Musings

Jun

10

Found in Translation

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, June 9th, 2019 (The Feast of Pentecost)

Readings: Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17

In my previous life, when I served as a priest in a mostly Spanish-speaking congregation, I prayed every day for a Pentecost miracle. Quite aside from the fact that translating my sermons took up a distressing amount of time, there was always so much in our shared life that got lost in translation – often due to my imperfect Spanish. There was the time I scandalized the altar guild by thanking them for washing, not the altar linens – but the altar diapers. Or the time when I asked my confirmation students to please pass me their eyeballs – instead of their worksheets (thankfully they declined). Or the fact that my inability to correctly pronounce the letter “d” caused me to routinely address my congregation not as “you all,” but “you bulls” (which, to add insult to injury, is a homophobic slur in certain parts of Latin America – and definitely not what I meant).

During the 3 years I served there, I would have given anything for access to the Holy Spirit driven miracle that we celebrate today – the miracle of universal, simultaneous translation. The miracle of effortless, mutual understanding in the midst of incredible diversity. The translation bloopers I shared with you are, while plenty embarrassing to me in the moment, minor in the grand scheme of things. But we all know that our inability to understand one another, be it because we translated inaccurately, inadequately, or not at all, can cause serious and lasting harm. Too often, instead of celebrating our diversity, we get lost in our divisions.

It is no accident that this is the miracle that we celebrate on the Feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church as we know it. A Church that has, from its origins, included members from a staggering array of ethnicities and religious backgrounds – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Jews, proselytes, and so on. A Church that, unlike other world religions, has never assumed a single, common language but has always existed in translation. A Church that has, therefore, always been vulnerable to human ego and human error.

It’s worth paying attention to the details of how this Pentecost translation miracle actually happens, because it has a lot to say about how we approach issues of diversity and inclusion today. So often, instead of doing the hard work of intercultural competency, we confuse equality with sameness. Which is where we get attitudes like: If all immigrants just would hurry up and learn English, we wouldn’t have to waste all this time translating. If only people of color would behave more like white people, we wouldn’t have to have difficult and necessary conversations about race. If only gender fluid people could decide whether they were male or female, we wouldn’t have to weep and gnash our teeth about how grammatically incorrect and inconvenient it is to use “they” as a preferred pronoun. If only everyone could be just like us.

This kind of forced sameness, where everyone is made to fit the mold of the dominant culture, is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit does at Pentecost. We do not get to go back to the mythical time before the Tower of Babel, when everyone spoke the same language. Instead, the Spirit gives the disciples the ability to speak to each member of the incredibly diverse crowd so that everyone can understand in their own native language. So that no one’s uniqueness is erased. So that everyone who wants it has access to the fiery, life-giving Word of God.

As heirs of the Holy Spirit’s legacy, as the Body of Christ in the world today: how are we partnering with the Spirit in her work of breaking down barriers to understanding and connection? How are we, in our communities, working towards unity without erasing diversity? How are we translating God’s Word so that all who are drawn to God may understand and feel welcomed?

When I talk about translation, I don’t just mean translating from one language to another (though heaven knows we have plenty of work to do on that). Even in monolingual settings, the Church is constantly interpreting and reinterpreting itself as it engages new communities in new contexts. How do we speak grace to young people who weren’t raised in the Church and don’t share our insidery vocabulary? How do we speak of God’s love and redemption to the LGBTQ community and others who have been wounded by the Church? How do we reimagine the ways we teach and preach and structure our communities so that we’re working with the Holy Spirit instead of getting in her way?

Today, as we rejoice at this fiery outpouring of the Spirit on our lives and on this community, we also recommit ourselves to living as Pentecost people, to joining in the Spirit’s work of translating, interpreting, and reimagining. To knocking down the walls that divide us while honoring and celebrating our God-given diversity. The Holy Spirit never stops pouring out her holy fire on us, never stops urging us to push toward a more just society and a more inclusive Church. And she never stops facilitating those little, magical moments of understanding and connection that when we set aside our suspicion and open our hearts to grace.

For each time that I committed an embarrassing translation faux pas in my previous parish, there were many more occasions when, somehow, with the Spirit’s intervention, everyone understood each other even when no one spoke the same language. Like when a whole group of Latina women volunteered for a week to help an elderly parishioner (who only spoke English) clean out her apartment and move into assisted living. They communicated exclusively in pantomime, but they understood one another. Or when neighbors from some of the wealthiest suburbs of New York City, who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, showed up in force to sit with a terrified Honduran teenager in a cold federal building as she awaited her immigration hearing. No words were exchanged, and they didn’t need to be. Love was clearly communicated. The Spirit’s presence was clearly felt.

This Pentecost, we proclaim that diversity does not have to divide us. That there is room enough in this Church for each of us to be the person God created us to be. And that there is no human barrier, no division that can stand for long when the Holy Spirit pours out her fire on us.