In the name of the Risen ☩ Lord. Amen.
Green tabling dogs clouds quick. I said, “green tabling dogs cloud quick.” That’s gibberish, and I have no idea what it means. While those are all words, they’ve been strung together in a meaningless way. Language is an amazing gift that has evolved in human society and allows us to communicate in such rich ways. While a picture might be worth a thousand words, even more amazingly, we actually have the ability to come up with those thousand words. Language is how we communicate, it is how we interpret the world, it is how we process our experiences, how we express ourselves. The point that I will attempt to make in this sermon is that faith is a language.
If you’ve ever had the joy of watching children learn how to speak, you know how amazing and bewildering the process is. They start with mimicking sounds, they absorb vocabulary, they learn the rules of grammar. And by the same token, when due to a stroke, an adult’s ability to speak is impaired, we become painfully aware of how speaking your native language isn’t something that you can just learn how to do as you would a second language. This is because language is about so much more than communication. Language is about meaning.
It’s worth observing that in the beginning, when God created the world, the world came into being through God’s spoken word – “Let there be light.” Words have the power to create worlds. Whoever said “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is seriously misinformed. Words have launched wars, saved lives, and lead us to discover beauty. As linguists and sociologists tell us, our grammar and vocabulary shape our world. Some languages have no such words as “left and right” but only use cardinal directions to describe spatial orientation. Other languages have nouns that are either masculine or feminine. Some languages conceive of time in very different ways. Still other languages do not have a possessive construction so that you cannot linguistically claim ownership of objects. These linguistic differences lead to profound cultural and behavioral differences.
Between college and seminary, I took 5 semesters of Spanish, 6 of Greek, and 4 of Hebrew – and those languages are all radically different. They all have different alphabets, different structures, different rules, and different vocabularies. And to understand them, you have to inhabit the world of the language. A Greek approach to Hebrew simply doesn’t work. Language is about meaning making and radically shapes the way the speakers of those languages interpret and live in the world – and the language of faith is no different.
The passage that we heard from Acts today is about language. After Jesus has ascended into heaven, the promised gift of the Holy Spirit comes to provide us with the continued presence of God with us. The way that the Spirit is manifest in Acts is instructive – the Spirit is seen and known through language. Divided tongues, as of fire, landed on the disciples and enabled them to speak in new ways so that the message of the Gospel could be heard and encountered.
As we all know, language isn’t just the words that we say, it’s also tone, it’s word choice, it’s non-verbal cues. The language of faith that the Spirit enables us to speak is the same. Faith isn’t just knowing what words to say. Faith isn’t saying “Jesus Christ is Lord,” faith is inhabiting the world in such a way that makes it clear that Jesus Christ is Lord. As amazing as it would be for people to start speaking in foreign languages, amazement doesn’t often lead to transformation. What the Spirit gave the disciples wasn’t merely words of faith, but rather lives of faith. The language of faith isn’t about learning some new words, it’s about having a new grammar, about fundamentally understanding the world in a new way. This is what led to the miracle of Pentecost when 3,000 people were baptized. They weren’t baptized because of words, but rather because this language of faith invited them into a new way of being, into the New Creation which began with Christ’s Resurrection.
The thing about language is that, for it to work, there have to be rules of grammar. You simply cannot make up your own grammatical structures and be coherent – as evidenced by the first line of this sermon. And so much of what we do as we strive to speak this language of faith is to learn and practice the grammar. Anytime you learn a new language, if you’re going to be fluent, you have to focus on the grammar. It’s why fluency is so difficult – because you have to leave behind the first language that you learned and think in a different language. Sometimes it’s simply whether or not you put the adjective before or after the noun, but you have to think about it. And sometimes it’s far more complex. It’s why when someone says “I go to store tomorrow,” we absolutely know what they mean, but it doesn’t sound quite right. And other times, there is such an impediment in the translation that the language is unintelligible. If you’ve ever tried to read assembly instructions written by a non-native English speaker, you have encountered this reality.
This happens in faith as well. The language of faith has a grammar that makes faith intelligible; and if we ignore that grammar, our faith becomes incoherent. Selfishness, greed, fear, hatred, injustice, lying, speech that denies the dignity of any human being – these things are simply incompatible with the grammar of faith. Though it doesn’t jump out from the text in Acts, the language of faith on display here is radical because it renders the language of the culture as gibberish. What happened on Pentecost was treasonous and subversive. Rome sought to have a monolithic and homogenous culture – there was to be one language, one religion, one currency, one interpretation of facts. Diversity was a threat to the socio-political-economic functioning of Rome. So for the Spirit to blow in and give people a different way of speaking, a different way of living, a different way of being valued was disruptive. This is what the language of faith does – it gives us a different way of reading our society, of articulating our values, of orienting ourselves to the world, of relating to God.
There are simply certain phrases that people in our culture don’t use – but the language of faith is built upon these grammatical constructions. The language of faith is built on the grammar of concepts like generosity, humility, thankfulness, forgiveness, grace, mercy, love, obedience, hope, trust. In the language of Christianity, we say, but more importantly, we orient our lives around counter-cultural phrases like “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” Christians say and do things like saying “I’m sorry” not seven times, but seventy times seven times. Christian grammar is built upon the statement “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Christianity is about trusting, even in the midst of chaos, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Christianity is a language that understands that we live in the New Creation – where Resurrection is all around us, where mercy is given freely, where love is abundant, where God is with us always.
This is a sort of language that is foreign in our world though, and many Christians haven’t been taught this sort of grammar. Instead, we speak the language of self and society. We may have a Christian accent, but often we don’t speak faith as our first language. The gift of the Holy Spirit, given to us in Baptism, is the gift of faith being our native tongue. But we must cultivate this gift for it to flourish. We have to surround ourselves with people who speak the language of faith, just as if you want to learn German you should hang out with people who speak German. We need to be fed with Eucharist, which is the bread and wine heaven, of the realm where this language of faith is the only one spoken. We have to read Scripture, which you might say is the style-manual of faith. We have to practice some new phrases – phrases like “I’m sorry,” “I forgive you,” “Here’s the truth,” “I love you,” “Peace be with you,” “I will, with God’s help,” “Here I am, Lord, send me,” “Let me help,” “You can’t do that to her,” “Thank you, God,” “I need help,” “Joy to the world,” “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” And it’s not just repeating these phrases as we might train a parrot to do so, it’s making these phrases a part of the way we see ourselves, others, and God.
Today, on Pentecost, we rejoice and give thanks for all that this Easter season means for our faith. By overcoming Sin and Death, Jesus Christ, the incarnate love of God, has opened to us the way of abundant life in the New Creation. By ascending to the right hand of the Father, this love of God made manifest in Jesus now rules over all Creation. And by sending the Holy Spirit upon us, we are given the ability to speak the language of New Creation. I pray that through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we might all be given the tongues of faith to speak the truth in love, to live in the New Creation, to strive to be more fluent in faith. The phrase “Green tabling dogs clouds quick” makes as much sense as anything else that you might say unless you’re speaking the language of faith which is founded on this simple grammar: Jesus Christ is Lord.
