Genesis 11:1,4; Acts 2:1-4

We have talked about words and the way we use and about how hard it is to find the exact word in another language and how hard it is to really understand what another person is saying and to capture their meaning.  The Tower of Babel story captures that exact moment when people who previously understood each other no longer understand each other.  We all have seen that many times, when people who were close no longer are able to communicate. Hurt, selfishness, greed, anger get in the way.  The day of Pentecost is the perfect opposite, the perfect antithesis of Babel.  People who could not understand each other suddenly meet in understanding in a whole new language.  

Friends, we think of communication as in using words.  We count on words, spoken or written.  We forget that there are many other ways for us to convey meaning and receive meaning, because that is what we are after when we communicate: transferring the meaning we experience to another person.   The language of the body is one powerful way to let people know what we experience.  We can say all the right words, but if the language of the body says something else, people are going to get a totally different idea or we will confuse them.  People will get a sense that we are not authentic.

There is the language of energy.  Dogs pick that up right away about people, whether it is the energy of fear or the energy of anger, negative or positive energy.  Sometimes when we start a worship service, I am aware that the energy in the room is very low.  Sometimes my own energy level is very low.  We all bring our lives to church after all.  Usually when the worship service starts going that energy will pick up.  There is also the language of our acts, our behavior.  It is expressed in how people do things.  The way they do a task, with full commitment or half-way, with enthusiasm or grudgingly or whether they a task right or procrastinate.  That is a way of communicating meaning on a whole range of things.  I always notice about this congregation how people find a way to work together, how they anticipate the next task, so that very little energy is expended by people having to ask time and time again or by someone else having to do the work of two people.  Yes, I know you are not perfect, but it’s especially obvious at fundraisers.  Then there is the language of art which is obvious in many ways. People communicate meaning through art.  In a sitcom (The Middle, ABC) a college student receives a painting from his girlfriend who lives far way.  He calls to tell her that he doesn’t get what it means and that as a result he does not get her.  As he is talking to her he starts looking at each item on the canvas and he realizes that she is breaking up with him by way of the painting.  Some people are more in tune with the art of music than others, or with paintings and sculptures, others are more in tune with the art of creating taste through cooking.  But they are language. The language of art is all about finding our voice.

These ways of communicating also have to do with the more obscure language of the gut, or at least that is what we call it.  In Thursday I work on the sermon at home, but this last Thursday I took a few hours and drove to Mather Field not far from where we live.  I did this because of a hobby I had as a junior high age kid: putting together models of World War II airplanes. I read that old planes were coming to Mather, including the P 51 mustang, a bunch of trainers and  a B-29 Superfortress, the only one left that flies, called Fifi, a plane just the one that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I liked the glass nose of the cockpit and was excited about going in to take a peek in cockpit.  So I stood in line under the right wing for 45 minutes almost.  It was almost time for me to enter the cockpit through some stairs that came out from the forward bomb bay.  The something weird happened.  In order to go in, I would have to spend about ten minutes standing on the tarmac between the opened bomb bay doors.  Something got a hold of me, a terrible sense of oppressiveness, a kind of anxiety.  It wasn’t about the close confines of the cockpit.  It was a sense that I could not stand in that open bomb bay for even a minute with my head right where the bombs used to be. It was like placing by head in a coffin. For a moment I felt connected to all the suffering that was unleashed from these bomb bays.  I felt that the person I was and had become should not be there.  I stepped over the line and walked away, to my own astonishment.  It was the language of the gut, which may be the only way to describe it.

Friends, today is Pentecost. We remember that a new language was born, a language of the Holy Spirit.  It is a language available to us, a language of peace and joy.  It is not just the language of the early church or a language of noisy churches that make us uncomfortable.  It is the language that God speaks to us when our spirit, our true authentic spirit and our gut, connect with the Spirit of God.  It is this that we are hungry for. This is the meaning we ultimately crave, God communicating God’s love to us, God accepting us and showing us God’s true Self .  It is the source of our hope and our solace, but also the source of creativity and energy.  It makes us new. Thanks be to God.