May 27, 2012

John Bluck

Pentecost Sunday     Acts 2:1-21

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Kingsland last week wondering what to say today, and more urgently what to order to eat. A couple of Chinese women sat down next to me and speaking very emphatically and rapidly in Cantonese, began choosing dishes. They were obviously regular customers and had the inside story on the menu that I needed. But I didn’t have a clue what they were saying and I didn’t have the courage to ask whether they could translate for me.

So I settled for pork fried ribs and whiled I waited read the Herald, which that day, was full of complaints about ever larger parts of retail Auckland being filled with signs that monolingual Kiwis can’t understand at all. They could well be advertising miracle cures for impotency or insolvency that every Kiwi might need. But those of us who can’t read Cantonese or Mandarin, Tagalog or Thai, Korean or Japanese, will never know.

Pakeha, monolingual New Zealanders are well accustomed to not knowing. Those of us whose families settled here before the 1860’s had great great grandparents who could speak Maori, and needed to if they lived in provincial areas. But after the New Zealand Wars of the 1860’s and the land confiscation and racial demonising that followed, Pakeha mostly gave up on being bicultural and Maori, diminished and demoralised, withdrew from the partnership or had to re-enter it on Pakeha terms. It wasn’t till the late 1960’s that we started to see what one nation, two peoples might mean. And it wasn’t till the early 1990’s that this church of ours took bicultural partnership seriously enough to rewrite its constitution.

I’ve just written a book about that journey which will be launched at General Synod/ Te Hinota Whanui in a couple of months. The late Hone Kaa gave it a title which describes the essence of Kiwi Anglicanism for the last 200 years. Wai Karekare, he called it. Turbulent Waters.

As a Maori with a Pakeha wife, fluent in both cultures, living between them, carrying the pain of the inequity and ignorance that still curses our partnership, Hone knew all about that turbulence.

I wonder what he would have said about Louis Crimp, the Act Party donor from Southland, who thinks Maori are ignorant and not real New Zealanders. Or Paul Henry who seems to think migrants are inherently dirty, not fit to live even in his linen cupboard. Maybe with that line, Mr Henry has gone an insult too far, as his ratings slide downwards.

All of this suggests that in our 21st century global village, with technology that lets us talk to and see everyone, and access information about anything, anytime, anywhere; we’re still no better at communicating with each other than we ever were.

It ought to be easier, but it isn’t.

We ought to be able to learn from our history of miscommunication, but we haven’t.

The ability to communicate with our neighbour, especially when our neighbour is a different colour, in a different income bracket, holds a different faith, seems to be as elusive as ever.

Muslims, Christians and Jews did better at living with each other in the 10th century that the 21st.

Wellington diocese has just elected a new bishop with a hair style different from most of us who still have hair. On the basis of his dreadlocks he got media coverage that his short back and sided colleagues could only dream of. There’s a case of difference creating communication. Pray God it will continue.

But for most of the time, difference deters any lasting communication. Our fear of the unfamiliar, our genetic preference to keep inside our comfort zones all works to keep us avoiding contact with people unlike ourselves.

And Christians who ought to know better are as quick as any indoor bowler or rugby player to form a club where the interests of insiders come first.

What we need more urgently than anything at this stage in our history as New Zealanders and Aucklanders especially, is not a balanced budget or a new rail loop or a pokey free convention centre. What we need first is a quantum leap in our ability to communicate with each other across the boundaries of race and class and income and gender and sexual orientation.

And because we still do that so badly, we continue to kid ourselves that we can ignore issues of child poverty, affordable housing and health care, a liveable wage.

Not because we who are privileged are bad people.

We’re simply insulated from the cries of anyone who disturbs us too much.

And the chances of that changing look more remote than ever. In a continuing GFC -global financial crisis – we’ve even got initials for it because we expect it to be around for a while, with an ever yawning gap between rich and poor, it’s easier to turn off the news and shut down communication as hope gets harder to find.

What we need is something outside ourselves, more radical than anything we’ve found, rooted in a confidence that exceeds anything we currently have, something that will work even in the worst of times.

The first Pentecost Sunday is a celebration of exactly that “something”.

