“Learning God’s Language” by the Rev. Dr. Don Wahlig, May 19, 2024, Year B / Pentecost – Psalm 104:24-34, 35b • Romans 8:22-27 or Acts 2:1-21 • John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

THEME:  Like learning a foreign language, learning to understand God speaking to us is the work of the Holy Spirit. It requires silence, reflection and intuitive spiritual discernment.

Have any of you ever studied a foreign language?  Who has studied Spanish? French? Italian? German? What other languages?

When I first began to learn another language, I was in elementary school. I was part of an experimental program to teach French to fourth graders. It was fun, but I confess it never really took. Then, in my 20s, I decided to try again.  So, I took a couple French courses at NYU. I enjoyed them. Gradually, I got a little better.  But then I went to Paris on vacation and discovered that I was far from fluent. I could order a café au lait and a croissant, but conversation was out of the question. 

When Beth and I went back to France for our honeymoon a few years later, it was pretty much the same. The words people used sounded like French, but, for the life of me, I could not understand what they were saying. Then, 30 years later, last summer, we went to Nice in the South of France. That trip inspired me. When we came home, I was determined that this time, I was finally going to do it: I was really going to learn French.  So, I downloaded a language app called Duolingo. Anybody ever use this? It is absolute genius. I click a button and listen to a sentence being spoken in French. Then I have to translate it, choosing from a group of words, some of which are correct and some of which are not. Thankfully, there is an option to slow the speaker down.  This helps tremendously. But it means I have to slow down and be patient. It also takes perseverance. More often than not, I have to hear the same sentence again and again in French.  And as I listen more closely, only then do I begin to make sense of it. Most of all, in addition to slowing down, being patient, and persevering, it takes repetition. Every night before I go to bed, Duolingo reminds me to spend 10 minutes doing an exercise. They make it fun, like a game. So, I do. In fact, my current streak is almost 170 days in a row. 

As I read our text from Romans this week, it occurred to me that learning French through Duolingo is a lot like learning God’s language through the Holy Spirit. Paul is contrasting life lived in pursuit of the flesh with life lived in the Spirit of God.  The old life leads to sin and death. The new life in Christ leads to peace in God’s presence. The way we move from the old to the new is the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit that you and I received in baptism works in us to raise us from death to life. Think of the Spirit like a divine translator. It helps us understand God’s will for us, so that we can live the way God wants us to live.

In the other direction, the Spirit conveys to God our inarticulate prayers and our inner groans so that God might intervene in our lives to assure us that our redemption is real. The way we know that the Spirit is at work in us is by the fruits of the Spirit. Paul describes these in Galatians. They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That is some list, isn’t it? Don’t we all aspire to those?  So, let’s do something here that we normally do in the Gathering. Let me ask you: Can you think of a time when you felt the presence of the Holy Spirit? 

We’d all like to have more of these spiritual experiences. And we can if we are willing to make the effort to learn God’s language. Just like learning a new language, that means we have to slow down and listen. We have to have patience. Most of all, we have to practice again and again so that we can understand what God is saying to us and how he wants us to live. The problem is that, when it comes to learning God’s language, we do not have a tool like Duolingo. We cannot simply download an app onto our phones to teach us how to hear God speaking through the Spirit. 

But there are ways to learn. And they have worked for more than 1,000 years.  They are silence, reflection, and intuition.  Think of these as the three tools of spiritual discernment. Let’s start with silence.  I think you would agree that we are mostly people of action. We are doers by nature. We want to get things done.  But if we are going to hear God talking to us, we need to get comfortable with silence. A.W. Tozer, one of the great pastors and preachers of the last century, famously said, “If you do all the talking when you pray, how will you ever hear God’s answers?” That is where being silent comes in. To do that, we have to quiet our mind and calm our thoughts.  Breathing deeply helps to slow us down.

Once we have slowed down in silence, the second step is to reflect on what God is doing in our lives. What have we experienced in worship? At Bible study? At work? What kind of interactions have we had with others that strike us as important, or unexpectedly pertinent and relevant? There is an old saying: There is no such thing as a coincidence. There are only God incidents. There is a lot of truth in that. The closer attention we pay to the people and events of our lives, the clearer we will see God’s hand guiding us to do his will.

Finally, when we have managed to be silent and reflect on the events and interactions of our lives, it is time to let our intuition go to work. Our intuition is often the first clue to what God is up to. It means paying attention to hunches.  What it does not mean is that we go rushing off impulsively chasing our gut instincts. We need to engage both our intuitive mind and our rational mind. Unfortunately, we tend to prioritize the latter, and be skeptical of the former. As Albert Einstein once said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

A better approach to spiritual discernment, is the one our Jesuit friends in the Roman Catholic Church have developed. They have a terrific system for reflection that goes back 500 years. It works very well. They see three modes of discerning God’s will through reflection.  The first is what they call “immediate intuition.” This is where God moves so clearly that a faithful Christian will follow without hesitation.   The second mode of reflection deals with the emotions. What are we feeling that leads us to want to act?  This is where the hunches come in. What is our gut telling us? The third mode of reflection is the rationalization of the discernment. This is where we ask “Is this message in keeping with God’s love for us and his desire to redeem us? Is it Christ-like?”

This is the time to bring others into the conversation we are having with God. We need to steer clear of the temptation to be a lone ranger, and seek the counsel of other faithful folks, especially for big decisions. Once we feel relatively certain that we have heard God clearly through silence, reflection, and intuition, it is time to test the message that we hear. This means taking a step in the direction that God is pointing us in order to see what happens. In my experience, once we have taken the first step, if the path we are on is truly God’s will, God will often reveal the next step and the next.  It will become like driving down Carlisle Pike at 2 in the morning with a series of green lights ahead of us. So, it may not be Duolingo, but this is the best way I know to learn God’s language.

And so, what might God be trying to say to you? What is it that God is doing in your life? What direction does God want you to follow? Whatever it is, there is no better time to learn how to understand his speech than today, the day of Pentecost. On the first Pentecost, the disciples were all speaking in different languages, and yet everyone could hear and understand in their own language. That is the work of the Spirit translating God’s will and God’s praise among God’s people. May the Spirit work in you and may the same surprising way. May we experience the fruits of its presence by listening and obeying God’s will for us. 

May it be so.