The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
May 31, 2009

The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-11
1 Corinthians 12:4-13
John 20:19-23

When the dry ground appeared again after the flood, the sons of Noah came out of the Ark, and “from them came all the people of the earth.... Now the whole earth had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they built a tower, a tower they believed would reach to the heavens.... But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower. And the Lord said, ‘If, as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not be able to understand each other.’ So the Lord stopped their building. That is why it was called Babel – because in that place the Lord confused the language of the whole world, and from there scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

And the rest is history – that building of the nations that were divided by barriers of language and borders and that were continually at war with each other, which was the subject of last week’s sermon.

But in his good time, God grew weary of the confusion. He grew weary of the sins of his people, and of their warring ways. And in the days of Herod, king of Judea, God sent a messenger to a virgin named Mary, in Nazareth of Galilee. And the angel greeted Mary and said, “Do not be afraid, Mary. The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and you will conceive and bear a son. He will be called Son of God, and he will reign over a kingdom that will never end.” And when the time had fully come, Mary gave birth to her son. And she named him Jesus – which means, “It is the Lord who saves” – just as the angel had told her she must name him.

And so it was that in God’s time, God sent his Son to bring the people of the earth back to God. And while he was on the earth Jesus lived among us sinners. He loved us, and gave up even his own life for us, to show us the way of love, the way of kingdom life. And on the third day, Easter Day, God raised Jesus to life. And on the evening of that same day, Jesus appeared to his disciples and said, “Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Then for forty days the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples. But on the fortieth day, he ascended into heaven. He left them, but he promised not to leave them comfortless, alone and without help. So on the fiftieth day, on the Day of Pentecost, the disciples “were all together in one place,” when “suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. And all of the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

The Feast of Pentecost was a day of pilgrimage and festival, a commemoration of the gathering of the first fruits and of God’s giving of the Law at Sinai, so faithful Jews from every nation traveled back to Jerusalem for the feast. Therefore, on that day “there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each person there heard the disciples speaking, not in Hebrew or in Aramaic or in Greek, but in his own language, in the language of his own nation back home. Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘Are not all these Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? [All of us from all the nations under heaven] – both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs – we all hear the disciples declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.’”

And in this manner, on the Day of Pentecost, God reversed the confusion of the languages of Babel. Although they were all Galileans, the disciples were empowered to speak in such manner that they were understood by everyone else in all their different languages. And on this day, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God sent his disciples into all the world to proclaim the good news of God’s love and power to every nation under heaven, so that people everywhere could hear it and understand it. And amazed and perplexed, they asked, “What does this mean?”

Indeed, that is the question for Pentecost. What does this mean? What does the gift of the Holy Spirit mean? Not only in Jerusalem in ancient times, but in Colorado Springs in our time.

It means at least three things. It means that the message and power of God’s love is not restricted to a particular language, nor is God’s love restricted by national borders or customs. It means that circumcised and uncircumcised, Jew and Gentile, native-born and foreigner alike, are the beloved objects of God’s pleasure, recipients of the Gospel.

It also means that God’s love is not confined by time, because at least two of the nations gathered in Jerusalem on that ancient Day of Pentecost – the Medes and the Elamites – were the nations of people who had disappeared from earthly existence more than two hundred years earlier. It means, in other words, that God has decided through his Holy Spirit to proclaim his love universally, across all time and space, and to do so in all the nations and in all the languages of the world.

And the third thing Pentecost means is that God empowers us. It was ordinary human beings, his disciples, whom God charged with his divine mission, the mission of carrying the Gospel to those beyond their own land. And this means that God has empowered you and me, and he sends us, not just Peter and James and John and the rest of the twelve, to take his message and his love to the ends of the earth.

So Pentecost is where the rubber hits the road. Pentecost is when and where all the stuff in the Bible – the commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of Jesus, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – lands in our laps. It is the mission God gave to us at our baptisms. It is where the future begins. It begins with our decision about whether we will be faithful to the commission God has given us.

What is difficult about this, of course, is that this divine commission, universal though it is, must always be carried out by specific people in specific times and specific circumstances, and our specific time is the Day of Pentecost, 2009, and our specific circumstance is Colorado Springs, in the State of Colorado, in the United States of America.