It happened at the worst of times. The prophecy it fulfilled from the book of Joel which gives us the language to describe this new gift of communication, has a context much tougher than anything we face. The prophet is lamenting the ruin of his country, just as Luke the author of today’s reading, was framed by the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. The Global Financial Crisis doesn’t even rank with that sort of devastation they faced.

The vines have dried up, cries Joel, the fields are devastated, the trees splintered, the seeds shrink and the oil fails. But undeterred by all that, he launches into the promise of God’s spirit being poured out in dreams and visions.

And exactly what form does this outpouring take?

A gift of communication no less. The ability of Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesapotamians, Judaeans and Cappadocians to make sense of each other, connect with each other, understand and respect each other , for all their differences.

And Samoans and Tongans, Koreans and Chinese, Maori and Pakeha, Southern and Eastern suburbs, Act voters and Mana Party members too.

The Pentecost gift is nothing less than a call to reorder our expectations of how we’re meant to be living with our neighbours, especially the neighbours who aren’t like us.

To live in shalom with them is to live in right relationship and you can’t begin to do that if you aren’t speaking to each other, understanding and respecting each other, no matter how different you might be.

Our vocation as Christians is to be in communication. The two Latin roots of that word are about holding things in common, and establishing community. The opposite of communication is not silence but sinfulness, which is best defined as a refusal to be in communion. 

Pentecost is the story of how the people of God are empowered to be communicators.

They’d been waiting around since Easter Sunday wondering what to do next, bewildered by what this resurrection presence of their crucified leader was calling them to do. They’d done a bit of restructuring, new people had been recruited to the leadership team, but no breakthroughs until this amazing morning when God gives them the courage and the confidence to stop talking to themselves and start talking to the world.

This Jesus story, they’re told, crumbles if you hold onto it for yourselves. It’s designed to be shared and God will help you find the words to tell it if you ask.

Pentecost isn’t a magic signs and wonders show. Ironically, we’ve made it that by letting it be defined by glossalalia, speaking in tongues, ecstatic but incomprensible. The festival of intelligible communication becomes a celebration of incoherence.

A deeper, tougher reading of this symbolic story shows us that God’s fundamental business is coherent communication, and that our essential reason for being human is to be in communion with each other and thereby with God. Even before we are called to be good or useful or holy we are called to be communicators. That’s what we are all about and designed to do..

Our Anglican tradition has known that for a long time, which is why the lectionary for today says “This is a principal feast and should not be replaced by any other celebration.” Only Christmas and Easter get that sort of treatment.

We sort of understood that when we stumbled and fumbled our way towards becoming a bicultural church, knowing that we couldn’t become authentically multicultural in Aotearoa unless we first became bicultural. Twenty years on from that constitutional revolution we are still stumbling and fumbling. Our understanding of each other’s tikanga, our contact with each other, our sharing of resources and worship is often less, not more than it was. If you didn’t read Taonga or go to General Synod or seek out a local Maori or Tongan congregation, you’d be forgiven for thinking Anglicans are whiter and more segregated than they used to be.

It was the Pentecost gift that led this church to rewrite its constitution, but we seem have taken a rain cheque on that gift lately. This Sunday says that gift is still on offer, waiting to be accepted and used. Not only in partnership with Maori but every different group.

The faith we share in the God we know in Jesus Christ, the God given blessings we enjoy have been given to us in order to be given away. We don’t enjoy them because we’re any better or more deserving than others. And the more we share and give away the richer we become. The more boldly we communicate with others who are different the better communicators we become. That’s the promise of this Pentecost festival.

St Matthews in the middle of a multi cultural city, embedded in the contradictions and chaos of Aucklanders talking past each other, telling your story electronically to the world, providing a place of welcome and hospitality to all comers, this ought to be a perfect place to hear and tell the Pentecost story.

I know you like to be known as a progressive church, a church on the margins, a cutting edge church. Consider as well, the title of a communicating church that helps us understand each other, listen to each other, find communion with each other. However unlike you the other might be.

And take this Pentecost story as a personal challenge this week as you struggle to deal with the people in your life you don’t like much, are fearful of, are threatened by. Ask God to let you try again at dealing with them more openly, more respectfully, more hopefully than you usually manage to do, as if all the earlier failures hadn’t happened. The Pentecost promise is that its worth another go.