There are all too many painful indications of the way communication currently seems to have broken down, both between and within different nations. We are increasingly failing to understand one another even when, in principle, we speak the same language.
The Washington Post recently offered an article urging a declaration of linguistic independence. Referring to the 250th anniversary of American Independence, a journalist challenged why, all these years later, America is still speaking “English”; ‘Surely it’s past time that the country designated “American” as its official language. It is not merely different, it is better – a dominant evolution’ of English!’
Written quite seriously, that seems a rather bleak satire on the recent decline in understanding and collaboration between our two nations.
What a contrast is offered by the story of Pentecost where universality and unimpeded communication, not dominance or competition, is the keynote. As the crowd listen in amazement, the disciples began to speak in other languages, and ‘each one heard them speaking in their own native language; Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Cretans and Arabs’.
In other words, people from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Palestine and so on. It wasn’t that they could all suddenly speak the disciples’ language of Aramaic; it was that the disciples, opened up by the Holy Spirit, could communicate in ways the people could all comprehend. Imagine that – a Middle East where everyone could truly hear and understand what all the others are saying! What that requires is certainly not that we all simply shout louder to make ourselves heard, but that we take the trouble to speak in the language of others, to see the world from their perspective and out of their experience.
This is what Christians are called to do; to rediscover that Pentecost gift and ensure we speak of our faith in ways that are meaningful and relevant to others; a shared language of mutual understanding, respectful of difference; a generous form of speech which conveys convincingly the hope our God of love gives us, and which is given authenticity by our actions.
May we all learn to speak an inclusive, humble, credible language, of love for all.
Revd Kate McFarlane
