Sunday, May 20, 2018

Why the Church I Serve Will be Flying the Rainbow Flag This June


I gotta admit.   I honestly didn’t how it was going to turn out.   But today, in worship, a bunch of Presbyterians spoke in tongues.
  
These Presbyterians didn't speak in the sort of tongues people associate with churches with a more Pentecostal flavor.   I have seen Presbyterians speak in such tongues.  I have spoken in a tongue like that myself.   So, when I say that, I don’t intend any disrespect.

No, the tongues folks spoke today reflected what miraculously happened on the first Pentecost, on the day that the Spirit of God came upon the followers of Jesus.  On that day, God did something quite unusual.  Instead of doing a miracle where God delivered a universal message in a universal language.   God delivered a universal message in all sorts of different languages.   And so on Pentecost Sunday, we did our own reenactment of that miracle as we retold the Pentecost story in Acts Chapter 2.
 
The English version of the story appeared on the screen, and then folks spoke a verse in all sorts of languages from Italian to Portuguese to Serbo-Croatian and even Urdu, ten or so different languages in all.   And it was pretty cool.  
  
But it was more than just a gimmick.  What we did there, what God did in this story, tells you something crucial not simply about how you have a relationship with God, but a relationship with anyone.  In fact, when you get what God was doing at Pentecost, it will help in every relationship of your life.  In fact, when people don’t share the message in the Pentecost way, often the message doesn’t get delivered. What is the Pentecost way?  In these words, God tells you.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Acts 2:1-13           

In this passage, God tells you something crucial about how not simply a relationship with God happens, but how any relationship happens.   It only happens when you speak in the language of love, and that language can be more different than you think.

What do I mean?  I’m talking about an insight that made the counselor Gary Chapman millions of dollars.  But as Chapman would tell you, he didn’t have the insight first.  God did.   And what is that insight? 

Everybody needs love.  But for everyone to receive the love, that love has to be in a language they understand.   Now how did Gary Chapman make millions off that idea? Chapman realized that in marriages or any intimate relationship, people speak different languages.  For example, some people show the one they love how much they care by acts of service they do.    They are always doing things for the one they love.   And why do they do that? That’s how they feel the love.   That’s their love language.  But here’s the problem, their love language is not the only one.   So, what if their love language isn’t the language of their spouse?  What if their spouse feels the love through physical touch or gift-giving or quality time or words of affirmation.    Do you know what happens?  That spouse thinks, my beloved is always doing nice things for me yes, but why doesn’t she ever say she loves me or why doesn’t he ever hold me in his arms.    In other words, Chapman pointed out, if you’re not speaking in the love language of your spouse, then that spouse isn’t going to feel your love.   It’s like someone speaking Swahili to someone who only knows English.   No matter how hard you try, your message just ain’t going to get there.  

Chapman took that idea and turned it into a book called the Five Love Languages.  That book has sold over ten million copies in English alone, and that doesn’t even count the 50 other languages that the book has been translated into.   It’s become the bestselling marriage book of all time.

And this insight Chapman applied to marriage lies behind what God does in the miracle of these languages at Pentecost.   God knows.  Everyone doesn’t speak the same love language.   After all, God could just have enabled everyone to understand one language on Pentecost.  But God doesn’t.  Instead, God enables everyone to hear this universal message in their own particular language, the language they heard growing up in their family, at their mother’s knee.   Do you see why that matters?

You can learn another language, sure.  But it won’t feel the same as the language of your birth. That language has a special place in your heart.   It’s why Russian Baptists meeting in our church's chapel each Sunday.   Sure, most, if not all of them know English.  They could go to another Baptist church. But hearing the message in Russians, well, it just feels like home.

