A People from Everywhere--May 26, 2026

A People from Everywhere--May 26, 2026

Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” (Acts 2:5-11)

It would have been almost certainly easier if things had been kept in a single language, rather than God's miraculous choice to enable this cosmopolitan crowd to hear the news of Jesus in their own native languages.  But God has never been one to just pick the easy way.  Rather, God has always had a thing for doing things with extravagant love, even when that meant doing something much more complicated and difficult.

These verses from the familiar story of Pentecost, which many of us heard this past Sunday, give us a glimpse of that choice of God's from the very beginning of the community called "church." As it happened, a large crowd of religious pilgrims had come back to the city of Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost (also called the festival of "Shauvot" or the Feast of Weeks), and they had come from all over the Mediterranean and near Eastern world. After centuries of the Jewish people being scattered throughout various kingdoms and empires, they had made lives and homes in other territories but kept their Jewish identity, faith, and worship.  So these people had grown up speaking a whole host of various languages from the places where they had settled--the list here in this passage is pretty lengthy, with more than a dozen people groups and ethnicities represented.  

And if God's intention is to get all of these people to be able to hear the news of Jesus and understand it as they go back home to their families, neighborhoods, and communities, God has two choices, you could say.  One option would be to miraculously give everybody the ability to hear and understand one language--say, the Aramaic that Simon Peter and the other disciples would have grown up speaking.  That would have made things nice and simple, and from then on the whole church could have insisted on a single language for uniformity and consistency. They could have said, "Anybody is welcome to be a Christ-follower, but first you have to learn Aramaic, because that's what the first disciples spoke." Or, the more complicated option would have been to enable everyone to hear in their own native language, somehow, presumably with attention to all the nuances, idioms, and quirks of each language. This seems like it would have set up a messier precedent, because it would have opened the doors to saying that the Good News of Jesus could be translated into any language and could be understood by anybody without making them learn a single common language first.  And from there, the church would have had to find ways to accommodate not just the languages, but the cultures, the backgrounds, the foods, and the complexions of people from all over.  And yet, as you and I well know, this is the choice God makes.  God deliberately brings about a miracle that meets everybody where they are, speaking their own language rather than insisting that they all learn one chosen language first in order to belong.  And God does that, I am convinced, because that's the nature of the Gospel: God meets us as we are, where we are, in order to make us a part of a people from everywhere.

And so here we are, twenty centuries later, worshiping, singing, praying, studying, and talking about the news of Jesus in English--a language that didn't even exist in the first century!--while other Christians in other places speak their own languages, too. Our belonging, and our acceptance, just as we are, comes from God's choice in this moment.  Our favorite hymns, and the cadences of our favorite Bible verses as we memorized them once upon a time, they are included in the praise of the church because from this critical moment onward, God did not impose a language requirement on the followers of Jesus.  Sometimes that choice makes things more complicated for us--just see what happens when you get two different translations side by side at a Bible study, for example.  But from God's vantage point, that's the beauty of the whole thing: God would rather be committed to the difficult work of finding ways to reach everybody than to just take the easy way out of requiring that we all learn Aramaic, or Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, first.  For the sake of reaching everybody, God chooses to set the precedent with all the languages of the Day of Pentecost.

This is the kind of community we belong to as the church. We aren't just the local County Historical Society that retells the events of our particular piece of ground.  We aren't just a religious version of your high school Spanish Club or French Club, either, focused on a single language and culture.  We are a people from everywhere, and there is room for each of us because God insists there is room for all of us.

How might that affect the way we see others whose stories, cultures, and languages are different from our own?  How might it change the way we see our own belonging here in the church?

Let's see how our witness might be widened today because of God's choice to speak in every language and meet people where they are.

Lord Jesus, send us out with your wide vision of love for all people as you have first reached out to us.