Remembering Our Language, a sermon given in Christ Chapel on November 18, 2004, by the Rev. Dr. Theodore J. Wardlaw, president and professor of homiletics at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Luke 21:5-19

In my household these days, my wife and one of my daughters -- like many of you -- are learning Spanish. Sometimes it's my privilege to help them with it, although it would probably be detrimental to their work for me to help them too much. After all, I don't know Spanish. What I do know is that I need to learn it.

The closest I have thus far come to learning Spanish was twenty years ago, when Kay and I were on week-long vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was one of those budget vacations, and all we had was one of those English-to-Spanish dictionaries, but it helped. It helped a lot. I kept that dictionary close at hand for the first several days of our vacation, but soon, as I gained more confidence, I began to leave it in the hotel room a little more often. I had kind of gotten oriented to things, and had figured out that, even when I was stumped, there was a good chance that I could form a Spanish word by simply adding a vowel to the English word. After all, our languages are not that different; they have the same romantic roots. "President" in English is "el presidente" in Spanish; "hamburger" is "hamburguesa," "telephone" is "telefono." See how easy it is to speak Spanish? So I began leaving the dictionary in the hotel room; and I began engaging people, more and more, in conversation.

One day, shortly thereafter, though, I got into a little trouble. We were in a shop, deciding on our purchases, and, as we were deciding, I engaged the shopkeeper in some conversation about politics. Amazingly, he discerned that we were Americans, and asked me what I thought of Ronald Reagan. I thought to myself, "What's the Spanish word for `embarrassed'?" I couldn't think of it, so I decided I would try my little trick. I said something like, "Yo soy embarrazado." The shopkeeper doubled over in laughter, and I was mystified, frankly. After all, the conversation had been going so well. But it was only later that I figured out that, in response to his question about Ronald Reagan, what I had said to him in fact was that I am pregnant. So it's probably a good idea that I help my wife and daughter with Spanish only under strict supervision.

Not that I'm against learning a new language, mind you. Any of us who have learned a new language know something of how culturally enriching it is. If you're getting ready for a trip to some exotic country where the language is different, there is a certain thrill, isn't there, in preparing for the trip by learning the language? And the truth is that you learn so much more than just the language. For you can't get ready for such a trip without learning, as well, something of the customs, and the traditions, and the history, and the clothing, and the food, and the geography of the country toward which you are traveling.

Now there is a sense in which being church is kind of like learning a new language. This is why Tom Long -- a dear friend of mine who has written some of the homiletics textbooks that many of you have read -- has said often, in fact, that the Christian Church is the language school of the kingdom of heaven. It's the place where one goes to learn something now about the language and the customs and the history and the food of a land toward which we are traveling. Short of arriving at that land, we can only approximate what it's like. We don't get the accent exactly right; we're a little clumsy with some of the words; we try our best to imagine its boundaries and dimensions, but all of these details are something of a mystery until we get there. We sit at table and practice the banquet that we will eat in fullness someday; but language school, after all, is just a foretaste of the land toward which we are traveling. Nonetheless, the church, he says, is the language school of the kingdom of heaven. And at our best, what we're doing in the world right now -- what we're doing in this act of worship right now, is which we are breaking open an alabaster jar of praise until its fragrance wafts up to the nostrils of God -- what we're doing here now is a foretaste, really, of what the Kingdom of heaven will look like in its fullness someday. The church, therefore, is the language school of the kingdom of heaven.

We teach our children to speak that language. When they are old enough, we explain to them the royal signs of our King -- the cross, the crown of thorns -- things which other kingdoms see as symbols of defeat, but which we see as signs of life, and reminders of the final victory of the kingdom of heaven. Even while other kingdoms are tottering, we look forward with hope to the coming of this kingdom, and we teach our children to sing about it. "Jesus loves the little children," they sing, "all the little children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight." A look at the newspaper, with its latest word of racism and ethnic violence and drive-by shootings and more deaths in Iraq, seems to render such a song absurd. But, since it's a kingdom song, we sing that song anyway. It reminds us not of what is, but of what shall be, and it inspires us to live into the customs and courtesies of that kingdom even now.

