Sermons

The Gift of Understanding

June 12, 2011
Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 7:37-39
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

Is there now or has there ever been someone in your life who has truly understood you? Really, deeply known you, “got you;” someone who instinctively understood the words you chose and the meanings they referenced? Someone who understood the things you didn’t say, the nuances of your emotional character, the slant of your brow, the purse of your lips, the message in your posture?

What do you think, has there ever been anyone like that in your life? You might think of a lover, I suppose, but then again, maybe not—a romantic relationship can be notoriously opaque. It could easily, perhaps even more likely, have been your mother, sister, brother, or friend.

Experience teaches that deep, robust interpersonal understanding is extremely hard to come by. Occasionally we can meet another person with whom we have a kind of chemistry where the instinctive understanding is so refreshing, challenging and deeply affirming that we can’t help but seek the company of this person. But it’s rare.

The person who comes closest to deeply understanding me for the longest period of time is my wife, Melissa. We met when I was nineteen, married when I was twenty-three, which now seems like way-too-few years old to understand the depth of another person. In looking back from this distance of time and experience I realize I hardly knew myself. Still, I would report that Melissa and I had a certain penetrating instinct about the other that transcended our limited wisdom. As it was, I was rather clumsy in the relationship in those earliest days, caught between wanting to be known and wanting to hide, wanting to know the other, yet uncertain just how much.

I think we humans are actually quite fickle in our attitude about this desire for deep understanding. We all say we want more of it in our lives. We say we want to be better understood and that we’re willing to understand others better. Nearly all of us would add our voices to the clamor for more understanding in our world. Who doesn’t believe our world needs more of it?

But honestly, do you really want to deeply understand, say, your enemies, and the people that tick you off? Do you spend quality time in that effort? And don’t we actually spend a lot of time trying to throw people off in their capturing our essence in any given moment? Don’t we bluff and pretend and obfuscate and misdirect much of the time so our true nature, attitudes and opinions remain unknown? And we’ll even do this with those we say we love.

There are many layers of meaning in this matter but in all of them—from the personal to the global—understanding remains a tantalizingly elusive goal.

From one vantage point the story of the life and death of Jesus concerns the relative lack of understanding among people. The political and religious leadership of his day clearly thought they knew what he was about and they didn’t much like what they thought they knew. They were wrong about him, of course. They did what most of us do much of the time; they weren’t as interested in truly understanding Jesus as they were in projecting onto him their own self-serving judgments. Understanding him wasn’t their primary or even secondary desire.

And though the disciples give it the old college try, they don’t come off all that much better in the understanding department. It took a long while even for his supposed friends to understand Jesus. This understanding never did come during his lifetime. It didn’t come in the disciples’ initial confrontation with resurrection. As the story is told it took time. Then some fifty days later while gathered together in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Shavuot which commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments understanding broke out.

Right in the thick of the hubbub in Jerusalem during the religious observance that brought all sorts of people from far distances to the city something grabbed hold of the disciples. The author of the story gives a fantastic, somewhat overwrought description of a violent wind filling the open space and tongues of flame appearing on the heads of the disciples. We can imagine a Steven Spielberg confection that would bring this to life. The emphasis would be focused on the theatrical, magical imagery which locates the miraculous in the special effects.

But while this story does concern a kind of miracle, the miracle is at once subtler and simultaneously far more profound than any visual effect could capture. The disciples begin to speak and in their speaking they are understood.

The first half of the miracle is that they are understood even to themselves, that is, they finally have it. The second half of the miracle is that in their sharing, all comers hear and apprehend what they mean.

Whatever else Pentecost might be, first and foremost it concerns the gift of understanding. To underline the point the author presents a wonderful listing of the varieties of ethnicities and nationalities represented in the city at that time. This is one of those lections that our readers dread receiving…often we’ll send along a pronouncing dictionary… But then, over the years I’ve seen many a professional quake at the reading of the scriptures from that lectern, and it isn’t simply a result of difficult words. Instead it concerns the matter of speaking about God, and then, of understanding the words they utter themselves, let alone presenting them in such a way as to be understood by all those gathered.

So our author tells us that Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Capadocians, Pontusians and Asians, Phrygians and Pamphylians, Egyptians and Libyans, Romans, Cretans and Arabs all were amazed and astonished because they were hearing and understanding something about God’s deeds of power.

Of course the disciples’ reputation preceded them. Earlier in Luke we’re told Jesus and his band of merry men were accused of being gluttons and wine bibbers. Here they’re also accused of early morning inebriation, although, how this might account for the foreigners’ understanding goes unexplained. No, on this day of Pentecost, the Spirit wind blew into town as though to blow out everything that clogged ears and minds, all that choked off channels of understanding. Many heard and at least partially understood a message of tremendous hope.

Chewing on this episode it dawns that we don’t spend nearly enough time considering this matter of understanding. We don’t name it nearly enough, we don’t expect it nearly enough, we don’t pray for it nearly enough and we don’t extend ourselves on its behalf nearly enough. Our homes don’t have nearly enough of it, our partnerships and marriages, our parenting relationships, our professional relationships. And looking further out into our community, our nation and our world, examining our own attitudes and biases, what do we see? Is it any wonder that if we take a moment to scan the horizon of our lives, everywhere we look we see a paucity of understanding?

On Pentecost that human problem was overcome for a moment. This overcoming came as a gift. I suppose it came as a gift because left to our own devices, understanding is often a third tier concern, notwithstanding the lip service we pay it. This problem isn’t simply a problem for liberals or conservatives, republicans or democrats, Methodists or Catholics, Jews, Muslims or Christians. The issue belongs to all of us and it’s fundamentally a spiritual issue, a matter of transcendent concern.

One of the reasons I’ve chosen this line of work, this vocation, and continue to stick with it pertains to this issue of understanding. If I believe half of what I preach, what I’m counting on is that the Spirit wind will blow in such a way as to generate understanding despite the general state of confusion most of us live in much of the time. In fact, I’m counting on the Spirit to take whatever words we use and twist them into whatever shape is required for understanding in each of us. I’m counting on the Spirit’s intercession in our life together in here and out there.

And you know, we have reason to be hopeful about this. In this very congregation we’ve had persons from Sierra Leone, Benin, Panama, Haiti, Nigeria, Jamaica, Korea, Japan, China, Germany, France, the Philippines, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Brazil, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand and many, many other places—not to mention the wide array of national regionalized identities—north and south; east, west and mid-west; each with their own cultural, religious predispositions. And then, too, the extraordinary array of former religious identities, all here, all gathered under one roof, hearing the same story about a Spirit which transcends all of our human boundaries and limitations. It is truly a miracle I tell you. That’s not something we could have accomplished on our own.

And that’s where I leave my message for today—leave it hanging in the miracle and mystery of understanding, inspiring the dawning hope that something more, something better is possible. I want to leave you with the expectation of the gift of understanding, an admonition to ask for it and the will to make it your way in our world. Come Holy Spirit…