Words, Word, and The Word mean different things even though they are one – Words are the medium of communication among persons, Word often means Logos or the essence of being of the transcendent who became human to live among us as Jesus, and the Word is the way we often refer to Holy Scripture. We use words to describe our thoughts, our feelings, emotions, even our struggle to understand and communicate God. While it is not possible to capture God in a word or even in 66 books, we describe the experience we have of God – transcendent experience beyond words, translated in language that no matter how allegorical or mythical makes the transcendent imminent.
People of many tribes and languages were together when the wind blew and the flames of tongues descended on them and they understood each other even across cultures and languages. Foreigners of difficult to pronounce places were able to transcend language and communicate a common experience. The Holy Spirit is not limited to language, culture, race, ethnicity, age, gender, or any other difference we use to categorize people. The Holy Spirit blows where it will! The Holy Spirit speaks across all our categories of difference. Some call Pentecost the birthday of the church. Those sad, wondering, confused men and women of Good Friday and Easter resurrection were now filled with joy and faith. They knew something they hoped but had not understood at the depth of their being; God is love and God loves them, despite their differences, despite their difficulty in communication, their borders of culture, their foreign languages and ways, God is love and loves them all.
I believe that it was the radical experience of Pentecost that led to the Christian missionary activity of St. Paul and generations of people including our own congregation. Written in Greek and Hebrew, the original texts of the books chosen for the canon, the bible we have, the majority of educated/literate persons in the Greek civilized world could read the texts. As civilization expanded and the teachings of Christianity moved into what is now Europe, Asia, North America, the bible was translated into the common language of the people. It was a struggle to move from the Greek and then Latin Holy Language into vernacular tongues but the reformers believed that every person was entitled to read the scriptures for their own benefit and spiritual nourishment. We trust that the English translation we read is consistent with the original texts, whether we choose the lectionary based New Revised Standard Version, or another version e.g. the New Jerusalem, The Message, King James, New International, or my favorite, the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible. Furthermore the bible has been translated into 1800 languages.
In similar fashion we have a book of common prayer, written in our language. When I was in Thailand, I had a choice of attending a service in Thai or in English at Christ Church Bangkok. In Kenya I had a choice of Swahili or English at the Anglican Church in Mombassa. On Wednesday evenings during this past year we have used the Eucharist Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer of India, Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Thailand, where the order and familiar words of anamnesis and institution were recognized as familiar and common. When I talk with family members about choices of scripture to be read at a funeral or memorial service, Psalm 23 is one of the favorites. I have to be careful here because if a person wants the King James Version we can find it in the Rite I burial service in the prayer book but not in the Psalter of the prayer book. If you look in the Book of Common Prayer on pages 476-477 you will find the King James Version of Psalm 23 whereas on pages 612-613 you will find the psalm as written for plainsong in the crafting of the prayer book. The Psalter is liturgical poetry, designed for vocal, congregational use, for singing or reading. The poetic version we use corresponds with Hebrew versification, which is not based on meter or rhyme, but on parallelism of clauses, a symmetry of form and sense. The parallelism may be one of redundancy or of contrast, separated by the asterisk. Three terms are used for God: Elohim, Adonai, and YHWH (the four-letter name tetragrammation, too holy to be articulated). After the invention of vowel points, the Name was provided with the vowels of the word Adonai producing a hybrid form that was transliterated “Jehovah.” When the holy name is translated LORD in small caps, it is the English equivalent of YHWH, whereas if Adonai is being translated the word is Lord without all caps.
It is interesting that wherever Islam and Judaism have gone across cultures the sacred texts have remained constant, Arabic and Hebrew respectively. Not Christianity – the Greek and Latin texts were translated into the language of the people. There is a fundamental distinction here that may point back to the experience of Pentecost, a recognition made by St. Paul, that in Christ, there is no discrimination between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free (Gal 3:28). All are one in Christ! Stressing faith over works, Paul gave us an inclusive principle of God’s freedom to choose us without regard to our cultural trophies. Faith as absolute gift of a loving and gracious God is the relativizing leaven in culture.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us – The Word is the logos, the second person of the Trinity who became a human being in order to draw the whole world into the embrace of God. If you doubt that all means all, you should remember today the unlikely prospect of those talking in foreign languages being understood by the power of God’s spirit. The Word is Jesus, our Christ and that is the connecting point of all in the body of Christ – the church.
So long as we understand that God is love and offers the gift of faith to those God chooses, we can abstain from judgment, allow the wind and fire of the Holy to blow and burn where it will. No one language or culture is inherently superior or inferior. God is God, living in true. Today in this place we will baptize Fany and Dayana in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and marked, as Christ’s own forever. For that we rejoice as we remember our own incorporation into the same body of Christ and as we all grow together in recognition of the universal love of God.
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