Dear friends in Christ, all the concern about national languages and national identity and national borders in our own land today is a political and economic issue. But it is not primarily so. Primarily, first and foremost, this concern, and all the hoopla surrounding it in the newspapers and on television, is a gift and opportunity from God.

Richard Rodriguez reminds us that there are now over forty million Latinos living in the United States, and he also reminds us that this fact is the result of a history that extends back in time for at least two hundred years. “I think historians will come to recognize the illegal immigrant as the great prophetic figure within the Americas,” writes Rodriguez. “The illegal immigrant Americanized us all by a simple and frugal migration – by sojourning in the North; and by sending the dream of [El Norte], a money-gram, back into Mexico.”

“From the early 20th century,” – almost a hundred years after the United States migrated its own southern border into Mexican territory – “the migrant commuted between here and there, [between] hot and cold, high and low, past and future, rich and poor, Spanish and English, life and death. [And] the legend of the North [which the migrant took back to Mexican territory] spread throughout the Americas. Today, Peruvians and Bolivians know when there are apple-picking jobs in the Yakima Valley, when the godawful fisheries in Alaska will begin to hire, when a dishwashing job in a Bronx restaurant is coming open.” And major league baseball – fifty years ago the preserve of the English language and of earlier immigrants from Europe – now speaks, at our invitation, the language of Mexico and Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and also, at our invitation as well, the languages of Japan and China.

“By the late 20th century, the rumor of the North had ascended to the middle and upper classes in Mexico,” Rodriguez adds. They, too, followed the peasant’s lead. In Mexico City, a capital of abundant but vulnerable wealth, the rich have learned the prudence of a second home in La Jolla.”

“[We North] Americans take our imperial influence for granted,” adds the man with north-of-the-border citizenship but a south-of-the-border name. “We assume, do we not, the desirability of WalMart. Shouldn’t we build WalMart in Mexico? Of course, we should. Where shall we build WalMart in Mexico? How about right here – where it will appear in the photograph of the Pyramid of the Sun?”

Three years ago, millions of brown people marched along U. S. streets, and “commentators did not seem to know what they were watching,” adds Rodriguez. “This was obviously a “demonstration,” but a demonstration of what? I believe it was a reunion [of the great prophetic figure within the Americas – a reunion] of family, [a reunion] of hemisphere. Children and parents walked as one family. Brothers born there, sisters born here, walked as one hemisphere. Colombians walking alongside Mexicans, walking alongside Dominicans, walking alongside Guatemalans. These people are no longer members of their ethnic or national groups; they’re marching as some new nation of the ‘Hispanic’ world.” They even marched, he adds, as mestizos, as those of mixed blood, those born of both the Spanish and the Indian; they marched as the descendants of those we thought we had banished from “our” land with the surrender of Geronimo to General Miles in 1886, but who are once again marching hauntingly in their former hunting lands of the north.

“A great many Americans are alarmed by how much of Mexico is [now] within the United States – the tongue, the tacos, the soccer balls, the street gangs, the Spanish Catholic Masses.” If so, should they not have been equally alarmed earlier, in 2004, when, during his reelection campaign, President Bush “put his arm around a brown child’s shoulder and waved a small Mexican flag with his other hand”?

“The extent of the Mexicanization of U.S. culture renders any notion of a fortified border irrelevant,” concludes Rodriguez. And watch closely – I implore you – watch the eyes of Mexican busboys and waiters as they observe U.S. college students conducting wet T-shirt competitions on the beaches of Cancun. Do not believe, America, that you are alone in your reservations concerning this marriage.”

“Because of immigration, legal and illegal, we are all entering a new world, [the world of] the hemisphere” The world is now flat, to put it in the language of Thomas Friedman. Sonia Sotomayor, born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican parents, is poised to become a Justice of our Supreme Court, appointed by a President whose own roots reach back to Kenya. And “there are now too many Mexicans [and Dominicans and Cubans and Guatemalans and Bolivians and folks from Ecuador and Costa Rica] in ‘America,’ and too many ‘Americans’ in Mexico [and the rest of Central and South American] for any of us to avoid the New World – the united states of the Americas.” [from Richard Rodriguez, “’Impure Genius’?” (Episcopal News Service, May 26, 2006) and “What a Wall Can’t Stop” (Washingtonpost.com, May 28, 2006)]

These, friends, are the circumstances of the Day of Pentecost, 2009, as we turn from East Costilla Street onto South Nevada Avenue on our way to work in Colorado Springs, in the State of Colorado, in the United States of America. And it all seems so strange, so challenging, so sudden, so new.

