Break out your Red. Red ties, red jackets, red dresses, Nantucket red slacks, Crimson Tide jerseys. It is Pentecost this Sunday. Go ahead, wear your Red.
In Great Britain, they call the Sunday that falls fifty days after Easter, Whitsun (or White Sunday). They wear white on Pentecost because that is the day in England when confirmands join the church.
Here, however, and throughout most of the rest of the Christian world, we pull out the Red.
Red is the color that Christians associate with the Spirit—that mischievous presence that set the disciples afire and tossed them onto the street to have an early morning block party. Red is the tint that we use to paint the third person of the Trinity—the freewheeling, blows-where-it-will gust of God. The Holy Ghost.
For those who like their religion less predictable, less buttoned down, more risky (Where is God going to take us now?), Pentecost promises a commotion—a ruckus.
This Sunday, the ruckus we have planned involves prayers in different languages, officers falling down on their knees, and children with pinwheels. The maintenance crew has even promised us tongues of fire. The Spirit will be stirring. So, come with an open heart. Oh yes, and wear your Red!
Good sermon yesterday, wish I could have been there. As an Esperantist, a Christian Esperantist whose Esperantism does flow in part from the prayer that God’s “will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, I always worry when I see non-Esperantists proposing to use Esperanto to illustrate some thesis or other. In this case my fears were needless; your facts were not far off the mark and your applications were not unreasonable. You exaggerated Zamenhof’s naïveté about the absolute centrality of language as the root of human enmity, but the exaggeration was not egregious.
I wonder if any of the Esperantists in the congregation (you know there were some!) took my suggestion to sing the first and last (not first and second, as the program had it) verses of “Holy, holy, holy” in Esperanto.
Dio benu vin kaj donu al vi Sian pacon.
Anyone Here Speak Esperanto? « Mia Himnareto – My Little Hymnal // May 25, 2010 at 2:15 pm
[...] Anyone Here Speak Esperanto? De Haruo This was the title of the Pentecost sermon (by Senior Pastor Scott Black Johnston) at New York’s prestigious Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The sermon can be heard (or downloaded in mp3) on the church website, and I have a followup comment in the pastor’s blog (under “Red“). [...]
I’m sorry, but I don’t know too much of English language to make a comment about theological issues, and I wouldn’t use this space to do this.
I tried to understand the speech “Anyone here speak Esperanto?”, and something has entered into my brain. About Esperanto, it wasn’t constructed to make a “reversion” on Babel’s event, to eliminate all languages around one and only language. Its goal is more marvelous: it’s just to bring a neutral auxiliary language to people who want to have an international communication without spending so much money or time learning a language, whose laws we lose if we can’t practice or if we don’t live in the country where it is spoken. It’s extremely uncomfortable to me to use English or Spanish to other people, for a lot of reasons !
And, besides, Zamenhof saw that, if the enemyness among peoples come from the lack of knowledgement about other’s culture, it’s strongly difficult to go through this obstacle using any national language, and only a neutral language would be helpful – but, if the enemyness of nations come from other reasons (economics, honour, etc.), there’s no language useful to solve the war that comes from fighting minds.
Thanks for your patience at reading my comment, full of strange combinations of words ! (This is a text made by me, an advanced student of English in Brazil)
Yours sincerely,
Vitor Luiz
http://tinyurl.com/5thAvePresby-eo-il is a Picasa album page of Neil Blonstein’s with a number of good pics of your church (as well as the Israel Day parade that took place on your street on Pentecost). Enjoy. (Neil is the World Esperanto Association’s liaison with the UN, occupying a desk in the Church Bldg. across the street from HQ.)