Xenophilia of the Spirit
Acts 2:1-21 and Ezekiel 37: 1-14
May 31, 2009
Whenever I read the story of Pentecost, which is our text from the book of Acts this morning, I am reminded of one particular incident told to me by a friend. This happened just a few years back. There was a Bible study being held at a certain church and a discussion developed about whether English should be made the official language of the United States. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth and after a while one of the participants stopped the discussion cold with this argument: “If God didn’t want us to have an official language, then why did he write the Bible in English!”
The joke here, of course, is that the Bible was written in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and few other snips of languages from the Middle East. Only in the year 1535CE was the first complete Modern English Bible, known as the Coverdale Bible, translated from the original languages.
There is a tendency in any culture to, after a while, begin to associate culture and nation with religion. And it is stories like the account of Pentecost which should slow down our minds and help us take a long, hard look at exactly what Christianity was, what it is today, and where it could be going in the future.
We catch the stars of our Pentecostal passage today directly after they have chosen their new disciple, Matthias, to replace Judas, who had only recently fallen dead spontaneously. A few days later, the day of Pentecost arrives. Pentecost simply means “fifty”; it was a Jewish festival celebrating the wheat harvest and came 50 days after Passover.
Pentecost was one of three main pilgrimage festivals for the Jewish people, meaning folks from all over the known world would gather in Jerusalem for feasts, celebrations and worship. Jerusalem itself, kind of like the United States today, was a melting pot or mixing bowl of cultures from across the Mediterranean and today’s Arab world. Many of the people living in Jerusalem were not weary travelers, though, but were residents who had moved to Jerusalem previously. They were people “from every nation under heaven” (v. 2:5), we are told.
Luke, the writer of Acts, goes on to list the nations and peoples who were represented in Jerusalem. See if you recognize any: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, Pontusians, Asians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Libyans, Cyrenians, Romans, Cretans, and Arabs.
What is striking about this list is that barring Egyptians and Libyans, no other modern day countries are listed—there are no French, no British, no Americans, no Portuguese, no Nigerian, no Russian, no Indonesian. And the nations of Libya and Egypt that are mentioned have gone through dramatic changes since this time in both boundaries and cultures. No, the first peoples to receive the good news of Jesus were from nations that no longer exist, or ones whose territories and histories have been changed dramatically since the time of the book of Acts.
Indeed, Christianity in the United States leaves only a small footprint in the global history of the Church. And English as a dominant world language even less so. Yet, the temptation is there, because of the broad influence of Christianity in our country to think of ourselves as the divine torch-bearers of Christian faith and doctrine. But we must always remember that the church is broader than one nation or one people; the United States, after all, only has just over 10% of the world’s Christian population.
And one more thing that struck me particularly deeply this week is that “Arab” is mentioned in the list of peoples in Acts. In our country today, “Arab” is all too frequently associated directly with “Muslim”, but these are two entirely different phenomena.
In this month’s National Geographic magazine the cover story is about Arab Christians who are caught in the middle between Israel and the Muslim world’s tenuous and frequently violent relationship. Many times these Arab Christians are some of the few moderate, peace-seeking voices, though many have fled the violence of region in the past two decades. One Arab Christian who lived in the United States for a few years before returning to his homeland had this to say:
"It's funny what Americans think about things. They've never heard of Arab Christians. They assume all Arabs are Muslim—terrorists, that is—and that Christianity was invented in Italy or something. So when you say, I'm an Arab Christian, they look at you funny, like you just said, ‘The moon is purple.’ I had one lady ask me, 'What does your family think about you being a Christian? I suppose they must have been very upset!’”
Indeed, the families of many Arab Christians have been Christians for longer than the United States and most of the countries in the world have even existed. They were, in fact, some of the very first converts to Christianity—found all the way back in our passage from Acts today.
Besides its helpful historical perspective, another part of the remarkable nature of this passage from Acts is that it is without boundaries. Nations don’t matter. Races don’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter. What matters is that the people of the world, regardless of who they are, hear the message of Jesus and develop a faith that is a unifying force bringing countries and people, regardless of their differences, together. It is about ending divisiveness, caring for other people, and ushering in an age of boundary-defying love.
