THE GIFT OF COMMUNICATION

June 7, 1992
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, each of us, in our own native
language?" -Acts 2:8 (NRSV)

Pentecost - the birth date of the Church - the gift of God's
spirit to the disciples and their response...

The story of Pentecost is, to say the very least, strange -
"a sound like the rush of a mighty wind... tongues of fire... men
and women speaking simultaneously in different languages." It
doesn't sound like church to me, at least a Presbyterian Church,
which is a perfect lead-in to the story I tell at least annually,
ordinarily on this occasion, about the fervent Pentecostal wor-
shiper who wandered into a traditional Presbyterian Church on
Sunday morning where divine worship was proceeding decently and
in order. When the minister began to preach the woman livened
up, began to get into it, began to respond with vocal and in-
creasingly audible "Amens" - "Praise the Lord." The people in
front of her became uncomfortable, turning around to look.
Finally an usher approached her and said, "Mam, is there some-
thing wrong?" "Why no," she said, "I've got the spirit." And
the usher, a bit non-plussed, stiffened and said, "Well, you
didn't get it here."

Which, come to think of it, was not unlike what the urbane
bystanders said in Jerusalem when the friends of Jesus experi-
enced, on the Day of Pentecost, a new sense of God's presence, a
new understanding of God's power and the meaning of their own
lives, and a new sense or urgency about the future. "They are
drunk," said the urbane sophisticate at this unseemly display of
religious enthusiasm.

James Forbes, preaching minister of Riverside Church, New
York, was invited to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale
University a few years ago, which Yale likes to describe as "the
most prestigious preaching event in the United States." Forbes,
who preached here last January and is recognized as one of our
very best, came out of the Pentecostal Church and still appreci-
ates how it formd him. His lectures were titled, "The Holy
Spirit and Preaching," - enough to scare off a lot of people.

We avoid Holy Spirit talk, Forbes observes, because we do
not want to seem unsophisticated. Even to use "spirit" language
is to seem somehow to be irrational... Nor, he says, do we want
to have anything to do with a power we cannot ultimately control.
The result is that we are intellectual deists and practical
atheists. Our God is an academic hypothesis... Human history,
our lives, go on under their own power, we think, untouched,
unaffected by power or love or grace beyond ourselves. That's
what atheism is, of course... believing nothing... or believing
something that doesn't make any difference. Religion which tries
to celebrate God the hypothesis, instead of God the spirit, God
the power, is bound to be fairly dry business.

And so, even while we are repelled by Holy Spirit talk we
are, in a way, fascinated. Spirituality is arguably the hottest
religious subject currently. Books on prayer and meditation are
bestsellers and some say that the whole New Age religion phenome-
non with its emphasis on extra sensory experience, transcendental
meditation... is evidence that traditional religion has forgotten
something very important.

But "Holy Spirit" continues to make us uncomfortable. And
our first problem is with this account. It sounds more like what
happens at Chicago Stadium as the Chicago Bulls are introduced
and the lights go down, the laser spots are flashing, the place
fills with fireworks, smoke, and literally erupts in a volcano of
noise and spirit. Did you ever try to describe that to someone
who has never been there? It can't be done, which is exactly the
problem Luke, who wrote the Acts of the Apostle, encountered when
he tried to record it.

The Biblical context is the time after Easter. The friends
of Jesus believe he is alive, not dead. There has been a resur-
rection. The man who wrote this account was Luke, and he closed
his first volume, the Gospel According to Luke, with an account
of two disciples on the road to Emmaeus and Jesus comes to them
on the road, and is known to them in the breaking of bread. Now
what? What to do next?

They waited in Jerusalem and Luke reports that on the Day of
Pentecost something happened that convinced the friends of Jesus
that God's commitment to the world was absolute, that God's
spirit was an energy they could rely on, that God's power was
dependable. And one thing more, one very important thing, God's
gift to them was the ability to speak and hear and understand in
a new way - the gift of communication.

We often get it wrong on Pentecost. What happened this day
was not an experience of unintelligible babble ~ what some call
"speaking in tongues" - but the very opposite. Men and women
spoke in languages which were intelligible to a carefully de-~
scribed multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic crowd of

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people. The Pentecostal gift, that is to say, is not peculiari-
ty, idiosyncrasy, religious oddity, but communication, intelligi-
bility, understanding. Quite simply, there is no more urgent
topic than that.

Think of the time and energy and money we invest in the art
of communication. We read about it; we attend seminars on de-
veloping communication skills; we hire consultants to teach
people in our business to communicate; we retain agencies to
sensitize us to the many ways we communicate as a university, a
hospital, a corporation, a government, with our multiple markets
or publics. And in our most personal relationships we know that
viability, energy, passion and joy, intimacy - depend entirely on
communication.

Hugh T. Kerr, editor of Theology Today wrote an essay,
"Whatever Happened to Dialogue," which noted the irony that we
are investing enormously in learning how to communicate while
simultaneously failing to do it much. It is fashionable on
campus these days simply to shout down somebody with whom you
disagree... ethnic groups remain isolated in racial enclaves,
eating together, rooming together, not talking much to anyone
outside.

