Other No More (Pentecost C)

 

“‘Other’ No More”
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year C
7 June 2025
Homily
Emmanuel Parish Church, Coos Bay Oregon

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Romans 8:14-17 ; John 14:8-17, (25-27)

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 News that the President has, over the objections of the governor of California, has called out the national guard to suppress civil unrest in Latino majority areas of Los Angeles, brought to mind to me, on this Pentecost Sunday, a couple of incidents from my youth.  I was raised in Moses Lake, an agricultural town in Eastern Washington, where a third of our population was Hispanic, mainly seasonal agricultural laborers.  Once, in junior high, I was in the locker room with two of my classmates, who were both speaking Spanish to each other.  I resented it.  I thought they were talking about me (and they may well have been, since my resentment was leaking even before they seemed to turn their attention to me).  With all the entitlement of a thirteen year old white boy growing up in the 50s, I said, “You’re in America.  Why don’t you speak English?”  The older one, somewhat physically intimidating to me, looked at me, and said in absolutely clear English.  Most of the West of the US used to be Mexico.  Why don’t you speak Spanish?”  And then he smiled. I later learned his name, Ronnie Medrano, and we actually became good friends.   

 

A couple of years later, I was working at the city swimming pool as a lifeguard.  There was a group of sketchy looking Mexican teenagers sitting on the bleachers outside the pool fence, looking at the scantily clad white girls who were swimming.  I again let my resentment leak, and this time, the objects of my resentment responded physically:  they started tossing hard pine cones at me.  When one that hit my head really hurt, I went in to the guard station and came out with a pith helmet on to protect my head.  The sight was so amusing, they boys broke into laughter, stopped the rain of pinecones, and spent the rest of the evening quietly enjoying the view. 

 

I was raised in a church that taught that God’s chosen people, the church, was like the Isra’elites of old:  they needed to keep their lineage pure, not intermarry or even mix much with pagan foreigners.  In fact, foreigners were seen as threatening.  I think that is why I had that resentment in the first place.  The idea is part and parcel of the Christian nationalism that is behind many of the current regime’s policies that have caused such turmoil.  But this fear or even contempt of the foreign is not Christian at all, as we will see in today’s scriptures. 

 

Today is Whitsunday or Pentecost, and all our scriptures are about the Spirit in one way or another. 

 

The Acts reading tells of the outpouring of the spirit on the Day of Pentecost.  So what’s Pentecost?  It is the feast of Shavuot, or Weeks, fifty days after the Feast of Passover (“Pentecost” is Greek for “50”).  It was a festival of the first fruits, where the very earliest produce of the agricultural year was becoming available.  In those days, you stored food in the winter by drying, salting, or smoking it, and saving roots and cabbages in cool cellars.  By early spring, your larder was pretty low, and fresh fruits and vegetables only a vague memory. So the earliest produce of spring signaled that hardship was over, and prodigal summer was arriving soon. On Shavuot, the first produce was given back to God in thanks, and then you held a big party with fresh produce, not dried and stored food.  

 

Elsewhere, Paul uses this very image—first fruits—to describe the Spirit.  Paul sees the world in which we live both as an early spring on the verge of a rich summer, or a woman in labor, suffering great pain in hope of a new life being delivered.  The spirit is a sign that the baby will be born, that produce will come.  The Spirit is like the first fruits in the spring, after our larders have run bare:  it is a sign of better things to come, of more and more life and abundance. Paul also calls the spirit “an anointing, an authenticating seal, a first installment” (2 Cor 1: 20-22): 4-7), and in today’s epistle, an “adoption” by God that makes us heirs. 

 

Paul’s letters tell us that early Christians experienced the Spirit in community by some kind of ecstatic utterance that he calls at one point “tongues of angels,” vocalizations that absent someone else to interpret them were meaningless (1 Cor. 13:1; 14:6-19).   It was the fact that this gift was equally shared by Jewish and Gentile Christians alike, regardless of their conformity to Jewish Law, that led the early Church to accept Gentiles as full members without insisting that they become Jews first (Galatians 2:14; Acts 1-15).

 

In the Gospel of John, the Spirit comes upon the disciples on the evening of Easter Sunday in that upper room with closed doors: when Jesus appears, he breathes on the disciples and says “receive the Holy Spirit.” 

