Can You Here Me Now

                  In 2013 Josh Katz and Wilson Andrews, writers for the New York Times, published a quiz titled “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk.” The quiz asks questions like “What do you call a carbonated beverage?”, “how do you pronounce aunt?”, and “What is the distinction between dinner and supper?”. Based on your answers the quiz creates a heat map of where in the United States speaks most like you and three cities in the US that share your dialect. It was a fascinating look into how even though roughly three-quarters of US households speak primarily English at home. Many of us are still speaking a slightly different version than our neighbors in other states.

                  Language is one of the focal points of the focal reading from Acts as we celebrate Pentecost this Sunday. The disciples having just had the Holy Spirit descend on them in startling winds and tongues of fire exit the house and began proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. The twist is they weren’t speaking in Aramaic their native language. Instead, they were speaking in many different languages of all the Jewish people who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holy festival of Shavout. At this point in their history the people of Israel had faced many conquering armies, famines, and other tragedies that there were Jewish communities scattered around the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia. Some hadn’t lived in Jerusalem for generations so their native tongue could have been Arabic, Greek, Coptic, or Phoenician among others. Yet there the disciples were with the gift of the Holy Spirit telling them of the Gospel so that they heard it in their own language.

                  I sometimes wonder if one of the problems with faith and church today is we aren’t speaking the language of our communities. The Christian church has existed for a couple thousand years at this point. The Lutheran Church just celebrated 500 years. It was inevitable some insider language would develop, and I wonder if the language of people we serve has changed around us. Not just in accents and dialects but the meaning behind the words we use, and the ways we talk about life with all its’ joy and worries. So my question(s) this week is this, do you feel like you hear the Gospel in your own language? What would it sound like if it did? And do you speak about Church and faith in a way that your neighbors and community hear it in their own language?

Amen,

Pastor Corey