"Speaking in Other Languages"

Sermon 05.23.10
“Speaking in Other Languages”

In this world today, there are approximately 6,500 living languages being spoken. That’s a mind-boggling figure and surprisingly, English is not at the top of the list. I want to take a minute to give you the run-down of the top 10 language and the number of people who speak them:

1. Mandarin 885 million speakers
2. Spanish 332 million speakers
3. English 322 million speakers
4. Bengali 189 million speakers
5. Hindi 182 million speakers
6. Portuguese 170 million speakers
6. Russian 170 million speakers
8. Japanese 125 million speakers
9. German 98 million speakers
10. Wu 77 million speakers

Curiously, French did not make the cut, which is why I took French classes in school for 5 years.

Speaking is the primary vehicle for communication, and after hearing these statistics, it should come as no surprise that we so often do not understand one another. And in addition to the tremendous quantity of languages themselves, we also have a set of language that cannot be labeled, such as the language of love and the language of power, the language of babies, and the language of politics.

In today’s reading from Acts, the traditional text for Pentecost Sunday, we have the situation of speaking many languages. Hear again the words of the passage describing this phenomenon: NRS Acts 2:3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” The audience was incredibly diverse – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappodocia Pontus and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene. And the reason that I was asked to read all of the lectionary this morning was a test on how well I could pronounce all these odd and unfamiliar names.

In my home church in Lancaster PA, as an enhanced portion of the worship service, the entire selection from Acts was read simultaneously at this point by 8 different members of the congregation, speaking 8 different languages. The result was sometimes overwhelming as words competed with each other, but it also provided a rich example of what occurred in the upper room when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles.

But I would argue that only one language was actually being spoken, and it defies a name, because it is the language of the Holy Spirit, which surpasses and transcends geographical areas and nationalities. The language of the Holy Spirit is not a dialect that can be set out and parsed. Rather than an act of speaking, it is a different way of communicating. While the Holy Spirit momentarily gave the Apostles the gift of tongues, a more perfect gift would be embodied in the ways that the Apostles acted, for they were destined to speak through the fruits of the Spirit.

The New Living Translation of the Bible gives us these words from Paul’s letter to the Galations: NLT Galatians 5:22 But when the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. The Holy Spirit does not fill us with a way to talk, but a way to act.
Most of us will not be speakers of many languages, and certainly not fluent in the ones that I mentioned earlier in my sermon. We can keep English as our first and only tongue, but adopt the language of the Spirit as our second. We must embody the traits, the gifts of our faith and then speak them to one another through these holy ways of conducting ourselves. The languages of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control are infinitely more important than being able to translate Sanskrit or print the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Let us as the body of Christ be filled with the Holy Spirit as the Apostles were on Pentecost. May we translate for others what we believe and how we behave. The good news is that we have an excellent dictionary at our fingertips through the Word of God. Speak loudly, speak clearly, and speak like tongues filled with holy flames. Amen.