This coming weekend is Pentecost Sunday.  The first reading is from St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. The story Luke describes is full of details that challenge the imagination.  Tongues of fire.  Rushing wind.  Bold preaching.  Mass baptism.  But at its heart, the Pentecost story is not about spectacle and drama.  It’s about the Holy Spirit showing up and transforming ordinary,  imperfect, frightened people into the Body of Christ.  It’s about the Spirit carrying us out of suspicion, tribalism, and fear, into a radical new way of engaging God and our neighbor.

Luke tells us that the disciples were “filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them ability…At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language.” Those of us who speak more than one language might be the best equipped to grasp the import of this miraculous moment.  Those of us who are bilingual (or more) understand implicitly that a language equals far more than the sum of its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax.

Languages carry the full weight of their respective cultures, histories, psychologies, and spiritualities.  To speak one language as opposed to another is to orient oneself differently in the world — to see differently, hear differently, process and punctuate reality differently.  Speaking more than one language allows you the opportunity to cross barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, culture, or politics and to challenge stereotypes.

We are living in an age when we are in such need of brave, border-crossing acts. Even local communities are growing more and more “tribal.” We speak in the language of echo chambers, slogans, and sound bites – words that open doors to include and shut doors to exclude. Yet we need to learn to speak the language of the “other” and risk vulnerability in the face of difference, and do so with no guarantee of welcome. At the same time we need to listen, take the risk that we are able to suspend disbelief, drop cherished defenses, and opt for curiosity instead of contempt.

On that long-ago Pentecost not all of them managed it — some, like their ancestors at Babel, scattered at the first sign of difference, they retreated into the well-worn narrative of denial: “Nothing new is happening here.  This isn’t God.  These are blubbering idiots who’ve had too much to drink.” But even in that atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, some people spoke, and some people listened, and into those astonishing exchanges, God breathed fresh life.

It is no small thing that the Holy Spirit loosened tongues to break down barriers on the birthday of the Church.  In the face of difference, God compelled his people to engage.  In the face of fear, Jesus breathed forth peace.  Out of the heart of deep difference, God birthed the Church.

Image credit: Descent of the Holy Spirit, Cryo-Russian icon, Wiki Commons, PD-US