Pulpitations: The Universal Translator

My sermon from today's Pentecost service, a day before the provincial election is held. The verse is below, but the short version is that after Jesus' death and resurrection, his disciples gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost. While together indoors, the holy spirit came upon them as a gust of wind, rested "tongues of fire" upon their heads, and they all felt themselves able to converse in a multitude of languages. 

Obviously, my thoughts turned, as they often do, to Star Trek...

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THE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

Language is the ultimate irony - it is the key to understanding and clarity, but also a cause for misunderstanding and confusion. Without a common language, It is nearly impossible to relate to other people.

Even within a single language, like English, one word can provoke multiple responses. Here’s an example: woke.

In today’s reading from Acts, Luke describes the coming of the Holy Spirit, a miracle that allows the followers of Jesus to speak in languages not previously known to them. Even more amazingly, they are heard in the native tongue of each listener who hears them.

Biblically, I find it intriguing that the same God who, in Genesis, toppled the Tower of Babel and confused the builders so they could no longer understand each other, is now helping to gift Jesus’ followers with innate multilingualism. The scriptures abound with these idiosyncrasies and contradictions though. If God has mellowed out considerably since the first book of the Bible, maybe it is due to becoming a parent? Who can say?

Back in Acts though, there is no real explanation as to how it is possible for all these languages to be heard and understood. Those of you who share my affection for science fiction and pop culture will no doubt immediately note the similarities between the effect of these “tongues of fire” and the well-established trope of the universal translator.

Dating back to 1945, the universal translator is largely a contrivance used to expedite storytelling. In the classic Star Trek episode “Metamorphosis,” Captain Kirk uses one to facilitate communication between people stranded on a planetoid and the glowing, mist-like creature preventing them from leaving. Kirk explains that there are certainly universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. The device compares the frequencies of brainwave patterns, looking for recognizable ideas, then provides the necessary grammar.

I mean, this idea is problematic right off the hop, right? The creature in this episode doesn’t even have a brain so Spock has to mod up the translator a bit, but just the idea of remote, inter-species brainwave recognition and interpretation - essentially mechanised telepathy - is pretty far-fetched, even for the 24th century.

Douglas Adams’ book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, takes an entirely different approach by introducing the Babel fish - a small creature that is placed in the auditory canal, It feeds on the brainwaves of sentient creatures speaking to its host, and, uh, excretes a translation into their brain. In the recent Ant-Man movie Quantumania, the main character drinks a mysterious ooze that lets him understand everyone around him, after which an alien blob casually says, “hi, I’m Veb - you just drank me?”

In science-fiction, there are very practical reasons for having a universal translator. If you had to waste time in every episode where the Enterprise encounters a new species, that would get pretty boring pretty quickly, even as a montage. Establishing a universal translator is a quick and dirty answer to the question, “hey, how come they understand each other?” It establishes that the fact they can understand each other is not the most important part of the narrative, and urges you to maintain attention.

God’s gift of universal translation to the followers of Jesus is way less mysterious than what happened back in Genesis with that tower. The message here seems pretty clear: if God’s love is for everyone, then God’s Word must be for everyone. Baptism, not just with water, but with the “living water” of the Holy Spirit John talks about, must become universal.

But whether we are talking about a universal translator, or a lingua franca, like the Greek that the New Testament is written in, or even a single dynamic language filled with context, nuance, classist associations and slang, challenges remain.

Could a universal translator reach across, say, a political divide?

I used the word “woke” earlier, as an example of a single word fraught with multiple meanings and impacts. In a social context, woke is an expression from black culture, dating back to the 1930s, meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” It was used extensively by Black Lives Matter activists after the Ferguson riots in 2014. When white people, particularly young white people, used woke to signal their support for BLM, opinions varied as to whether this was allyship or appropriation.

The Oxford English Dictionary added “woke” in 2017, but by 2020, it was more common to see it used ironically or disparagingly by those on the political right. Equated with “virtue signaling” or acts more performative than sincere, woke has become a catchword for political correctness run amuck (in their eyes, at least). “Go woke, go broke,” is the rallying cry for racist trolls and homophobes who hate the idea of diversity and inclusion upsetting the homogeneity of a culture that is not as familiar to them as it once was, and who review bomb films or games with a feminist protagonist or sympathetic depiction of queer culture.

Now, despite the fact that its harshest critics are unable to even define “woke,” or what it is about racial justice or the acknowledgment of systemic racism that is so terrifying, the word is a battleground.

So let me tell you, being given this scripture to discuss, the day before an incredibly important and probably divisive provincial election has really made me wonder if there is another layer of meaning to be found in the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit.

In two days’ time, we should have the election results. As of right now, it feels too close to call, so that means that no matter what the result ends up being, half the population of the province are going to be upset. Some are going to be sad. Some are going to be angry. And a very small group of that last set is going to act inappropriately.

Some of these emotions are going to carry over into the legislature, but I hope and I pray, I mean literally pray, that the next assortment of MLAs, no matter who the premier is, governs for all Albertans, and recognizes the need to heal the rift between left and right.

And outside the government buildings and riding associations, in the living rooms, and front steps and coffee shops and street corners and bus stops, we all need to talk - not in another language, but in whatever common tongues we have at our disposal. And we have to reach across that divide I mentioned.

And it won’t be easy, because there is going to be suspicion on both sides of this divide, and we will occasionally get our hands slapped as we stretch them across the chasm. But if we do it enough times, persistently, consistently, maybe we can get someone thinking hey, maybe drag storytime at the library isn’t an existential threat to civilization. Or wondering if perhaps capitalism isn’t irretrievably broken and just needs some rethinking, whatever.

But more than talking, we have to make sure our internal transceivers are set to receive and we have to listen. I mean really listen. The light of God is in that obstinate individual, the same way it exists in our stubborn selves! We have more in common with the folks on that other side than we have differences, no matter what side that happens to be. And yes, some of those differences are fundamental, but they always have been, and when we stop thinking in absolutes and start looking for areas of understanding and compromise, that is when Albertans, and humanity in general, have made their greatest progress.

Maintain your principles, but stay flexible, be fluid. Remember that anger often begins out of fear, and fear out of misunderstanding. Be patient. Don’t fight, flow! Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist and film star, spoke at length about this power:

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

In John’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say, ““Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” When we reach out, out of our individual communities, out of our respective bubbles, we become a channel for that water.

We use things like language and culture to define ourselves, but in doing so we often alienate the “other” - and spoiler alert, there is no “other.” By removing the language barrier at Pentecost, God illustrates that language is irrelevant in the big picture and not the important part of the story (just like Star Trek). And just like all the fictional universal translators, it is a storytelling contrivance - for a very important story.

God’s love is for everyone. The message of Jesus is for everyone. We can have that tongue of flame on our heads if we want it, and bring that message and that love to everyone, with our actions as much as our words.

Don’t stop reaching out! It is what God wants and what Jesus has taught us.

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Acts 2:1-21

The Coming of the Holy Spirit

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation 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.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’




John 7:37-39

Rivers of Living Water

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.