Mother Tongue - Foreign Land

Mother tongue - foreign land - an exercise in non-conformity and cognitive dissonance
A sermon preached by Jane Stranz at the Ecumenical Centre in the context of praying for Britain and Ireland in the Ecumenical Prayer Cycle. Liturgical outline here.

A room with a view
There is a wonderful view from the back bedroom of my parents' house. It was the room where my mother gave birth to my brother, less than a mile from where her own mother had given birth to her.
The view is of rolling fields and greenery, trees and hedges; in the distance 40 miles away are the Malvern Hills (not quite Mont Blanc or the Alps but beautiful nevertheless). Further away still and only to be seen on a clear day is a glimpse of another country the outline of the black mountains in Wales, and a reminder of a different and more ancient Celtic language, which the English language has pushed to the margins – just as the English language is pushing so many other languages to the margins these days.
This is the view my brother and I still sit on the back step to drink in on our rare visits home.
That view has hardly changed in our lifetime. It speaks to us of childhood and beauty. It is also a landscape we have simply always known, a landscape that seems to know and welcome us back into its beauty and our memories.
The view I love so much would probably still be recognisable to William Shakespeare who was born just 10 miles away. When I think of where I come from that greenery and stretching view come to mind straight away. I understand that landscape like I understand my mother tongue.

And yet …
These days when I think about "home" it's often an exercise in cognitive dissonance
Home is not just a long way away, though not as far as for many of you, but “home” is also to some extent a long time ago.
These days when I go back I often feel as if I'm in a foreign land - even though people all around speak the same language as me. I feel caught between Babel and Pentecost, which is why I've chosen those texts this morning.

In my first month working at the WCC, my colleague in the language service Rosemarie Dönch, who will later this year retire after more than 35 years working for the WCC gave me a precious piece of advice she received from one of her professors when learning about translation: "Your first foreign language is your mother tongue." It's a useful reminder that even our mother tongue - which ever language that may be - remains a strange and complex language, perhaps even to some extent a foreign land.

The biblical story of the tower of Babel is actually very humorous - full of wonderful babbling wordplay and alliteration that is sadly lost in translation. But what holds a kind of sad fascination in the story is the fact that here are people who speak a common language yet nevertheless do not seem to have achieved real understanding:
Are they building their Ziggurat ever taller as a reaction to the destruction of the flood? or because of the fear of no longer being in the beautiful garden of Eden? Is it a desperate expression of the longing for structure and a big project in the face of meaninglessness and chaos? Or do they build because they no longer know how to communicate with God - despite all speaking the same language? Perhaps (as we human beings do all too often) they have confused their role with God's.

God disperses them not to monolithic empire building but to dispersed, embedded, rooted living in human community across the face of the earth - speaking the local language.

In this house we seek to speak the language, the mother tongue if you will, of ecumenism. Sometimes we speak the language so well that we fail to realise that others need quite a bit of interpretation and translation when we’re talking.
Sometimes working for ecumenical and international ideals and realities we can also feel quite a bit of cognitive dissonance, our ecumenical "home" is changing as fast as we try to work for it and understand its wonderful and brilliant diversity
I do also wonder whether I have in my heart learnt the language of ecumenism assiduously enough, perhaps I haven’t spent enough time learning my ecumenical verb tables and vocabulary, perhaps the language of ecumenism is an accent I just put on sometime. Try being the unfortunate colleague who recently assumed that because I was English I must be an Anglican. Just hearing the tone with which I said "I am NOT an Anglican" makes me wince with hindsight – that remark certainly touched a raw nerve!
Even if ecumenism is our mother tongue we still have lots to learn from what will always also be a foreign language.
Sometimes I am still back at Babel, baking bricks for a tower of insignificance. Fearful that everything is changing, wanting to hold on to my beautiful unchanging view and thoughts of the past - of life and church as it used to be when I first started looking at the far off hills. My tiny insignificant denomination in Britain is struggling, once it saw its future as being ecumenism, now it tries perhaps too late to affirm its identity. Yet other very different churches are growing, bearing witness in new and exciting ways. Do I grieve or give thanks - or in an ecumenical spirit a bit of both?

Some months ago I went home to my mother's 70th birthday and I realised that the view from the house has changed. My mother has a new partner, a new man in her life (this was quite a profound change for her children to accept!) and her partner has transformed the unruly garden relaying the hedges, coppicing and chopping down the rotten trees. The already beautiful view has been completely opened up, and a new horizon has appeared, new hills can bee seen – that perspective and horizon were previously hidden.

The Spirit of Pentecost blesses the disciples with fire, with words and with understanding. IT changes everything. It offers us also the promise that it will not be through monolithic towers but through the Spirit-filled relational structuring of diversity and messiness that the mother tongue of ecumenism can continue to be shared.
The Spirit is after all the great interpreter and comforter.

Are we ready to receive the new life and new insights in all their diversity that the Spirit offers - granting us a homecoming even when the mother tongue of the gospel and of ecumenism seem foreign to us.

Or would we rather babble at Babel?