It has been said that the Spirit of God blows where it will, shattering boundaries between people along the way. In the text today we hear these words: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…divided tongues of fire…rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:2-4).
Hopefully these words bring to mind the story in Genesis when the wind or the Spirit of God moved over the face of the earth, bringing substance to a formless world. Or perhaps you recognize this rush of wind in the passage from Ezekiel—the wind that sent the dry bones rattling, the wind that the blew the breath of life into the suffering tribes of Israel. The resurrecting breath of life. A hot, violent wind.
Whenever I hear of a hot, violent wind, I can’t help but think back to my time in the desert borderlands surrounding Tucson, Arizona, where hot, violent winds are the norm more than the exception.
For those of you who have been to the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the discombobulating things that you may remember is seeing the very border itself—a line in the sand, seemingly randomly drawn, separating one continuous landscape into two different countries. The borderlands have made headlines recently for all the wrong reasons—drug trafficking, violence, gang troubles.
Yet there is a vibrant community living on both sides of the border that, in many places, are essentially one ethnic group. Daily, people drive or walk back and forth, between the U.S. and Mexico, for work or pleasure. And even though many times families and communities are split by the border, the borderlands are really a self-contained culture. Part Mexican, part United States, but one border identity.
One of my favorite stories from my time on the border comments directly on this one culture separated by a thin wall. Every year on November 2nd, the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, there is a gathering of Catholic bishops and Christian believers on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. The fence at this particular location is well over the height of a person, though it is made of wire mesh so you can see right through it.
As the special time of service approaches ordained clergy wear vestments of white robes, lay people gather, the border wall itself is decorated in vibrant colors, and two tables are set up, one nudging up to each side of the fence, so that the only thing separating them is the border wall itself. And then a worship service is held and communion is served. Two languages, two countries, but one body of Christ, enlivened by the one rushing, hot Spirit of God.
These moments of common bonds trumping differences may seem distant at times. After all, what national borders can we span a communion table across here in the greater Richmond area?
And unlike in our Pentecost passage today, most of us don’t speak languages other than English (though I would strongly encourage learning one!). But each one of us does speak in a different way. Any one of us who has known another person deeply—whether family, friend or loved one—learns quickly the peculiarities of their own language and communication. And to love someone is to understand them, to speak their language.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the word “xenophobia.” It means simply fear of the unknown, strange or foreign. Its opposite is “xenophilia”—loving the unknown, strange, or foreign. Perhaps this is what is at the heart of Pentecost, and indeed it may be at the very heart of the gospel itself—loving people and sharing our lives with each other regardless of our differences.
Xenophilia can be global in that it drives people to set up a communion table across a border, to see the beauty of diversity in other cultures, to understand the glory faith spoken in a multitude of languages and practiced in myriad ways.
But xenophilia can also be local. No person is the same, and each one of us speaks different languages, in a sense. We react in different ways, different situations affect us differently. And xenophilia helps us to understand our families, our friends, our enemies and our loved ones and the variety of languages they speak. Maybe we can sense a grunt of unhappiness in a friend. May a mumble under the breath tells us something is wrong. Maybe we sense a loved one’s joy in the way they scamper around the house. Maybe we know when they are discouraged and lend a listening ear before they even ask.
In a way this is xenophilia—loving others so deeply that we know what makes them smile, what makes them laugh, what makes them angry, and what makes them their very best, and then helping to nurture their best traits and bearing with them through their troubling times.
Xenophilia is a Godsend. It was gift of the Spirit in the miracle of tongues at Pentecost. And today it allows us to speak in different languages, to understand those who are different from us, and more than just get-along, it can help us thrive together. So may you this week learn another language. May you seek to understand those who are different than you, and may that violent, rushing wind give you the gift of xenophilia. Amen.
About 2.1 billion people are estimated to identify as Christians. As of 2004, about 225 million people in the United States could be classified as Christian. See ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) http://www.trincoll.edu/Academics/AcademicResources/values/ISSSC/archive.htm and http://www.adherents.com/
Story by Don Belt, National Geographic Magazine, June 2009, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/arab-christians/belt-text/3 , accessed on May 28, 2009.
For more information and a short video see http://oneborderonebody.nd.edu/, accessed on May 28, 2009.