Moreover, since that kingdom envisions what it is like for everyone to have enough and for no one to be in need, we practice in the "here and now" what it means to share what we have. We practice what it means to embrace as brothers and sisters even those who look like such strangers. We practice what it means to extend the boundaries of love and acceptance beyond those careful lines we are otherwise prone to draw around ourselves. We practice the language and the customs of the kingdom of heaven, even while we're still a good, long distance away from it.

But there is a danger in all of our practicing; and that is that we will confuse the language of the kingdom toward which we're traveling with any one of several other languages that we speak. For the truth, of course, is that we are multi-lingual, and are forever navigating the claims of the other kingdoms that compete for our attentions and our loyalties -- be they nations, or economic systems, or the near -- doctrine in this country of conspicuous consumption that we wrap around us like a birthright, or powers that are seen instead of powers that are unseen. Sometimes we take our politics, for example, and spray some "God" on it, and call it faith language. Did anybody notice that during this recent election season? I did. I was stunned, in fact, by the clever use of that vacuous term "moral values," which served in effect as an empty vessel into which our culture poured whatever meaning it wished; and as near as I could tell, that term "moral values" had everything to do with sex and virtually nothing to do with poverty and warfare and the official dismissal of whole scores of people and nations who are suffering. So we do that with politics.

We do it sometimes with economics. When I was a pastor in Atlanta, the Director of Maintenance came into my office one Monday morning and said, "I want you to know that, night before last, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior." He wasn't a churchy kind of person, and so I was genuinely surprised. I said, "That's wonderful, tell me about it." He said, "Yeah, I was at an Amway convention this weekend, and they had this big revival service on Saturday night." Said, "The preacher is on national television!" He said, "After the sermon, there was an altar call, and I looked at all those folks going down the aisle. There was one guy," he said, "who has a six-bedroom house and a Winnebago, and lots of people working for him, and right then and there," he said, "I decided that if he can accept Jesus Christ then so can I." The more we talked, the more I got the impression that he was expecting Jesus Christ to be his Chief Financial Officer -- to make him rich and successful. So I said, "There are times when accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior is the beginning, not the end, of your troubles."

The temptation, in this world where there are always kingdoms vying for our attention, is to get them all confused with one another.

Stephen Carter, in his book The Culture of Disbelief, has gone many places giving an address to civic groups entitled "The Most Dangerous Children in America." In this address, he tells two stories. The first is about the terrifying day that his five-year-old daughter was caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between rival gangs in Queens, New York. They were separated by the gunfire, he and his daughter, and he couldn't get to her until the shooting stopped. It's a horrifying story, of course, in spite of the happy ending of father and daughter reunited, unharmed.

And then he tells another personal experience, of commuting one day on the train from his home in Stamford, Connecticut, to New Haven, Connecticut. As the train made its various stops, many teenagers got on board, headed for private schools along the train's route. At one stop, a group of girls got on, and Carter couldn't help but overhear their conversation. They were debating which community was the most fashionable, the most exclusive. Was it Westport or Fairfield? A Westport girl would name a person of great wealth in her community, only to be trumped by a Fairfield girl naming a person of even greater wealth from her community. And so the argument raged, back and forth, until one of the Westport girls came up with an announcement she clearly saw as the final, deciding point for Westport. She named a world-famous entertainer who, she claimed, actually lived in Westport. One of the Fairfield girls said Not true! The entertainer did not live in Westport but was only visiting a friend there. She knew this for a fact because she had met this entertainer at her father's store.

Whereupon the Westport girl began laughing out loud. "Your father has a store?" The Fairfield girl, realizing too late that she had said too much, cringed in shame as the Westport girl went on to say, "What does he sell there? Hardware?"

