tongue, as it were, of the people with whom we interact on a daily basis. The gospel witness of the church does not depend on how well we communicate in our own language but how well we communicate in the language of those with whom we interact and whom we hope to reach with the message of the gospel.

 

We have long required professional missionaries to be trained in the language of the people to whom they were being sent. That’s linguistic competence: competence in the vocabulary and the grammar and syntax of the language of those among whom they will be attempting to communicate the gospel. And along with linguistic competence, we have also instructed them in the customs and practices of the people to whom they are going. That’s cultural competence. It’s not enough to know the language; you have to understand the culture as well. There is linguistic competence and there is cultural competence. And then there is interpersonal competence. The gospel witness of our lives individually and collectively depends every bit as much on our interpersonal competence as it does on linguistic competence and cultural competence. If the greatest commandment is, as Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30) and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31) and “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12), then our “ends-of-the-earth” witness begins with our individual and collective interpersonal competence in love in their own language. Not in our own language. In their own language.

 

Twenty years ago, Gary Chapman, a Baptist minister and marriage counselor, published what became a NY Times bestseller, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. The “five love languages” identified by Chapman are words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Based on his experience and expertise as a counselor, Chapman said that if you want to communicate your love for someone effectively, use words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Those are the five languages of love. But Chapman pointed out something even more important than knowing and using these five languages. The key to communicating love effectively, Chapman said, is using their language, not your own.

 

For example, years ago it wasn’t unusual for me to stop at a flower shop on my way home from work on a Friday afternoon to buy a fresh flower arrangement for my wife Bev. The Neil Diamond song “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Any More” hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 the year after we were married, and I was determined not ever to be that guy. So I brought flowers to express my love. Until one day, Bev sat me down and told me to stop. She told me the flowers were pretty and that she appreciated the thought, but there were other things she would rather have with the money I was spending on flowers from the florist. “If you want to bring me flowers,” she said, “just grab a $5 handful at the grocery store. They’ll do just fine,” she said. I was crushed. The flowers I was bringing home expressed my love. I would stand in front of the large glass windows of the cooler and inspect the arrangements to see which one was just right. Were their daisies in it? She loves daisies. Was there at least one rose? She loves roses. Was the design of the arrangement creative, just a little bit quirky? She loves quirky. But here’s the problem. For all my good intentions—and we all know what road is paved with good intentions—for all my good intentions in communicating love, those arrangements didn’t speak love to the person to whom I was giving them. In fact, they were actually counterproductive to our relationship because they were speaking in my own language, not hers.

 

The same thing can happen at church. One Sunday morning after worship I hugged a long-time member of the congregation I was serving. “O, I like hugs,” she said, with a big smile. And then she frowned. “Your predecessor would kiss me too, and I don’t like kisses,” she said firmly. Note to the pastoral file: Hug this one, but don’t kiss her. That would be counterproductive. The same thing can happen in our theology and our teaching and our preaching. The Rev. Dr. G. Bimawoo Fiawoo grew up in Ghana, earned a doctorate in Great Britain, and was sent by the Presbyterian Church in the UK as a missionary to Robeson County, NC. When I met him in the 1970s, he was a faculty member in the English Department at North Carolina Central University in Durham where he was one of my teachers. Dr. Fiawoo spent his summers in Chicago working in a church-sponsored program for underprivileged children. One morning, he led a simple devotional on the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer. But he said that every time he spoke of God as a father—God like a father, God is our father, God is your father, “Our Father who art in heaven”—one little boy would frown or shake his head or look away. So when the devotional was over and the children were beginning to make their way to their next activity, Dr. Fiawoo stopped the little boy and told him that he noticed that it seemed to bother him whenever he said that God was like a father. “Not like my father,” said the little boy; “My father killed my mother and my sister.” Note to the pastoral file: “Father” isn’t love language for this one. Because of their experience with the person and the language of “father,” that word about God does not express love at all to some people; in fact, to them it means something that is actually the opposite of what Jesus intended when he addressed God as “Abba,” father (Mark 14:36).

 

In our gospel witness—together as a church and individually as faithful followers of Jesus—if the language we use is not their own language, it does not communicate love; in fact, it is counterproductive in our efforts to communicate the gospel message. When a congregation I was pastoring was preparing a mission team to go into an eastern European country, we were instructed in how best to present ourselves to adherents of Islam. We were taught to self-identify as a “follower of Jesus” rather than as a “Christian.” Centuries of crusades and Christian-Muslim conflict have turned the word “Christian” into a derogatory term to millions of Muslims. But to be “a follower of Jesus” is to self-identify with a figure who is honored as a prophet in Islam. Now, I’m embarrassed to tell you that my first reaction to that instruction was to become indignant. “Who are they to determine how I should identify myself?” I thought. “How I express my identity is my business, not theirs. I’m a Christian, and a Christian is who I will be to anyone and everyone.” That was the reaction inside my head. But then I heard another voice inside that countered my reaction with a different question: “What is your goal here, Jeff? Is self-expression really your highest goal? Or is the effective communication of the message of the gospel your highest goal? If self-expression is more important to you than effective communication of the gospel, then insist on using your own language.” For those of you who are old enough to remember, you might call that the Sammy Davis, Jr., approach to mission and ministry: “I gotta be me, I gotta be me.” Edie Brickell sang it 20 years later: “What I am is what I am.”

 

But assertions of self-expression are the antithesis of the wisdom expressed in the words of the apostle Paul in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”; and in 1 Corinthians 9:20, “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews”; and in 1 Corinthians 10:32-33, “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved.” Because after all, Paul said, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way,” Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). And that’s exactly the counsel of Gary Chapman in The Five Love Languages. It’s a model for interpersonal competence in every aspect of our lives and our missions and our ministries. Before we insist on telling someone what means love in our language we must first ask the question, “What means love to this person in her or his or their own language?”

 

That’s the lesson in the church’s first Pentecost that I want you to see this morning. If you will ask that question consistently and persistently in your every relationship and interaction, sooner or later you will find yourself in the presence of an amazing event, a miracle even, when you succeed in the interpersonal competence of communicating in their own language. That’s the model of Pentecost. It’s the daily practice of Pentecost in all our interactions in family, church, workplace, school, neighborhood, community, nation, world. And that’s how we too can fulfill the promise of the words of Jesus for the ends-of-the-earth witness of all of us, individually and together.

 

Benediction:

As you go from this place into the week ahead of you, go loving others in their own language as you have been loved by God in yours. Go with God’s blessing, and go with God’s peace. Amen.

 

Copyrighted © 2015 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at 02tlsjeff@gmail.com..