And God knew that same feeling would happen when all those travelers from other places heard God speaking to them in their own tongue.   Sure, God’s message of love is universal, but the language in which the love comes can’t always be the same.  Sometimes, that language has to be very different
That’s what Don Richardson discovered over 50 years ago in the jungles of New Guinea.  Don and his wife Carol and their 7-month old baby, went there to live with the Sawi, a tribe of cannibalistic headhunters.   Why did they go there? Don and Carol were linguists.  They had come to learn the Sawi language, and to do so with one goal, for the Sawi to have the Bible in their own language. 
And Don got the language down, even though it was amazingly complex.  Sawi verbs have 17 tenses.  English verbs have three.   But Richardson had a bigger problem.  The Sawi idealized treachery and betrayal.  So, in the Jesus story, the Sawi thought Judas was the hero, for pulling a fast one on this dupe, Jesus.  For them, Jesus was a joke. 
But then something happened.  The Richardsons shared how they were considering leaving. Now the Sawi might not have gotten the Jesus message, but they liked Don and Carol.  They liked the medicines they got them, the help they provided.  So, to keep them, the Sawi villages decided to make peace.  For years, they had been at war.   And when Don saw how they forged this peace, it became clear.   A family in one village gave one of their children, a peace child, to a family in the enemy village.   Through this peace child, the peace came.    As Richardson wrote, "if a man would actually give his own son to his enemies, that man could be trusted!"   And Richardson realized.  That’s how the Sawi will get the message.  Jesus had come from God to be the peace child to end the war between God and people.   Richardson called this way of sharing the gospel, a redemptive analogy.  
And with this redemptive analogy, the Sawi got it.   This good news of God’s love came alive for them.   And the Sawis because Christians by the hundreds, then the thousands.  The love God gave in Jesus, that message is universal.  But for everyone to hear it, it has to be particular and personal.  It has to come in a love language they understand. 
But on that day, God didn’t only go particular.   God went universal too.  God used something everyone could see, fire, flames above the apostle’s heads. That’s why the color for Pentecost is red.  It stands for the fire.   And yes, fire can be scary, like with that volcano in Hawaii.  But mainly, fire means warmth, passion, love.   And when God spoke in the love language of each person gathered there, those folks saw what that fire meant.  It proclaimed a God who loved them, right where they were.          
In the church I served in New York, God led us to our own particular way for people to see the love.  In that congregation, we had folks from so many different countries.   We wanted to find a way to celebrate that.  We started with doing a multi-cultural food fair, like we do here.  Everybody loved that.  But then we wondered.  How could we do more to visibly show everyone that in God’s family, every culture could feel welcome and affirmed.   So we decided to hang flags.   We invited people to buy a flag of their homeland to hang in our sanctuary.  Funny enough, we got the idea from a Pentecostal church that had done the same thing.    And it worked.   Just seeing that flag, folks from Trinidad or El Salvador or Cuba or Ghana; the list could go on, felt that God loved them, right where they were. 
And when the church I serve now started flying two Scottish flags on either side of our sign for our Kirkin’ of the Tartans, our celebration of the Scottish heritage of Presbyterianism, our leaders began to wonder.   Could we fly other flags there as particular signs of God’s love to folks in our community?   And we decided.  Let’s try it out.  So, beginning in June, we are.  
And what flag will kick off this new way of reaching our community?  Since June has become the month that honors the Gay Civil Rights movement, we decided to start with the Rainbow Flag.   We did that for one important reason.  We knew that many in this community had gotten a message that God’s love was not for them, including often from other Christians.  And this flag would show our GLBTQ neighbors and all our neighbors, that in this church, we welcomed everyone.   After all, this church has baptized the infants of same sex couples.  This church has celebrated same sex marriages.  We have ordained gay and lesbian leaders.   But if we didn’t speak that message of God’s welcome in this particular way, in a language that our neighbors could hear or rather see, than God’s message of love and welcome would get lost.  
Let me also tell you what our church did not intend by flying this flag in June.   We didn’t intend to make a political statement on one issue.   And we didn’t intend to exclude folks in our church, who have more conservative perspectives on what the Bible says about same sex relationships.  And we didn’t intend to say we are a Gay church any more then we when we flew the Scottish flags, we intended to say we were a Scottish church.   We simply wanted to say to our LGBTQ neighbors that if they came to worship, they would not feel judgment or exclusion here.  They would feel the love of this God, who in Jesus gave everything for them.    And we wanted to speak that universal good news in a language that they could hear and see, and so we decided to fly the flag.  Now in July, we’ll fly a different flag (the American one for Independence Day), and we are asking folks for suggestions and ideas on what flags to fly in that space at different times.  But with every flag we fly we want to share the same thing, God’s amazing love for every human being on this planet.   
When I was growing up, in my Sunday School, we used to sing a song that celebrated that love.  It came from a verse from that Biblical love song, The Song of Solomon.   There, the woman tells of how her beloved welcomed her to his table by flying a banner that proclaimed his passionate love for her.    And in that love song, followers of Jesus found a redemptive analogy, one that pointed to God’s passionate love for you and for me.   That’s the message this story proclaims, that all the flags we fly will hopefully proclaim, that God’s love is for everyone, that his banner over everyone is love.        

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