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