May 24, 2026

“Jabberwocky”

“Bereshit, bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et-ha’aretz.  Veha’aretz hayatah tohu vevohu, vehosheck al p’nai tahom.  Veruah Elohim mirahefetz al-p’nai hamayim,”

“En arche ein halogos, kai halogos ein pros ton theon, kai theos ein halogos.”

Speaking in tongues?. . . or jabberwocky?

“Twas brillig and the slithy toves

did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

all mimsy were the borogoves,

and the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the jubjub bird, and shun

the frumios bandersnatch!”

Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky,” from “Through the Looking-Glass” sounds like nonsense – almost as incomprehensible as those earlier words I read.  They’re simply Bible verses read in their original languages, Hebrew and Greek.

Foreign languages sound a little like Jabberwocky at times.  We’ve all had the experience of standing in the check-out line at the supermarket and overhearing a couple from some other country speaking “who knows what language.”  It sounds like gibberish.  And they speak it so quickly.  You wonder how they can possibly understand each other.  Of course, two people speaking English also sound, to foreign ears, like they are spitting machine-gun-fire gibberish at each other.  Language separates us, and makes other people seem strange.

Some people believe that on Pentecost, as you heard in this morning’s scripture, when the Holy Spirit rested on the apostles, and they spoke in foreign “tongues,” that it was an experience of some strange, other-worldly mumbo-jumbo – jabberwocky.  If that had been the case, we wouldn’t be celebrating Pentecost today, because nothing out of the ordinary would have happened.  The whole incident would have been quite unremarkable.  Some of the folks standing around would have given each other knowing glances, as if to say, “Foreigners!”

With jabberwocky, non-communication is the norm.  It has been the norm as far back as humanity can remember.  It all started (so the story goes) when a bunch of folks living on the plain of Shinar decided to make a name for themselves and build a tower into the heavens.  God became terribly concerned that they were getting too big for their britches, so God came down to earth and “confused” their language.  We all know how the story comes out: they were scattered over the face of the earth and the great tower remained incomplete.

The legend of the tower of Babel is the story of the status quo.  It’s the familiar story of how non-communication – jabberwocky – leads to alienation and defeat.  It’s the usual pattern, a pattern that was overturned at Pentecost.  Pentecost is the flip-side of Babel.

Pentecost doesn’t have anything to do with incomprehensible gibberish – no strange sounds coming out of people’s mouths that required some specially gifted linguist to translate.  The account in Acts, Chapter 2, says that “each one (among those who were gathered from many nations) heard them speaking in their own language.”  The point of Pentecost was clear communication!  And if the church was founded at Pentecost, it was founded on clear communication.

The familiar story of Babel was entirely rewritten.  At Babel the operative principle was ascendancy of self, the characteristic phenomenon was “jabberwocky,” the relational force was disorganization and chaos, and the end result was powerlessness.

At Pentecost the operative principle was the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the characteristic phenomenon was clear communication, the relational force was unity, and the end result was power – the power of devotion, the power to become the Church of Jesus Christ.

It is power that was discovered at Pentecost, a power we have long needed.  Because so many of our days are lived in the midst of jabberwocky.

Men and women seem always to be speaking jabberwocky to each other.  I don’t know if it’s our genetics or our upbringing, but we seem to be stuck speaking different languages.  Men are likely to say things like, “You want to know what I’m feeling?  I feel fine.  That’s how I feel.”  Women, on the other hand, say things like, “So, what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you?  And I suppose if it doesn’t make sense to you then it wouldn’t make sense to anyone, right?”  A lot of the time in marriages, one of us is speaking tigalic, and the other one is speaking Swahili, I suspect.

We are also separated from each other by our theological languages.  I’ll never forget the time I was traveling through the South with my family, and a man came up to my father and said, “Brother, have you found Jesus?”  My dad said, “I didn’t know he was lost.”

