What is it like to experience a meaningful, even profound, connection with someone who is quite different from yourself?

How have you experienced that? A real and moving connection with someone from quite a different background from yourself, with very different life experiences, with significant differences between you?

In a way that is real, I mean, not papering over the differences, not naïve about how significantly different we can be from each other, how strange we can be to each other… I mean experiences of connection that may even honor the strangeness of another person, honor the differences, such that we can behold the mystery of another person in their full personhood, while also experiencing the deep level of shared humanity we have with others.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

Have you had experiences like this?

It doesn’t need to be a big dramatic experience. It can be an everyday kind of thing.

Now, it can be dramatic: for example, I know a few veterans who share stories about being in the midst of war and suddenly came face-to-face with the shared humanity of their enemy, despite everything that bitterly divided them, an experience that came like a flash of revelation, and caused a dramatic change in their lives.

But, really, often these kinds of experiences of deep connection across difference are very mundane, you know, just about hitherto strangers who find themselves in a waiting room at the same time, at a bus stop, a check-out line, and discover a deeply human connection.

Today is our yearly celebration of Pentecost, often called the “Birthday of the Church,” when Jesus’ disciples came together after Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension for their people’s spring harvest festival, and they experienced Christ’s presence in their midst, as a movement of the Holy Spirit, blowing through them like a tremendous wind.

Suddenly, they were able to speak in ways that anyone and everyone could understand, regardless of differences in their language and culture and ethnicity. Jerusalem at the time, as it is to this day, as cosmopolitan cities have been through history, was full of folks from all manner of different corners of the known world, with their different customs and tongues. Yet through this experience with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, everyone who Jesus’ disciples encountered in the streets suddenly knew what they were talking about, regardless of their differences and strangeness to each other, they all recognized and connected with the message the Jesus people were sharing.

It was astonishing.

“What does it mean?” people asked. What does it mean?

To explore this question, “What does it mean?”, I want to honor the sacredness of those experiences in our lives when we connect on a human level, deep and true, with other people who, honestly, are quite different from ourselves. There is a sacred spark in these moments, especially, as I said earlier, when they are at the same time a recognition of difference as well as a recognition of union. 

The Church was born from such an experience, among a group of folks who had dedicated their lives, and their lives together to keeping God at the center through all that Jesus had taught them and shown them about the nature of God, and God’s relationship with humanity.

And the Pentecost experience wasn’t about just any kind of connection across difference (oh, you have a kid? I have a kid too; oh, you like to garden? I like to garden too), as important as those connections can be – and they are important. Rather, this is about the most profound level of connection of all, at the heart of our shared human nature, at the heart of why Jesus and his Way has liberating power for humanity.

We all are children of the Living God, our Creator, One and Holy.

We all share in the human experience and the human predicament: we need to love and be loved, we need nourishment and safety, yet so often we are denied these and we deny others these, we suffer the consequences of human failings and frailty and fraught defiance of the fact that we are not gods.

Through Christ we know that God has come into this human condition, to hold us all in it, in its pain and its pleasure, and show us mercy and restoration. This is a gift we can receive and take into our hearts. With the heart of Christ, we can join in God’s love, in being formed by that Holy Love, and sharing that holy Love. This is a heart that anyone can recognize, spoken in a language that anyone can hear and understand, anyone whose heart is yearning, yearning for a deeper connection with the universal Love of the Divine.

This is Good News. It’s a gift to receive and to share.

And the good news is also that we can know it and share it in ways that resonate across divides while also embracing and not seeking to erase the differences that our Creator has seen fit to endow humanity and all of the world.

That last part is important, because too often throughout history, and to this day, too many Christians have twisted the Gospel into the service of their ambitions for domination. Too often Christians have used our religion as a weapon in an arsenal to try to erase differences between people and somehow remake everyone uniformly into their own image. This has done tremendous harm, especially to folks who don’t fit into the fabricated mold, for reasons of language, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and on and on.

I, for one, am sick of it. Just sick of it.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here. But, you know, as the choir we need encouragement, encouragement to sing on, to sing on with the true heart of Christ:

The true heart of Christ, the heart of Christ’s universal love and mercy, deeper and stronger than all the hateful nonsense that some folks do in Jesus’ name and God’s name.

Let’s keep coming back to the heart of Christ, the Spirit of Christ, who sees and embraces each of us in our beauty and brokenness, and who allows us to see and embrace others in our shared humanity, across our differences. So that we can continue this long and beautiful lineage of those who share with other God’s universal Love.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Delivered Sunday, May 19, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

Video available here.