Pentecost Sunday: Mother tongues

 Pentecost 2026 WM 8 and 10am

Acts 2.1-12, John 7.37- 39

If I were to ask you what your mother tongue is, I wonder what you would reply. My guess is that for most of us here today the answer would be English, but perhaps not all. But we all have a mother tongue –the language we find it easiest to speak, the language we think and dream in. It’s the language we learned from our primary caregivers – mothers or others – when we were young, and it shapes and forms us. But our mother tongue isn’t just English - or French or Swahili. It’s our own distinctive way of speaking that language. Perhaps we naturally use long fancy words, or we don’t. We may use slang or jargon specific to our job. We may have favourite words or turns of phrase which our friends and family recognise as unique to us. Our “mother tongue” is shaped by and reflects the whole of our life experience – class, upbringing, hobbies and enthusiasms. We can speak other peoples’ mother tongues for a while. It’s called ‘code switching’ – adapting what we say and how we say it to fit the situation. Perhaps you have a “telephone voice”? And I can bet the teachers among us have a “teacher voice”.  We all need to ‘code switch’ from time to time, but it’s not the voice that is really us, that expresses who we really are – our mother tongue, our native language. 

Mother tongues are at the heart of the reading we heard from the Book of Acts earlier. Crowds of people have come to Jerusalem from every corner of the ancient world – traders, travellers, maybe some pilgrims who’ve come for this Jewish feast of Pentecost from one of the historic Jewish settlements around the Mediterranean, places where Jewish communities had kept their faith, but mostly spoke the local languages. All of a sudden, we are told, they see a bunch of excited Galilean Jews erupting onto the street, talking loudly about God. And the strange thing is that those visitors from far off lands – the Medes and Parthians and Elamites and all the rest - seem to hear them speak in their own native languages, their mother tongues. 

Imagine you are in that crowd. You’ve come to Jerusalem from some isolated little hill town in Cappadocia – in the Anatolian highlands of what is now Turkey. Your mother tongue is Cappadocian – an ancient language, but not very widespread at this point. The Aramaic language you hear all around you in Jerusalem, the native language of this place, is completely incomprehensible to you. It’s just a babble. You feel far from home, maybe a bit homesick too.

Suddenly, though, you hear people talking your language, telling you about a God who loves you in Cappadocian, like a fellow native. “What does this mean?” you say. And you realise that what it means is that the God these people are speaking about is a native of your home too. He doesn’t just know the vocabulary and grammar of Cappadocian. He knows its hills and streams like the back of his hand, as you do. He knows that funny shaped rock that marks the path down to your village, and the way the tree in the village square has a broken branch where you swung on it too hard as a child. The God you are hearing about is a native of your place. You’ve come here, perhaps looking for him, but you have just discovered that he was at home with you all the time. He’s not just a Jewish God, who you can read about and worship in translation. He speaks the language of your tribe, and more wonderfully than that, he speaks your own, personal language too, that unique tongue which is rooted in and shaped by all the things that have happened to you. This is the God who gets you, who understands you, in a way that only someone who shares your mother tongue can ever do. You don’t have to explain yourself or translate yourself for him. You don’t have to code switch, or use words that feel foreign to you. You can tell it like it is, in your way, and God will hear it like it is because God knows it like it is for you. This God is your God and always has been.

And of course, if that is true for our Cappadocian traveller in first century Jerusalem, it is true for you and me too. 

The Holy Spirit’s arrival in the hearts of the disciples on the Day of Pentecost is described in very mysterious, dramatic terms – rushing wind, tongues of fire, but in some ways that’s the least important thing about this story. Most people, most of the time don’t have that sort of experience of the Holy Spirit, but that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit isn’t at work. It’s that moment when we realise that this “faith” thing has to do with us, that God has to do with us, that this matters to us and the way we live our lives, even if we can’t understand it or explain it – that’s the Holy Spirit at work. I often wonder what draws people to church, why you are all here. Sometimes I ask people straight out. They look at me a bit funny, but I ask anyway. Often the answer is “I don’t know. I just felt I had to be here”. That’s the Holy Spirit at work, God speaking your mother tongue, the language that only you and God can fully understand, making a connection with you which you can’t just ignore or walk away from. 

God is at home in each one of us through his Spirit, speaking our language. That is the great revelation of Pentecost. 

It’s tempting to stop there, and just enjoy that, but I’m not going to, because that message doesn’t just have profound implications for our personal spiritual lives, but also for the way we treat others. 

