Theme:  The Holy Spirit, poured out on the church, opens pathways of communication, enabling the Gospel to break through the multiple barriers to our hearing. Barriers are also broken down to enable us to to communicate with one another and with God.

A lot of the big church fights of the last thirty years or so have been over how we understand the role of the Holy Spirit, and especially over the place of what is know as “the gift of speaking in tongues”.

It is somewhat ironic that the reactions to a story that is in essence about the breaking down of barriers to communication, should themselves become major barriers to communication between Christian peoples. I have no intention of trying to sort out the disputes this morning. I do hope that what I have to say will not exacerbate any of them, but might help open some lines of communication between us and God and us and each other.

Whatever else might be said about the story from Acts of the church’s first Day of Pentecost, the one thing that is quite clear is that the primary miracle that the Spirit of God enables here is one of breaking through the barriers of communication. People who could not understand because of language barriers, hear and understand, and God’s message breaks through to people who otherwise could not have heard it. God broke thru the sound barrier!

Whether the miracle happens in the voice box of the speaker or the eardrums of the hearer or both doesn’t matter (both are implied by the text), it is a miracle, something that could not have happened if God’s Holy Spirit had not intervened and allowed something new and different to happen. And it would appear from what Jesus said in the gospel reading that this is pretty much one of the standard areas of business of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “The Advocate,” (there’s a funny Greek word there, parakleitos, which is various translated as advocate, counselor, helper, comforter), “The Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, will testify on my behalf, and you also are to testify.” Testifying, getting the truth across, communicating. This is the task of the Spirit and our task, in response to the Spirit.

And when it happens it is miraculous, because there are so many barriers to genuine communication, especially when it comes to communication about the deep issues of life and meaning and spirit. Jesus spoke many times about the difficulty of getting the message through. He usually used the metaphor of blindness for it, describing his mission as opening the eyes of the blind, and although this was sometimes a physical blindness, most of the time he was dealing with those whose eyes were OK but who just could not or would not see. As he said to those who believed they were in the know in a passage we read just a few weeks a go, “If you were blind, you’d have an excuse, but since you claim you can see, you stand condemned.”
We have story after story of Jesus trying to get his disciples to understand what he was on about, only to have them misunderstand again and again. Communication, especially once you get beyond the superficialities, is a tough job with a relatively low success rate, and even Jesus had only occasional breakthroughs.

No doubt every one of you knows the feeling of trying to make your point to someone and you can see that it’s just not getting through. Am I right? You know the sense of frustration that rises up and up as you try different tacks in an attempt to get them to see it your way, and nothing seems to work. Or perhaps you know that sinking feeling when you’re dealing with someone who has such a negative view of themselves that they seem to be able to manufacture an insult out of anything you say, so when ever you have something to say you spend about half an hour planning your line so as to eliminate any possible way they could turn it into a put down, but they still find a way. Another communication failure.

The barriers are so many, when you think about it, it’s a wonder we manage at all. Popular books like the “Mars and Venus” series are built on the premise that we speak different languages but we don’t even know it. Psychologists often talk about the way we tend to hear every thing through the filters of our previous experience. They reckon it doesn’t matter what you say to me, I’ll only hear the stuff that I have categories for in my head, and so what I think you meant will be a sort of combination between what you actually said and what I already believed or wanted to hear.
What I want to hear acts as a filter too. What I perceive as being in my own interests. Most of us are quite good at filtering out information that threatens our comfort zones or calls for change. All of you who’ve even been in psychotherapy can no doubt attest to how much effort it takes to stop defending yourself and start actually listening to things that call you to make significant changes. Am I right? Do you know that experience?

Whether it’s pride that refuses to acknowledge that I might not be up to standard, or fear that would rather stay in familiar places even if they’re the pits, or individualism that refuses to entrust myself to anyone else, or self-preoccupation that can’t afford to look at how my behavior impacts on others, or image consciousness that couldn’t face the world without the trappings, the nice things, the fashionable accessories. Whatever it may be, every one of us has things that block our ears and refuse to allow the Word of God through to our core where it might challenge and cut and rearrange. Every one of us has areas where we’ve inoculated ourselves to the claims of Jesus Christ on our lives, and nothing short of a miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit will open up our ears and enable us to hear God’s word in our own tongue.
We need flames of fire to fall on us and burn through the barriers before anything is going to get through. We need the Holy Spirit to come like a howling wind, blasting the cobwebs out of our hearts and minds and breathing new life into our world-weary souls. And when that happens, when the word gets through, either because the Spirit gave you different words or gave me opened ears, then that’s a miracle, and that’s the kind of business God is in.

On the day of Pentecost, God broke through the sound and language barrier… and all peoples understood the language of discipleship, love, forgiveness.

Condensed and edited from a sermon by Nathan Nettleson,
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