Since Tim Townsend’s May 10 “Keep the Faith” column and Pamela Dolan’s post following the Archbishop of Sudan’s visit to St. Louis, I have been thinking about the role language plays in religion, particularly in the Christian tradition.

This past Sunday, as we celebrated the festival of Pentecost, four readers stood before our congregation reading the account from the Acts of the Apostles. And when they came to the moment when the disciples started speaking in other languages, they each began reciting the passage in different languages. It was a powerful moment, a dramatic cacophony to simulate the event of Pentecost.

“And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6)

The celebration of Pentecost reverberates with the meaning of history. It represents the dramatic reversal of the tower of Babel, that ancient account of the origins of language. There, the multiplicity of languages devolves into total confusion. Here, the speaking of languages opens us to revelation. The celebration of God’s revelation in any and every language is at the heart of the Christian proclamation of good news to all people.

This is Christianity’s uniquely “vernacular” impulse. It is why one of the first acts of Christian proclamation is the act of translation, why Christianity has no problem translating its Scriptures into languages other than its original Greek and Hebrew while still calling the book the Word of God. But it also results in a kind of cultural translation, all the way back to the first extant text of Saxon Europe (before even Beowulf), the ninth century Heliand. In this retelling, Jesus of Nazareth is described as a Saxon-esque “chieftain,” his disciples as “warrior-companions,” all of them walking amid the “hill-forts” of Judea. Christianity has often spoken in the local “vocabulary” of the culture in which it finds itself.

Because of the event of Pentecost, Christians remain true to their tradition when they speak the language of interreligious dialogue by speaking their own particular language with charity and hospitality, and inviting others into the conversation.

But, of course, different religious traditions approach language differently. As just one example, I know that Islam approaches the original language of its Scriptures very differently from Christianity. So I wonder if our ears are as often attuned to the ways different religious traditions use language, or at least as attuned as our mouths are ready to speak.

Photo credit: Lutheran World Relief