Over recent weeks and months, we’ve seen the upsurge of what I think is a deeply disturbing “Christian nationalism”, falsely equating Christianity with Britishness. We’ve seen people brandishing crosses as if they were weapons, wearing the flag of St George (who was from Cappadocia, by the way, and never came anywhere near England), and even dressing up as Crusaders, as if that time in history was something to celebrate. We’ve seen Christian faith turned into a tribal marker. But the Gospels are clear that it isn’t symbols which show that we are God’s people. Nor is it words – even the words of the Lord’s prayer. And it certainly isn’t nationality. In Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, Jesus tells us that it is when we see him in the hungry and feed them, in the thirsty and give them drink, in the stranger and welcome them, in the naked, the sick and the prisoner and care for them. That’s what shows that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, causing rivers of living water to flow out of our hearts, as Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel, living waters that bring life and love to others, not death and hatred.

“What does this mean?” said the crowd on the day of Pentecost. And we are invited to ask the same question. What does it mean to know that God speaks my mother tongue? And what does it mean to know that he speaks the mother tongue of every other person on the planet too? Amen 

I will not leave you orphaned: Easter 6

 Easter 6 2026

Acts 17.22-31, John 14. 15-21

“I will not leave you orphaned” says Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. I wonder what images come to your mind when you hear the word “orphan”. Perhaps Little Orphan Annie, or Harry Potter, or a character from Charles Dickens – his stories are full of orphans like Oliver Twist or Pip from Great Expectations. Orphans are common in Victorian novels, partly because there were so many of them, in an age when parents died of many things they would now easily survive. I’ve looked back into my family tree, and found my great-great grandfather, John, in a workhouse at the age of 5 with his older sister. His mother had died of cholera, and for a long time I couldn’t find any trace of his father. At 13, John was working as a farm labourer, then became a navvy, travelling around the country labouring to build the new-fangled railway system – which turned out to be the path his father had taken too, having to leave his children in the workhouse to grow up there, going from one railway site to another, rarely, if ever seeing them as he moved from job to job.  John eventually married and had his own family – 8 children – but they and his wife travelled with him around his navvying jobs, living in Railway huts in the temporary settlements that were built near each work site. It sounds as if he didn’t want to repeat the pattern he had known as a child. 

Or perhaps when you hear the word “orphan” you think of the many orphans there are around the world now in places where life is still fragile and perilous. There are reckoned to be around 153 million orphans in the world, and that number is being added to daily by conflict, poverty, poor health care and displacement. India alone has 30 million orphans.

The word “orphan” is a powerful and somewhat terrifying one. It is every parent’s worst nightmare to think of their children having to navigate the world alone, and every small child’s worst nightmare to find themselves alone without a friendly adult to help them. 

But of course Jesus isn’t speaking to small children when he speaks the words we heard today. He’s speaking to his disciples on the night before he dies. They are grown adults, burly fishermen who’ve sailed boats through gales, tax-collectors who’ve had to deal with the Roman political and military machine, women who have lived on the margins of their societies, and had to develop quick wits and courage. Yet he recognises that when they lose him, first to crucifixion and then as he ascends to his Father in heaven, they will feel lost, bereft, uncertain. They will have to make their own decisions, as they take on the work he has called them to. And it won’t be easy. They will face persecution. They will feel orphaned. 

The fact is that, however old we are, however much we’ve been through, we all come to points in our lives when we realise we can’t face life on our own, when we look around for someone who knows what they are doing or who at least looks as if they do. We may be grown up chronologically, but there’s a small child in each of us, looking for help and guidance. 

“I will not leave you orphaned” says Jesus. What does he mean? The rest of the reading makes it clear. Through his Holy Spirit, he says, they will feel his presence in an even deeper way than the way they have until then. Up until now, they have had to physically be with him to see him, hear him and feel him. But the Spirit of God will be within them, like the sap that rises through the grapevine, like the blood that circulates through their veins, closer than their own heartbeat. And the Spirit will be known too in their community – the Spirit isn’t some personal possession but will be in the love that draws them to each other. 

In our first reading, from the book of Acts, St Paul stands on a well-known debating place in Athens, the centre of philosophical learning in the ancient world. Athens was home to people of every philosophy, every religion and none. He had walked there past a bewildering array of shrines to this god and that goddess and had even found one to “the unknown god” – a way of hedging your bets just in case you’d left some god out of your worship. The shrines were mute testaments to the human longing to reach out beyond ourselves, to find support and care in a vast and sometimes lonely universe. But Paul is confident as he talks to these people that he has found the source of the love that really matters. “We are God’s offspring” he says. We are his own children, known, loved and held in his safe embrace, children of a God who loved us so much that he came among us himself, served us and died for us, and who builds us into a community so that we can share that love with one another, and let it spill out to others too.

“I will not leave you orphaned”. Whatever we face, we do not face it alone, but surrounded by love that nothing can destroy. 

Amen