But actually, it is neither new nor strange.

Pentecost in our day, in the united states of the Americas, presents an opportunity as fresh as this morning and as ancient as the earliest parts of the Bible. And there, in the Bible, there is help for us in our time and circumstances. For in the ancient land of Judah, as recorded in the Book of Ruth, there was in the time of the judges in Israel an economic upheaval as great as the one we are experiencing now. Because of it, Elimelech, from Bethlehem in Judah, and his wife Naomi, emigrated to the foreign land of Moab in search of food and a way to make a living. While in Moab, Naomi bore Elimelech two sons. Later, however, Elimelech died, and their two sons, both Judeans living in a foreign land, married foreign women, Moabite women, and they and their wives and their mother lived in that foreign land for ten years. Then both of Naomi’s sons died, leaving three widows, one an Israelite (their mother) and two Moabitesses (their wives), bereft and destitute in that land.

When Naomi heard that times were better back home, she decided to return, because she no longer had a way of making a living in Moab. One of her daughters-in-law, Ruth, a Moabitess, knew that life would be hard for her mother-in-law in Judah, because life was always hard for widows, so Ruth insisted on going with her. And Ruth’s decision, of course, meant that she, in turn, would live with two strikes against her. She would now be not only a widow, but also herself a foreigner, an immigrant in Israel.

But in Israel, because of the law of God, the women were taken in and cared for, given food and drink and protection, by the righteous man Boaz. Boaz, the Scriptures tell us, was their go’el, their redeemer, the one who saved the Moabitess and her mother from their affliction and desolation.

Boaz gave them work. He opened his fields to them so they could glean for food, and when he did so, Ruth the Moabitess “bowed down with her face to the ground and exclaimed, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me, a foreigner?’ And Boaz said, ‘I have been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of her husband – how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.’”

Friends, the Bible is simply chock-full of such stories of the love and mercy of God for the stranger and the foreigner, chock-full of stories of the love and mercy of God offered through the lives of faithful people like Boaz. These stories are commended to us as examples of the way we ourselves are to walk in. So “do not forget to love the foreigner among you (lit. philoxenia),” the author of the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts us, ”for by so doing some have entertained angels unawares.” Indeed, it was the foreigner himself who offered similar succor to the baby Jesus, our Redeemer, and to Mary and Joseph, in their time of immigration to a foreign land in Egypt to escape the terrors of Herod.

Today, in the Year of our Lord, 2009, Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit, is the feast of the One who empowers us to respond to the circumstances of our time the way the apostles responded in theirs and the way Boaz responded in his, the feast of the One who empowers us with the commitment to share the good news of God’s love to whomever it is that God sends us.

The Holy Spirit does not require us to learn Spanish in order to preach the Gospel. He does empower us to proclaim and show the love of God in our own speech and our own actions in such ways that it may be heard and received by those who speak Spanish or Japanese or Chinese, or whatever other languages are spoken among us. To accomplish this, we might respond to the foreigner among us with the words of Boaz: “May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” We might respond by proclaiming the good news of God in English in such a way that it is heard and understood across the barriers of language and culture. We may even need to do so in the face of hostile laws, as Peter and James and John had to do, since some in our land would actually criminalize the practice of Biblical religion as practiced by Boaz and the apostles. Wouldn’t that be a cosmic irony for a nation that prides itself on being founded on Judeo-Christian values!

We all hope, of course, that it will not come to that. For the story of God at Pentecost affirms that God does not belong to any human language or nation or tribe – not to the Medes or the Persians, not to the Chinese or the Americans, not to Jews or Muslims or Christians. The story of God at Pentecost is that God is God, and that we belong to God, and that because we all belong to God we all belong to one another as well.

The focus of Pentecost is not on the gift of tongues. The focus of Pentecost is on the gift of ears, and of hearts. The focus of Pentecost is not on human speech, but on the Word God speaks to us, the Word God speaks to each of us in his own native tongue, so that we might hear and know and live a common Gospel in the name of God.

That we may hear this Word in our land in our time, that we may proclaim it in word and in deed in our land and in our time as Boaz and the apostles did in theirs, is the most appropriate prayer I can think of for the Feast of the Holy Spirit, 2009.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen