Pentecost: The Incarnate Tongue

This is a repost with some revisions for Pentecost Sunday…

Last year our family visited a church in Raleigh to listen to an Ethiopian Gospel choir.    I wasn’t expecting to personally get much out of this concert other than to enjoy the enjoyment of Sophie and Eli, our two adopted children from Ethiopia.  A few minutes into the first song, however, I was pleasantly surprised to learn I was in for far more than I expected.

Even though the songs were sung in Amharic, a tongue I do not know, I found myself strangely drawn into their music.  While I did not know what was being said I knew that these people were praising and worshipping God.  They were full of joy and thanksgiving – it was obvious from the looks on their faces, the rhythm of their dancing and the tenor of their voices.   The language they praised God in may have been foreign to me but their posture towards God I recognized. I found myself in awe.  Before the first song was even half way through my eyes welled up with tears and thanked God that the Spirit shows up where she will, with or without my consent or expectation.   Such events have been going on for millennia…

Atop a mountain in the middle of a wilderness a group of people were given a new tongue.   God gave Moses the Ten Words, an ethic these Hebrew people were to live by that would display for the world around them what a life in relationship to their Creator ought to look like.   Israel was learning, slowly but surely, what it meant to be a people whose sole identity was given to them as Gift.   They were not a people who seized identity for themselves like the nations around them but were always in a posture of receiving from God what other peoples fought to grasp.   The Ten Words Yahweh gave to them on Mount Sinai further articulated what it meant to live as the people of a God whose name could not yet be pronounced (YHWH in Hebrew has no vowel points).   Israel was indeed a strange tongue in the land, embodying a mode of being that marked them as peculiar.  It was promised that through them all the nations of the world would be blessed but at this point in the story it is hard to imagine.  Israel stops and stutters.   They speak unintelligibly much of the time.   Amazingly, unlike other national histories that scrub questionable behavior, Israel does not hide her poor speech – She does not hide her failure to speak well the words God has gifted her with.  But if Israel continues to stutter how will all the nations hear?

In a little town called Bethlehem a group of very peculiar people gathered in a stable.   Like Moses before them a word from God was received as gift, this time not ten but One:  The Word made flesh.  The angel would announce this One’s name as Immanuel, or God with us, and in some way the promises of old will be fulfilled here, in this most peculiar place in the midst of this most peculiar people.   Jesus the Jew, born in Bethlehem, will speak perfectly in word and deed what Israel before had stuttered.   Jesus is the Incarnate Tongue, the Word of God perfectly spoken, scandalously peculiar and miraculously present – Immanuel.    As wonderful as this Good News is we find that it is only a prelude of more to come.

It was Passover and Jerusalem was swamped.    Both Jew and Gentile from nations far and wide converged to re-enact the only words they knew.   A peculiar band of Israel’s faithful were gathered together in a room, praying, all in one accord.   They had learned to speak and embody a new word, a word the world was standing on tip-toes to hear, a word that trumped the penultimate word the Passover guests have long spoken.   But would the rest of the world understand?

A flash.  A clap of thunder.  Howling wind.  Tongues of fire.   Doors crash open and out spill a people no longer speaking for themselves, no longer stuttering, but speaking the mysteries and promises of God in a tongue they do not possess as their own.  It is gift.   But it is a gift they cannot hoard.    The nations gathered hear this strange tongue and miraculously, they understand.   They can hear the vowel points being placed on God’s name.  The nations, just like Israel, are invited to speak a strange new tongue in the world.  They, like Jesus, are invited to be God’s incarnate tongue to all the nations, announcing the Good News that indeed, God is still Immanuel.   The Church is born – the Incarnate Tongue is still with us.

Sitting in that church, listening to an Ethiopian Gospel Choir sing praises to God in a tongue I did not know made me think of our task as the ecclesia of God – God’s church – God’s called-out ones.  Standing before my congregation the next morning I asked them, “Why do you come to church?”  I offered them this answer for consideration:   We come to church to be given a new tongue to speak.    We come to church to learn how to speak well this language that has been given to us so that the world who does not yet know it might be attracted to it in the same way I was attracted to the Ethiopian choir.   We come to church to further carry out the gesture begun in Bethlehem and fulfilled at Pentecost in hopes of becoming a people who do not speak from the nothingness within us but from the abundance God gives us.   If we did only that it may well be enough.   If we sing God’s tongue well we will no doubt cause people on the streets to stop and take notice – perhaps even asking if we are drunk.   Some may even well up in tears and feel their hearts strangely warmed as they witness God’s incarnate tongue singing in tune.

God, help us sing well.

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