Senior Sermon - Gibin Thampy, BD IV

Sermon

Church: Not the Voice of the Voiceless but the Space of Many Voices.

Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein met each other while they were traveling together. And a crowd of people started to vigorously applaud the celebrities. They waved to the crowd and Einstein said to Charlie Chaplin: “What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you”. And Chaplin replied: “True. But your glory is even greater. The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say”. Chaplin’s words are true to me, because many times in U. T. C, I also joined in laughter even without understanding what the preacher exactly said.

Language; it is not merely a means of communication. Rather language represents culture, identity, politics, geography, so on and so forth. Language can be a cause for war; it can unite and separate people, discriminate and affirm solidarity. In Babel, the scattered language disseminated human beings, and in Jerusalem the scattered language concentrated people. The Acts of the Apostles, written toward the end of the first century by the author of the Gospel of Luke, narrates the story of the early church, beginning with this event. There in Jerusalem, where people gathered from different lands for the festival, the community experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, described as tongues of fire settling on their heads and enabling them to speak the good news of Jesus in different languages. With this event, the door was opened for a new community called ‘church.’  Today, based on the read pericope, I would like to reflect up on the theme Church: Not the Voice of the Voiceless, but the celebration of Many Voices.

Only the book of Acts records this story that we find in chapter 2. For Luke, it is clearly a serious event because, this event inaugurates all that follows. Without the coming of the Spirit there would be no prophecy, no preaching, no mission, no conversions, and no worldwide Christian movements. This event of Pentecost begins in a house where the disciples were ‘all together.’ Luke’s focus in this passage is on one event that happened to the early followers of Jesus as a corporate gathering. Luke is not trying here to give us a detailed description of individual Christian experience, rather a communal experience. My first point is Church: A space of togetherness.

Church: A space for togetherness

Luke’s brief summary about the believers who are present there, reflects the image of togetherness, oneness, and unity. They were all together in the same place. The use of Greek word pantes suggests that the entire group has continued to meet and pray together in continuity. In the first part of Acts 2, the reader discovers two distinct pictures. The first picture is of the group of gathered believers, which the narrative consistently depicts with unanimity and a bond of togetherness. The second picture comes out of the first one: a picture of the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise to his apostles, the coming of the Holy Spirit.

What does it convey to us, the present church? The Pentecost event clearly tells us that, the Holy Spirit kindles us as a witnessing community only when we are together in unity. When we think of church unity, we often misinterpret unity as uniformity. The concept of unity very often negates denial of genuine plurality. What kind of church unity we are aspiring for? Are we seeking to unite church as a homogeneous community like a military troop?  In a military camp the trainees must have to obey the commands of the trainer and also they have to do everything as a single unit. In a military camp the cadets are not allowed to do anything alone. They are being trained to obey and act uniformly according to the commands. This uniformity and discipline gives them a self-pride of being part of that troop. The same strategies are being used by the political parties and religious fundamental groups. When we analyse the history we observe that the fascism, Nazism and now the Islamic state and Hinduthwa are using the method of mass drills to unite their followers and to implement their agendas. Unfortunately now in churches also we are finding the same. We are trying to homogenise Liturgy, tradition, Church governance, pastoral care so on and so forth. In theological thinking, plurality is integral to reality. Prof. A. P. Nirmal had shared his radical concerns for the nature of the church. According to him, the time has come for the Christian churches to replace the traditional dogmatic affirmations about the nature of Church with new images. We need to affirm oneness through the plurality of the churches, holiness through justice, catholicity through conceptuality, apostolicity through peoplehood, which we affirm in the words of the Nicene Creed. The divine call is to seek for the thread that passes through every Christian movement. It is nothing but love, which is the principle of cohesion and binds everything together in perfect harmony. To make church as a celebration of many voices, we need to unite together by accepting and respecting the identity and integrity of every fellow believer. My second point is Church: A space for affirming diverse identities.

Church: A space for affirming diverse identities

The usual interpretation is that the Holy Spirit at Pentecost overcame linguistic difference in order for the Gospel to be heard. But to the contrary, Luke portrays that the spirit actually heightened linguistic difference at Pentecost. Exactly, what were the native languages of the Jewish communities represented at the Temple that day? For at least the vast majority of those who were in Jerusalem for Pentecost, the first language would have been Greek and Aramaic or Hebrew. Roughly speaking, Jews from the land of Israel and the eastern diaspora spoke Aramaic as their first language, while the native language of Jews from the western diaspora was Greek. Hebrew or Aramaic and Greek could all serve as markers of Israel’s ethnic identity. And these languages have been expected to serve as the lingua franca of the emerging group of Jesus followers.  Hebrew language had a unique position in first century Jewish culture. Hebrew was highly esteemed as the ‘holy tongue’. It was the language of God, the language of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and thus the appropriate language for worship. Likewise, Greek was the language of imperial power. Greek represents the power, authority, and subjugation. But Luke does not portray the Holy Spirit as inspiring speech in Hebrew/Aramaic or Greek. The phrase ‘each in their own language in which they were born’ refers to the language of the hearer’s place of origin- their diaspora homelands. This is again emphasized in Acts 2:11. Rather than eliminating the cultural particularity marked by language, the Holy Spirit explicitly affirmed ethno-linguistic diversity by allowing the crowd to hear in diverse languages of their respective birth. It was an affirmation of the pluralization of languages and identity. In the light of the potential for language to create conflict, it is striking that the Holy Spirit does not unite through unified language. Instead the spirit gives voice to the gospel in the lesser known dialects of diaspora home lands. For the people who had made the journey to Jerusalem for Pentecost, they expected to hear Hebrew or Greek. But they were surprised to hear the disciples of Jesus praising God in the so called lower vernacular languages of the diaspora people. That clearly shows that God’s spirit respected the social identity of all the people who were gathered there.

 It tells about the role of the church to preserve and respect the identity of every believer. Church is a space for affirming diverse identities. But what is the situation of the present church? We express that we are one in Christ. But still there is no space for the ‘other voices’ in our church. We always boast about our traditions. It is a pity that we prioritize the name of the churches rather than the name of Christ and his message. In order to ‘preserve’ the “so called tradition”, we built separate church buildings for the ‘other’ voices. We categorize them as voiceless, because we do not accept their identity.

By wearing the mask of ‘voice of the voiceless’ we never let the little voices be heard. Who are we to claim as voice of the voiceless? There is no one without voice. Everyone has their own voice. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit kindled the little voices to proclaim the word of God in their own languages that affirms their identity with authority. To make church as a space for all voices, we need to respect and affirm the identity of all the members of the body of Christ. It is sin, if we boast about of our own identities and deny the uniqueness and dignity of our fellow beings’ identity. The church which inaugurated on Pentecost is an example of preserving and respecting the identities of every believer. It is a space of togetherness and not otherness. Let me conclude my reflection with the words of Arch Bishop Nathan Soderblom: “When the spirit of God visits humanity, it kindles a flame in our heart, a fire of love and justice with the ardent compassion of Christ.” May this spirit help us to speak in different languages about unity. May this spirit enable us to respect every one’s identity. So that we can transform the body of Christ as a celebration of many voices.