In the 1989 film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella goes on a crosscountry quest from Iowa to Boston and winds up kidnapping a famous and reclusive author named Terrence Mann, played by James Earl Jones.
They wind up attending a baseball game together, and by the time they finally arrive at Fenway Park, the two characters are sharing their life stories, until Costner’s character asks, “So what do you want?”
Jones’ Terrence Mann immediately launches into an impassioned speech about wanting to be left alone in peace, about wanting people to think for themselves, and about wanting people to stop asking him to write more and speak out more.
But Costner looks at him sort of stunned, and says, “No, I mean, what do you want?” and gestures towards the concession stand. He wants to know what he wants to eat, not what he wants out of life.
Now it’s not that the impassioned answer was incorrect. It wasn’t wrong at all. It’s actually quite eloquent and even a little moving. It just wasn’t exactly the answer to the question being asked.
I’ve been thinking about this scene all week as I’ve been reflecting on the events of Pentecost because I think something similar happening in this story when the people ask the disciples what it all means, and Peter responds with an impassioned, lengthy sermon about God and the death and resurrection of Christ.
It’s not his sermon, of which we only hear a snippet today, is inaccurate or wrong. If you read the whole thing, it’s actually quite eloquent, moving, and even persuasive. After all, it manages to convert scores to the Way of Jesus. But like with James Earl Jones’ character in Field of Dreams, it just wasn’t exactly the answer to the question the people were asking.
I’m not so sure they’re asking about what happened with Jesus 50 days before. They had just heard the disciples proclaiming this—and they had understood it—in their own languages. That’s not the part that confuses them. The message doesn’t confuse them; the perplexing thing was the way the message was communicated—that they could hear the message of God in their own individual languages, in the vernacular, in the same language and tongues they had put their babies to sleep, ordered fish from the markets, declined to help a friend, or whispered their devotion to their beloved.
Suddenly the ordinary tongue was speaking of the extraordinary.
Think about it. People had come from far and wide for this festival to celebrate and remember God’s wonderful gift of the Torah given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. There were pilgrims from all over the known world, each with their own language. They had come expecting to hear the deeds of God’s salvation spoken in Hebrew, like they had every time they’d made the long journey to Jerusalem for pilgrimage or every time they’d worshiped in a synagogue. It was the liturgical language of the day. They might have even been expecting to hear an unintelligible cacophony other foreign languages in the festival streets.
What they didn’t expect was to hear their own.
If you’ve ever been on pilgrimage or spent time in a country that didn’t speak your native language as its own, you know what this is like. You become accustomed to not being able to understand everything. And if you do happen to hear someone speaking words you can understand without having to jump through the linguistic hoops of real-time translation in your head, you become like a moth to a flame, seeking them out in hopes of experiencing a little bit of home away from home.
Whenever I’ve been in another country—or even in a different part of our country, bumping into someone who speaks the way you speak immediately makes you relax and immediately establishes a bond. Spend a few years living in a place like Northern California after living your whole life in Alabama like I did, and you quickly realize a Southern drawl or simply the word “y’all” is enough to build a friendship.
On Pentecost, this is essentially what God is doing, reaching out to all people, from every walk of life, from every language around, and speaking directly to them in a language not that they could just understand but in a language that felt like home, like they belonged to the story of God just as they are.
In other words, God spoke.
The people understood it in their own languages.
And this confused them.
That’s what amazed the people. That’s something of what they’re getting at when they ask, “What does this all mean?”
What did it mean that God spoke in the common language of each, not just in one tongue?
What did it mean that the proclamation of God’s saving work was proclaimed in more than just the liturgical language of the Temple and religious authorities?
What did it mean that the Good News that Jesus is Lord was declared not in Latin, the language of the imperial conquerors throughout the known world but in the languages of the conquered, of the powerless, of the oppressed?
What did it mean that God gave the divine voice to the languages of a bunch of nobodies?
This wasn’t how people expected to experience and understand the omnipotent God. It’s no wonder this gift of the Spirit was disorienting for them when their expectations of how God was supposed to communicate were disrupted.
Gifts from God tend to be that way — jarring and disruptive before treasured and nurtured. It was that way with the Torah, too. The Hebrew people kind of freaked out when Moses tarried on Mt. Sinai and then came down with the gift of the Torah with his face set ablaze with glory.
It was a disruption for God to come that close to them, for them to witness it all, even from afar.
On this Pentecost, as they are celebrating and remembering this gift of the Torah, God’s gift and revelation comes even closer than the mountain. And as with the Torah, this gift of the Spirit is just as disruptive and confusing.
Even though the story of Babel seems to suggest that human difference is a curse from God from which conflict stems, Pentecost instead proclaims this sort of difference is actually a gift from God in which God is made manifest. It means that through Spirit we can be liberated from the curse of uniformity and the oppression of sameness and the a single language and a single way of thinking.
It means that, through the Spirit, unity no longer requires a centralized uniform identity but through the celebration of all the ways God is made manifest in and through us, even those, and maybe especially those who are different from us.
Human difference is a reflection of the divine image of God who comes to us in the unity-amid-diveristy that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Human difference is a holy gift.
Young and old, and each in between, gifts from god.
Conservative and liberal, gifts from God.
Introvert and extrovert, gifts from God.
Protestant and Catholic, Baptist and Episcopalian, gifts from God.
LGBTQ folks and hetero folks, gifts from God.
Transgender and traditionally gender folks, gifts from God.
Immigrant and citizen, gifts from God.
Black skin, brown skin, white skin, gifts from God.
That so much of what I just said is so often viewed as a curse, used as wedges to divide us, and to create targets for dehumanization, demonization, and discrimination reminds me just how frequently we still misunderstand what God was trying to tell us on Pentecost.
It reminds me just how often we are like that scene in Field of Dreams when we are asked a question about those people over there so vastly different from us, we respond with fear, with attempts to control, discredit or marginalize, to preach them into our way of thinking instead of responding with gratitude for diversity and difference and taking a moment to listen to the disorienting and holy disruptive way in which God is speaking and revealing divine love to us through them.
Perhaps if we did so, we’d know the transformative power of Pentecost and of God’s holy, boundary-crossing spirit. So let us pray for a renewal of a that Spirit of Pentecost in our day and time.
Let us pray:
O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.