I was never more powerfully reminded of the linguistic chasms between people of different faith backgrounds than by an experience I had with the other clergy in a town where I once pastored.  There had been a few incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti and fights in the schools, and we all decided to draft a pastoral letter to the community, calling for unity in the midst of discord.  I was given the task of errand boy, shuttling revisions of the letter to all of our Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, and various Protestant brethren and sistren.  There were revisions of the initial draft; there were theological difficulties; there were linguistic and stylistic problems; there were revisions of revisions; and revisions of revisions of revisions.  So, one day, in the midst of all this, I was lamenting the arduousness of the task to the local Rabbi.  I said, “Man, this has been painful duty, trying to get this letter together,” he said, “But what a worthwhile pain – for all of us.”  And I saw his point.  What we had been agonizing over, as clergy from many different faith backgrounds, was nothing less than translation!  We were straining to hear one another’s language of faith, and to cut through the jabberwocky that divides us in order to find the true common ground.  God bless Rabbi Fertig for opening my eyes; I, for one, had absolutely no idea that I was engaged in such a noble purpose.

Words have power.  Language shapes the way we think and view the world.  Folks from Gallup Mills, Vermont, from New York, New York, from Selma, Alabama, Coffeyville, Kansas, Berkley, California, and the South Side of Chicago all speak different “languages” – if you will.  Those languages reflect the different worlds in which they live.  To some degree, they reflect different values, different priorities, different cultural standards and behaviors.  But it all comes down to language.  If we could truly hear each other’s language, we would hear each other’s culture, we would hear the neighborhoods, and the country roads, the bowling teams and the street-corner gangs.

Instead, we are frightened by the jabberwocky and gibberish we hear in the grocery store or on the nightly news.  Fear leads to suspicion.  Suspicion ultimately leads finally to that which we are also remembering this weekend: rows and rows of uniform white grave markers.

This morning, I would like for us to pray for a miracle – that, somehow, by the grace of the Almighty, people will learn to hear each other – to hear not only the words, but the context.  You never quite master a language until you master the context.  We never truly hear each other until we learn one another’s cultures – histories.

This is not a trivial undertaking.  It’s essential!  This is not a nicety, a luxury, or a sidelight.  This is the dead center of the gospel.

Many of us get nervous when we hear talk of Pentecostalism.  The Pentecostals are assumed by a lot of folks in our quiet, well-ordered, New England churches to be a kind of lunatic fringe.  But what strikes me about Pentecostalism is that it’s, first and foremost, a multi-cultural, multi-racial phenomenon.  That’s not just coincidence.  These people all claim, with us, the day of Pentecost as their defining moment.  And that moment of Spirit and power was shared by people from many different nations and languages.  The Bible says that “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” were all together in one place, and all received together this astounding gift of being able to hear and comprehend one another.

The Church of Jesus Christ was born as a multinational, multi-cultural, multi-racial movement.  It is our heritage, our birthright, our identity.  So, we’d better be about the business of learning other cultures, other ways of thinking, speaking, relating.  We’d better be about the business of building bridges, sticking our necks out to make new friends, learn about other cultures.  We’d better be staying the course when the pleasantries give way to disagreement and misunderstanding.

If we fail in small ways, then the larger opportunities may be missed as well.  Families have been torn apart, churches have been split, wars have been fought over great differences that began as nothing more momentous than jabberwocky.

We are Pentecost people.  We have received a powerful gift.  It is nothing less than the possibility of actually hearing and comprehending one another.  And at times, by that power, it can almost be as though we were speaking each other’s languages.  And miracle of miracles, among Pentecost people sometimes even those who speak the language of middle class, middle-America, can understand those who speak the jive-talk of the South Side of Chicago.  Sometimes even those who speak the language of adolescence and rebellion can comprehend the words of parental concern.  Sometimes the language of regular people is comprehensible to theologians, and sometimes, even, visa-versa.

We are Pentecost people – no longer under the reign of Babel.  We need not be rendered powerless by miscommunication and divisiveness.  We must not be peddlers of Jabberwocky, imprisoned by smallness of vision.

We are Pentecost people – those who are the very hope for a world divided against itself.  May we live up to our calling.