ON SPEAKING AND HEARING

May 28, 1989
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-13

"And how is it that we hear, eachof us...?"
~Acts 2:8 (RSV)

"Sometime around 1880, a language catastrophe occurred in Hawaii.”
So reports Lewis Thomas in his book, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to
Mahler's Ninth Symphony. "Thousands of immigrant workers were brought to
the islands to work for the new sugar industry. These people, speaking
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and various Spanish dialects, were
unable to communicate with one another or with the native Hawaiians or the
English-speaking owners of the plantations, and they first did what such
mixed-language populations have always done: they spoke pidgin. A pidgin
is not real language at all, more like a set of verbal signals used to name
objects but lacking grammatical rules needed for expressing thoughts and
ideas. And then, within a single generation, a whole mass of mixed peoples
began speaking a new tongue: Hawaiian Creole... with a highly
sophisticated grammar..." How that happened has. been the topic of much
scholarly inquiry. The author of the book Roots of Language, Derek
Bikerton of the University of Hawaii, concludes that the children did it.
Adults could not have - did not have time to create it, learn and then
teach it. It had to be from the bottom up - "the children, crowded
together, jabbering away at each other, playing." [see Lewis Thomas, Late
Nights Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, p. 51-54] It's a
mystery. Professsor Bikerton's proposal is supported by the fact that
identical twins occasionally develop a language no one else can comprehend
but which clearly allows them to communicate.

The development of different languages, dialects and accents within
language is a fascinating topic. Linguists trace the roots of many of. the
words we use back through time and geography to a Proto-Indo-European
language which has vanished, except for tiny remnants handed back and forth
between Germans and French and Anglo Saxons and landing, sometimes, in
slang - so that "schmuck," for instance, is related to "meek" and
originally to the ancient word Meug, meaning damp and slippery.

But the children creating new language by jabbering and playing
certainly is reminiscent of two Bible stories: Pentecost — when people
mysteriously heard the Gospel in their own tongue, and before that, one of
very earliest stories - the Tower of Babel, It is a disarmingly simple
story. But there are nuances and as is always the case with good stories,
the power, the force, is in the nuance.

It takes place after Eden and Cain and Abel, and Noah and the flood,
and immediately before the call of Abraham. It is part of the prologue
to the story of God and the people of God. In the stories of creation and
fall, life in and out of the garden, the flood and the promise, the Bible
is setting some fundamental assumptions about God and the world and human
life. These stories are not meant to be historical narratives. They are
true stories because they help us see truth about ourselves.

So, after the flood people are starting history all over, chastened
and wiser, one hopes. Wandering around the plains they decide to stop
wandering, settle down, build a city, and a high tower, "Come, let us
build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us
make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the
whole earth." That is not a reference to the Sears Tower or the new
preposal to build the world's tallest skyscraper in the South Loop, but it
does sound familiar. .

God is the scatterer. God's intent here is for people to move out,
settle the whole earth, become different. God is a pluralist. God does
not think much of racial and political and social homogeneity, it seems.
But the people do, which should not come as a surprise. "Let's stick
together, build a city with a wall around it, pass a few restrictive
covenants, organize a few exclusive clubs, keep 'them' out." The tower is
a symbol of their self-sufficiency, their pride... Now the nuance. This
story has been used to criticize the Promethean tendencies of humankind to
build bigger and better and fly faster and higher and to propose a kind of
modesty and mediocrity as God's plan. In an overly simplistic sense it has
been used to attack cities as godless and skyscrapers as symbols of sin.
But the real sin here is not ambition, the reach for the stars. The real
problem here is that people are resisting the will of God to spread out
over the earth and become different peoples with different cultures and
languages. Instead the people are trying to secure their future, their
safety and well-being by clinging together, remaining exclusive.

And so God surveys the situation: sees the tight city with its proud
tower and says, in essence, "This won't do. This won't do at all. I mean
more than this. This exclusivity and racial purity and cultural conformity
is boring.” And so God does what they won't do - scatters them and gives
them languages so that they will not be able to stick so tightly together
but rather become a beautiful kaleidoscope of color and custom and religion
and culture.

