Our biggest handicap: The #1 thing life in Kittson Co. lacks

Scripture: Acts 2:1-21

            When we talking about scripture, one of the things that is very difficult to understand is the way that languages live and breathe and move. It’s why it is notoriously difficult to pin down meanings of words and why I sometimes talk about Greek and Hebrew until your eyes roll back into your skull. But this is a side effect of speaking only a single language in our day to day routines. Those of us who speak English in an Anglo-centric world are slowly losing the ability to describe things, and this is in no small part because we don’t have to work very hard to explain what we are talking about.

            You see this with texting. Why write “I don’t know” when “idk” will do? Why waste your time with “OK” when “k” will do? Why use four characters when you can use two? Why spell out a word when you can use only the consonants or make it into an acronym? Our language is dumbed down in this way, but texting is only a symptom and not the real disease. We are thinking in narrower and narrower terms because our way of seeing the world works for us—we don’t have to work at it. We are handicapped by our lack of exposure to different ways of relating to the world, and this is true in Hallock, Minnesota, but it’s also becoming truer and truer in many other, supposedly diverse places.

            All of this dulls our reactions to the incredible event that was Pentecost. The miracle at Pentecost was not that a group of people all spoke the same language—that’s a misunderstanding that only a dominant group who speaks a single language could make. The miracle at Pentecost was that a group of people spoke in a whole wide variety of languages and people heard them each in the native tongue of each, which is far cooler than everybody picking up the same boring language, because in a multitude of languages meaning deepens and we come to a greater understand of what a thing is. Maybe for the first time in these peoples’ lives they were able to understand concepts that had remained abstract. For the first time, the people could understand their neighbor fully—not in their own language but in a language that deepened and widened their own.

We use a lot of words in the church that are beautiful but also woefully inadequate in English. Take, for example, two English words: grace and love. These words mean something to us, but if we only consider our cultural understanding of these concepts we will miss a ton of depth. In Greek, the word for grace is “charis” which is a word that combines three ideas: grace, favor, and kindness. In Greek, three ideas converge in one word, widening our view of it. Now, imagine if you were hearing about grace not in two languages but in twenty, and imagine how your conception of grace would deepen because of the wisdom of those voices.

            The same is true of love, because in fact there are three ancient Greek words for love: philia, eros, and agape. Each of these words express a different kind of understanding of what love is: philia is the love of friendship, eros is the erotic or physical love, and agape is the spiritual, sacrificial love. It’s only when you know this that exchanges like the one at the end of John’s Gospel make sense when Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” He’s asking “Do you agape me?” and Peter responds “Yes, I love you.” Yes, I phileo you. Jesus asks again, “Peter, do you agape me?” “Yes, I phileo you.” Suddenly it’s obvious why Jesus repeats the question three times until Peter responds, “Yes, I agape you.” In English we can only guess that Jesus is being unnecessarily repetitive; in Greek our eyes are opened.

            It’s the same way whenever we encounter a different way of thinking. I’ve said this many times, but here’s the honest to God truth: I love this part of the world in northwestern Minnesota; it is filled with fantastic, loving people, who care about one another deeply and you are part of a great community, and none of you have yet ridden me off the road while I’ve been biking around or shouted for me to get on a bike path (because, well, there aren’t any), so I’m very thankful for that and for all of you. But the one handicap that you have in this part of the world—the one thing that I see as limiting you and your children—is a complete lack of diversity. This handicaps us not only because of the prejudices that arise from a lack of experience with people who look and act different from us, but also because it means our children are not exposed to different ways of thinking and that dulls their ability to make sense of the world. To not experience the wider world makes it easier to feel boxed in to one way of thinking and feel as if there is no way out; it contributes to the prevalence of depression and anxiety and all the other mental health issues that we see in this area. We don’t consider enough how much of a handicap it is to walk through the grocery store and hear only English and see only faces that look like ours.

