When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? (Acts 2: 1-8)

For Mother’s Day this year, my oldest kid gave me a little clay planter in the shape of Sigmund Freud’s head.  I’ve planted dill in the planter and it’s coming up quite well – with an amusing little part of plant sticking up at what could be the back of Freud’s head, kinda like a green cowlick.  I love this planter.  I love it for a whole bunch of reasons, but mostly because its a gift that really shows that my kid ‘gets’ me.  They get me enough that they know I’d be totally entertained by the planter, that I’d display the head with great pride and that I could plant some kitchen herbs in it.  I will happily trim off dill when the plant gets high enough and use it while I’m cooking supper; taking great care to preserve the silly green cowlick at the back.

I love that my kid ‘gets’ me.  I love that we can speak to each other and ‘get’ what each other is saying.  It hasn’t always been that way.  Both of us have had to work at listening and learning each other’s ways of communicating and there was a long time of painful attempts at understanding what we were trying to say to each other.  But love won out; our commitment to each other won out and now we can communicate with easy joy.

I’ve been thinking a lot of what it means to speak in a way that people can understand me, and for me to hear Good News spoken in a way that I understand.  I’ve thought about it a lot because this week, besides being Pentecost, is also Pride Sunday.

And while I think the church has made great strides in terms of equity and inclusion, I’m also really mindful that we need to let love win out and speak to people in a way that means that they can understand that we love them.

We churchy people have spent a lot of time trying to change people who identify as LGBTQ2S.  We’ve insisted on change, actually.  We have expected people who speak differently from us to conform to our way of relating to world; a way that insists that ‘valid’ communication is straight, cis-gender and mostly white.  That we can only love certain people, that we can only identify as the specific gender that we have external sexual organs for, and that we can only express ourselves in a way that emphasizes gender at the outer edges of its expression; in ‘manly’ ways, or using our ‘feminine wiles’.

Our Pentecost story tells us that this outlook of change that we are requiring people to conform to is actually completely opposite from what God expects of us.  Our Pentecost story tells us that the Holy Spirit has granted us power to speak in ways so that the other person will understand that God loves them, exactly as they were created and exactly as they express themselves.  Once again, our faith stories remind us that Pentecost isn’t about supposed to be about us and our inspiration; we’ve already been given that incredible gift.  No, our Pentecost story tells us that now, we have the ability to speak into other lives and give them this same gift of love that we were so freely given.

And we will be using the language that they understand.

Not the language that we expect them to speak.

So, this week, if you find yourself tripping over someone’s preferred pronouns, or even, maybe, disdainfully saying that you won’t use the pronouns they ask you to use because it isn’t the language you think is right, I hope you’ll take a moment and remember that actually – you’ve got this.  We were given tongues of fire at Pentecost by the Holy Spirit for moments exactly like that.  Moments when someone needs to have you speak their language.  Moments when someone else needs you to ‘get’ them.  Moments when Love needs to win.

Blessings today my friends, and Remember you are Loved,

~Rev Lynne