 

But Luke, as part of his declared purpose in the Gospel and Acts of setting down in “a reasonable order” Christ and the apostles’ ministry, somewhat artificially places the coming of the Spirit ten days after the ascension of the resurrected Jesus at the end of his forty-day minister.  And what day was that?  Pentecost, Shavuot, the day of first fruits and early payment of God’s promises. 

      

Luke-Acts recasts the ecstatic speaking in angelic tongues as the miraculous speaking of other people’s languages, breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers. And this is where we learn the error of so-called Christian nationalism. 

 

In Book of Genesis, there is an ancient folk myth that tries to answer the question “Why are there so many different languages and cultures?”  The story of the Tower of Babel, however, is much more an example of bigotry, linguistic division, and tribalism than it is a real explanation or remedy of the toxic diversity it seeks to explain.  Told from the point of view of a nomadic Hebrew living in the land of Canaan, itis loaded with ridicule and slurs against urban Mesopotamians living in Babylon, or Babel as the city was known in Hebrew.  A ziggurat, or temple tower, is caricatured as an arrogant effort to displace God.  The xenophobia buried in the story becomes clear with the pun of its good-old-boy humor punch line.  God decides to destroy the tower and disperse the urbanites by confusing their language.  The Hebrew word for confuse is close to the Hebrew name for the city. Thus the moral of this “Just So” story is this: “That is why they called the City Babylon, because God caused them to ‘babble on’ to each other!”  

 

The real cause of cultural and linguistic division is far deeper and intractable than this myth imagines.  It is rooted in the way our brains are hard-wired.  Researchers on the development of the brain in early childhood have recognized that a chief element of our becoming able to make distinctions in interpreting faces, their expressions, and the sounds they make (language) is the brain’s tendency early on to block out less-frequently-encountered faces or language as “other,” and not worthy of the same amount of effort.   Only thus is the brain able to refine and tune the complicated business of understanding verbal and non-verbal cues in communication.  Six-month-old children of whatever culture or race tend to react more attentively and discriminatingly to faces of the colors, shapes, and setting the children are most exposed to, while bracketing out the less familiar, and tending to give them the cold shoulder.   When a person of European-extraction says “all Asians look alike to me,” we might think that this is just an artifact of bigotry.  But there is an actual neurological reason behind such statements: our brains tend to process faces of types with which we are less familiar generically and not individually.  Living in China and in Africa, I have heard friends in both places admit with a bit of embarrassment, “All you whites tend to look the same to me.”   

 

Similarly, the sounds, rhythms, and accents of the languages used regularly in the home pique the child’s interest, as shown in elevated brain-wave activity.  The sounds and rhythms of other languages increasingly are treated as so much meaningless noise by 3- to 12-month-old brains.  Where there is some brain defect that interferes with this normal process and the young brain is unable to filter and block such sounds out as ‘foreign’, the child’s ability to learn its mother language is usually seriously damaged or destroyed.

 

Luke’s casting of the coming of the spirit as the undoing of Babel tells us much we need to know about “the Spirit.”  And it isn’t that the Spirit endorses racism under the guise of “keeping God’s chosen people pure.”  Living in the Spirit means engaging with the new, the foreign, the strange, the ‘other.’  It means getting to know strange faces and making them familiar enough that they no longer all look alike.  It is putting aside the fear that is the foundation of all tribalism, sectarianism, faction, and distaste for the new, the strange.  It is the way God leads us to give an affirming and thankful “yes” to life in all its variety and glory, and put away any stingy and defensive “no.”

  

Tribalism, chauvinism, partisanship, racism, and jingoism come from fear, self-seeking, and that part of us that resists God.   Paul urges us, in contrast, “Live by the Spirit.  … [in] love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:16-23). The promise if we do so, is great: God’s power, working in us, will “do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20-21). 

 

This week, I want each of us to reflect on areas where we are saying “no” to the foreign, to the strange, whether this is because of national origin, race, or language, or because they differ from you in their hopes for society.  Let’s ask ourselves seriously whether this “No” is really what God has in mind.  Reach out. Maybe try harder with that new language on Rosetta Stone. Build bridges, not walls.  Break down barriers, and try to understand people who puzzle us. And as relationship builds, explain your own strangeness to them.   Let us pray for the Spirit to remove from us undue fear, and to create in us a new heart, and empower us to say “yes,” and “welcome.”  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.