What the Bible does with this story is point to a truth about the
human condition and God's will for creation. It is not an effort to answer
the question of how human language developed. The truth is that there are
many cultures, and that language is one of the most important expressions
of that magnificent pluralism. The truth is that language also divides and

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that the future hope of the world depends on being able to communicate,
establishing a common language of sorts, a new way of speaking and hearing.

In the meantime we know the power of language to heal and to divide.

If you have ever traveled in a country whose language you could
neither speak nor understand you know how distancing language is. It is an
experience of powerlessness and weakness and some fear to not be able to
communicate, It is demeaning and exhausting to have to struggle to buy a
bus token or order a meal or ask for directions. And it is absolutely
wonderful when someone says, "Let me help. I know English. I speak your
language.”

twenty-five years ago we learned how language was part of a pattern
of cultural racism, and that claiming not to intend to be racist or
prejudiced made it no less powerful... Language, we learned, not only
expresses a culture, it helps to form and shape a culture. And so we
changed the language and it was awkward at first to replace words we had
used all cur lives.

At the heart of the ongoing discussion of inclusive and gender

exclusive language is the truth that language is powerful. It can heal but

it can also divide.

The Biblical story suggests that part of what is wrong with us has to
do with the language, speaking and hearing. And if you have ever been the
object of, or have used a racist slur, an ethnic insult: dage, wop, hunky,
polak, spic, nigger, kike... you know how powerfully painful, how
distancing, language’ can be.

We have trouble, not with the technique of language but with its

_ spirit. Hugh T. Kerr wrote a wonderful article one time. "What Ever

Happened to Dialogue” and noted that our inability to communicate is
epidemic in spite of the energy we invest in the project. Kerr cites the
unhappy incidents of students shouting down speakers whose political views
differ from their own, and the sad but now rather common phenomenon of
minorities living, eating and socializing together on campus, for mutual
support - with the result that fewer people are talking to one another
across racial barriers than ever.

"The current failure to communicate," he observes, “is not a problem
of communication as if it’ could be solved by discovering better media. We
have more media than we know what to do with. Our problem is that so many
of us don't want to communicate in the first place, partly because we have
nothing to say to each other, and partly because everybody seems to be mad
at everybody else."

We are, it would appear, emerging from the era designated "The Me
Generation” or the "New Narcissism," the time when greed became socially
acceptable and blatant selfishness an admirable trait. One of the nasty
by-products of that mentality was a simple refusal to listen to anyone else
or even to acknowledge that there might be truth and goodness bigger than
the dimensions of my own ego, that in fact there just might be something of
value someone else has to say to me.

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No one said it with more nastiness than Fritz Pearls:

"I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations.
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I:

If by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped."

When that was carefully typed out and scotch-taped to your

teenagers's bedroom door, you knew you were in trouble, or at least

entering a new stage of family relationships.

A century ago Ibsen. wrote a play about a mental hospital. The
director says, “Here we are ourselves with a vengeance. Ourselves and
nothing but ourselves. We go full steam through life under the pressure of
self. Each one shuts himself up in the casket of self, sinks to the bottom
by self-fermentation and seasons in the well of self. No one here weeps
for the woes of others. Ne one listens to anyone else's ideas." [see
Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny, p. 143}

I think we know in a personal sense that our ability to communicate
very much reflects the condition of our spirit. I think we know that
communication between two people may be technically correct but utterly
empty if there is no dimension of spirituality in it. I think we know that
communication is communion, that there is grace in it and power to heal and
give life. And I think everybody knows by now that communion and
communication happen when there is a mutual investment in listening as
there is in speaking: when two people covenant together and listen.