"Our current failure to communicate," he says, "is not a
problem of media or technique. Our problem is that so many of us
don't want to communicate - partly because we have nothing to say
to each other, and partly because everybody seems to be mad at
everybody else."

It is not simple. Couples who want to get along better or
develop a stronger relationship always know that the key is
communication and they know something else usually, namely that
it isn't automatic, or simple, or easy; that there is a sense
that the longer you know someone, the more of a challenge commu-
nication becomes. Or perhaps more accurately, the longer you
know someone the easier it is not to communicate, to quit trying,
to give up, and to live in isolated silence, in separation,
alienation - all of which are good synonyms for "hell."

Might the Church of Jesus Christ have something to contrib-
ute to the conversation about communication? I think so. For
one thing here, on Pentecost - this occasion of the Church's
birth - we experience the truth that communication is more than
hearing, more than merely speaking words at one another. In
fact, we ought to know that language is so powerful that it can
divide as well as bring together, destroy as well as heal. If
you have ever been the object of a racial slur, or if you have
ever used one, the ugliest words in our vocabulary - "dago, wop,
hunkey, kike, polak, spic, nigger..." - you know how painful and
distancing language can be. The story of the Tower of Babel is
an ancient way to describe the fractious, divided nature of the
human race. Once speaking one language, the human enterprise is
divided by language, scattered over the face of the earth.

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Pentecost is healing: the coming together in mutuality, communi-
ty of what has been divided; the reunion and the miracle - the
gift is communication.

Words are powerful. One of the first things I read every
Sunday is William Safire's column in the New York Times Magazine
on language and inevitably I learn something about the mystery
and magic of human language and its power not only to reflect but
to shape human experience. Robert MacNeil of the "MacNeil/Lehrer
News Hour," wrote a bestseller, Wordstruck in which he chronicles
his reverence for the power of language. "Spoken words," he
observes, "carry a stronger current to the emotions than the
printed word. Speak to me and you will move me; write to me and
I'll have to think about it." [p. 127]

I spent the last few days of the week attending the meeting
of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in
Milwaukee and was struck again with the truth that much talking
is not necessarily synonymous with much communicating and that
speaking can divide, that words are weapons we use on each other.
In the matter of abortion, for instance, I was struck again that
people who disagree on what is responsible and moral are not
always interested in communicating, but often in winning, defeat-
ing, arguing down an opponent who begins to feel like an enemy.

Pentecost is a reminder that energy needs to be invested not
only in speaking but in listening if the goal is communication...
that you have to want to - stronger still, will to - understand a
person with whom you disagree. It's true globally - at the Earth
Summit in Rio where people from radically different cultures,
economies, life-styles, and stages of development are, according
to one news report, struggling to find a new vocabulary with
which to communicate with one another. And@ it is abundantly and
profoundly true in the arena of your intimate and personal rela-
tionships. Communication happens only when the hearer wills it,
wants it, works at hearing, listening and understanding. Some-
times it's called "active listening." The sense of it is simply
that communication will never happen until both parties will it
to happen. And then a miracle - you cannot prevent it from
happening.

Communication is always a gift, that is to say. Commun-
ication always is a result of community, communion... which is
why the most appropriate way to celebrate Pentecost is not by
ranting and raving (see Forbes) about the Spirit, but by sitting
down at table together.

_ For there, at table, eating and drinking together, we are
engaging in the oldest human ritual of all, communion - breaking
bread together, expressing and creating community.

How, finally, does anyone of us know God, experience comnun-

ion with God, understand God? We are not very good at talking
about it actually, It always comes out wrong. We know God

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because God has spoken and the word God spoke to us was Jesus
Christ... Furthermore, God has done something to keep the conver-
sation going, has given us the spirit whose power is the gift of
communication.

We know God because God is fully invested in the art of
communion with us. What we know and understand of God, our very
best thinkers have always perceived, is because God wills it,
wants it, gives it. Our faith, the theologians have always
taught, is not something we invent, or create, or achieve. Our
faith is fully itself, a gift of God.

Jim Forbes put it in a lovely paragraph:

"In each of us there is a unique unfolding of God-
consciousness that defies analysis because it is
safe-guarded... within the heart of God."

[fhe Holy Spirit and Preaching, p. 30]

And before him, Paul Tillich, philosopher, theologian, so
brilliantly esoteric that his name is synonymous with difficult,
complex thinking, said on this topic, something very simple:

"The Spirit can work in you with a soft but in-
‘sistent voice: The Spirit can work in you, awak-
ening the desire to strive toward the sublime over
against the profanity of the average day. The
Spirit can give you courage which says 'yes' to
life in spite of the destructiveness you have
experienced..." (Forbes, Ibid, p. 74]

This modest meal stands for the most profound idea: that
God, Creator of all, Lord of the universe, is committed to us,
wills to be in communion with us, and that together - in communi-
ty - we know and experience the presence and power of our God.

So let us come to receive the gift. Let us come to table
gratefully, in communion with one another. It is the Spirit of
' God that bids us.

"The lone, wild bird in lofty flight

Is still with Thee, nor leaves Thy sight.
And I am Thine! I rest in Thee.

Great Spirit, come, and rest in me."

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