            The miracle of Pentecost was not that everybody thought the same but that everybody experienced the completely different thoughts of others. When we hear a voice we do not understand and we choose to learn from it, then we widen our understanding of the world God created—the world we live in. This is why we take our youth on mission trips outside of the county. Yes, there is plenty of work to be done here, and mission should happen at home, but the experience of leaving what is familiar and entering into a culture we do not understand is absolutely critical to discover more about ourselves, which makes it all the more important that mission does not stop at the end of high school; it should be a regular, necessary part of the Christian life.
            This is so important not just for spiritual reasons; it is also important because spending too much time in our comfort zones is slowly killing us. I counsel an alarming number of people with anxiety issues and many of these issues involve a feeling of being trapped and afraid of leaving our comfortable little boxes. We assume that new experiences will only increase our anxiety, but in reality an anxious person will create new anxieties out of whatever is normal, forever shrinking their comfort zone until there is nothing left and every situation is overwhelming. All of us have this same disorder to some extent—it’s a natural part of being human. We have to train ourselves to leave our comfort zones in order to discover what God might do with us in the midst of a world that thinks differently than you and me. You can’t know why you are the way you are until you discover what is it that makes you distinct—both the good and the bad.

            I realize this is counter-intuitive for the ancestors of people who came to America for a new life, learned a foreign language, and sought to assimilate into society. I know we tend to expect the same of those who come and live with us—that outsiders learn to speak like us—but today we find ourselves in an entirely different situation than our ancestors faced. As the dominant culture, speaking the dominant language in the western world, we need to experience different ways of thinking because our one way of thinking blunts our creativity, handicaps our children’s education, and makes our faith life boring.

            Nothing could be more of an affront to the Spirit than to expect others to conform to us, rather than letting our inhibitions go. Most of us can't even imagine letting our inhibitions go without alcohol being involved, which is at least biblical, because neither could the onlookers on that first Pentecost. They could not imagine that the joy of being filled with the Spirit could be from anything other than drunkenness. How often do we think the same when we see people experiencing a culture different from our own? We assume drugs or alcohol must be involved.

But maybe that’s just another example of our cultural handicap to one way of thinking. Maybe, if we experienced something different, we would be less scared of talking about the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit would not be some unapproachable, indescribable force. Maybe we could stop using the Spirit language as a kind of power play—we could stop saying that “the Spirit told me to do this” or “the Spirit told me to do that” which is really only shorthand for saying, “I’m going to do this no matter what you think and I’m going to use God as the excuse.” Maybe—if we actually left our comfort zones—we would discover how the Holy Spirit is moving us back home. Mission away always leads back home, and it changes us for new ways of service in the world.
One thing we rarely consider is that Pentecost could not have happened if the people of all those nationalities were not gathered together already. It required that initial jumpstart on the part of people seeking out those different from themselves. We need to be willing to take that scary first step. The longer you are isolated in one culture—in one way of thinking—the scarier it is, but it also becomes more and more necessary, because one way of thinking may seem like a comfort, but it sets us up for disaster. It sets us up for a long and painful decline. It sets us up for re-creating what has gone by, even while the vision of our ancestors has been for a better life ahead. It’s harder to imagine what that might be than to look back nostalgically on what was, but it’s also what we are called to do: to seek out the stranger and not to make that stranger like us, but to learn from that person a new way, a new culture, and a new language—a new way of seeing the world. This does not require learning Spanish or Mandarin or Greek—not all of us are in a place of our lives to do that—but it does require leaving our boxes to discover a new way of living, to talk with somebody who is different from us, and to have the wisdom to learn from the one who thinks differently from you or me.

The Holy Spirit is a scary, scary beast to those who are concerned with the status quo, because it is always about doing a new thing. It is always pushing us out into the world to widen our view. “Humans have point of view,” writes Madeleine l’Engle, “God has view.” The more we enter into the world, the more we begin to see that our little part of it isn’t so big and important. At first that is scary. At first that makes us want to see nothing more of it, to retreat home and never leave again. But a little further afield we begin to discover that, in a world much bigger than we imagine, we matter precisely because of our uniqueness, and we can only discover our unique voice when we have heard the voices of others. We need one another to strengthen our faith, even as we need one another to give us perspective that is so badly needed. We tend to think that mission is about us going out into the world and offering something that the world needs, but more often mission is about going out into the world and discovering what it is that we need that we never could have seen at home.

Then, the irony is that we return to our lives and begin to see what we needed all along. That’s the Spirit at work—not speaking to us in voices that are familiar but through voices that sound different and scary. Nobody ever said it would be easy, but by the grace of God we may discover the wisdom in those voices yet.