We know that to love another person is te listen to him or her. To
be loved is to be heard. Joe Sittler wrote an essay on marriage one time
that cited a Flannery O'Connor short story about an old couple who have
lived all their lives in a small cabin overlooking the Appalachian
Mountains. "They were sitting there - both very aged people - in their
rocking chairs on a spring day. The man said, ‘Well, Sarah, I see there's
still snow up there on the mountain.' Now he knew there was snow on the
mountain every year. She knew there was snow every year. So why does he
have to say it? Because that to perceive that, to know that at times there
is snow and at times there is not snow — this was part of their observation
of an eternal rhythm which made their life together. In marriage you say
the same things over and over, you inquire about the same“people. And this
is ho-hum in one way. But it is breathtaking in another." {Grace Notes
and Other Fragments, p. 18-19}

There is a word here for the world, particularly on this Memorial Day
weekend. It is a day to remember those who have died in the service of
country. It is a reminder that we live in an imperfect world where the
inability of human beings to live together, to communicate across
boundaries of race, nation and class, is expressed in war making and
planning and preparing. It is a day to give thanks for the selfless
sacrifice of some and to pray fervently that it not happen again. It is a
day to pray for world leaders and to give thanks that the mentality of the

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Tower of Babel, the lie that security can be guaranteed by higher towers,
stronger walls, less communication, more powerful bombs and faster
missiles, seems for the moment to have receded. It is a day to praise God
for what has been said and done by Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Bush and to pray
for their health, courage and strength.

"How is it that we hear?" ask the people on the day of Pentecost
when suddenly this wonderfully diverse group of people begin to hear, each
in his/her own language... The miracle of Pentecost is that people who
could not communicate, now can, now hear something they recognize.

The enchanting possibility of the old story is that the many nations
with many languages, all loved and intended by God, remember common words,
words that allow them to be diverse, but also one in love .and trust and
peace. .

There are occasions when it breaks through.

Robert Fulgham introduced a story about a Russian soldier by
repeating American stereotypes... "Russians are a rotten lot, immoral,
aggressive, ruthless, coarse, evil, respansible for most of the troubles in
this world. They're not like us."

But sometimes we stumble on to the forgotten language of our
humanity: sometimes we remember the common tongue. Nicolai Pestretsov,
thirty-six, was stationed in Angola where his wife had come to visit. Ina
raid by a South African military unit four of his comrades were killed and

he was captured. The South African military communique read: "Sgt.
Pestretsov refused t6 leave the body of his slain wife, who was killed in
the assault of the village," almost as if they couldn't believe it. "He
went to the body of his wife and would not leave it..." Why, asks

Fulghum, didn't he run for it? How strange. "What made him go back? Is it
possible that he loved her... that he wanted to hold her in his arms one
last time?,.. that he felt the stupidity of war... that he didn't care what
became of him now?"

Fulghum says, "Here's to you, Nicolai Pestretsov, for reminding us...
You kept the faith, kept it bright, kept it shining. Bless you." [All I
Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p. 31-33]

That's the common language that transcends the city wall or nation or
class or race,

Lewis Thomas returns to the proposition that children create language
with a wonderful scenario which sounds almost like a Biblical version of
the peaceable kingdom.

"The adults and wise elders of the tribe, sitting around a fire
speaking a small~talk pidgin, pointing at one thing or another and
muttering isolated words. No syntax, no real ideas, no metaphors.
Somewhere nearby, that critical mass of children, jabbering and shouting at
each other, their voices rising in the exultations of discovery, talking,
talking, and forever thereafter never stopping." [Thomas, op. cit., p. 54]

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Don't you suppose that's what Pentecost was like... that happy,
exuberant mass of children, creating new language, new communication,
speaking, but also, miraculously, hearing?

The Christian religion proclaims that the Spirit of God makes that
happen and that the medium becomes the message. For what is being said and
now heard and what will heal divisions and bring new life and wholeness and
salvation is the most incredible word every spoken, a word for which there
is never a vocabulary big or eloquent enough, yet a word which once heard
must be spoken over and over again and sung and danced and shouted in the
streets in every language ~-

God is love...
God's love has come in Jesus Christ...
God's love lives...
God's love promises peace...

And you and I, together, have a brand new language with which to love
each other and to tell the world about the one who loves us all.

All praise to Hin...

Amen.

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