A Pentecost Experience

“There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound they came on the run. Then when they heard, one after another, their mother tongue being spoken, they were thunderstruck. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans? How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues?” Acts 2: 5-11 MSG

If you were in church last Sunday, you probably heard some version of the words above read as a portion of one of the lessons. Even if you didn’t, you will still be familiar with the story about people speaking in tongues that the church has labeled Pentecost. I have aways understood it as sort of a mini United Nations, where through the wonders of technology, [in this case God or the Holy Spirit], each person hears their own language regardless of the language actually being spoken.

But for some reason this past Sunday, the words being read had a new meaning for me. For the first time I actually heard the line, ‘How come we are hearing them talk in our various mother tongues.’ And I thought… they are hearing the words in the other languages and yet they know what is being said - and realizing that everyone is hearing the same message! Something very different from my previous conception of the passage.

I was reminded of a time when the mother of a newly-arrived refugee family was telling me a story. She was crouched down by my chair, tears rolling down her cheeks, as between sobs she told her story to me in her native tongue. I didn’t understand a word of what she was saying, yet when her eldest daughter told me afterwards in her halting English what her mother had said, I discovered that I actually had understood every word of it! This, I think, is what is being talked about in the story of Pentecost.

In another part of the New Testament, Matthew has Jesus say: ‘He who has ears, let him hear’. In other words as followers of Jesus we are to listen with ears that hear what is being said even when we don’t understand the words themselves. It shouldn’t matter if the other person is of a different religion, ethnic group, or socio-economic status. If we are truly ‘listening’ to them, we will hear what is being said. Language is so often used as a barrier between people but the story of the early church began with the story we heard this past Sunday, a story that urges us to put aside the divisions of language and grow to understand the other.

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