Carter tells these two stories, and then asks his audience the question: which of the two groups of children is the more dangerous -- the gang members or the private school girls? The gang members, people almost always say -- until Carter points out that the gang members, violent as they are, are living dead-end lives and will almost never break out of their neighborhood. But the girls on the train -- attending the best prep schools in the land -- will be going on to the finest universities and then to important careers where they will make decisions that will effect many other people. In the long run, the language they will speak and the attitudes behind that language may in fact be more dangerous than bullets. But here and there, we have used language that all but suggests that those kinds of values got hatched in church. (1)

The temptation in this world is to get all the various languages we speak all confused, until the God-language we use often ends up sounding a lot like a lesser language.

This is what's going on in today's text, if you think about it. Jesus and his disciples were coming out of the Temple, the temple of Jerusalem, the sort of "Washington Cathedral" in the ecclesial imagination of Luke's church. In their corporate memory, at least, this temple had been a place designed for prayer and for meeting God and for learning the language of the kingdom toward which they were traveling, but Luke reports that this temple so dear to their memories had in fact been corrupted -- the rich people throwing their pocket change into the treasury, while the widow gave everything she had. The temple had been enmeshed, somehow, with the trappings of other kingdoms; until its purpose as a language school had been compromised. So the disciples in this text looked around at all the fine architectural details, all the grandeur of it, and one of them made a perfectly innocent comment about how pretty it was.

And Jesus just blew him out of the water. He said, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." A little later, someone asked a follow-up question. And Jesus responded with strange language about wars and rumors of wars, and nations going against nations, and kingdoms going against kingdoms, and earthquakes and famines and plagues and all the rest. Read this text out loud, and it's kind of hard to say, "The Word of the Lord; thanks be to God."

But Luke was hoping that his community would read this language of Jesus and discern that it wasn't so much about times to come -- that, instead, it was about the front page of the morning paper. It wasn't so much a prediction of trials in the future, as it was a snapshot of their trouble in the present. Persecution from without, insecurity within, yuppie preachers with slick, upbeat messages of a Christ without a cross, others trying to wed the faith to the nation and thus offer a patriotic ideology, all the chaos in the world -- it was all there in Luke's day, just like it is in ours, on the front page. And strange as it may sound to us, Jesus was encouraging these disciples not to confuse all these competing kingdoms with the kingdom he was leading them toward. With an eye toward that kingdom, he ended his apocalyptic tirade with a vision not of despair but of hope. "You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance, you will gain your souls." Don't get too attached to all of the symbols of the present kingdoms -- not even the Temple, not even the church -- for our present kingdoms, with all of their power to compel and with all of their power to destroy, do not offer the last word. Don't forget that we are practicing the language and the customs of another kingdom-the one toward which we are headed even now.

The temptation is to confuse all the kingdoms vying for our attention, and to give them far too much power, until we lose sight of the only kingdom that really matters.

I've read recently of a particularly vivid history written of the life of Alexander the Great. In this history, there's a very effective and dramatic re-creation of a memorable day when the Greek army that was following Alexander across Asia Minor was seized by terror and dismay when they discovered that they had marched clean off their maps. The only maps they had were Greek maps, which contained but a small segment of Asia Minor. They had marched clean off their maps, and now the rest was blank space. All they had to go by was what they could see ahead-the towering Himalayas, and God only knew what lay within and beyond those mountains. It was all mystery.

What do we do when we march off our maps? When the temple falls, when all the other kingdoms we care about disappoint us, or implode upon themselves, or change in ways that threaten us? What do we do? Do we give up, go it alone? Or do we march on ahead with One Who has been as well with those who have marched off other maps in the past?

We know, of course, what the Church of Jesus Christ does at its best. It marches on! Marches on, in spite of the kingdoms that fall and rise and fall and rise and fall again. Marches on toward the only kingdom that matters -- that kingdom whose language and customs we fumble with, maybe, but are dazzled by all the same. For after all, the church has not been left with just a few interesting ideas and a few historic old buildings. The church has been left with the ongoing invitation to come out and be a part of a people whose presence, and whose eating and drinking with Jesus, is a sign of that very kingdom. And we've been left as well with a promise: that, through Jesus Christ our Lord, we will indeed gain our souls."

(1) Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 204-206. I am also grateful from Thomas G. Long's treatment of this section of Carter's book in his book, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), pp. 55-56.