And Holds More Than Or

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[0:00] It is so pleasant, so joyful to be amongst you here today. I feel that my ministry is an outpouring of what is on the hearts of many of you today. The worship of this community has formed who I am as a Christian and I continue to do that work and I carry you with me as we do our ministry down in Oaxaca and we also bring what we have learned as we contemplate God back to you today. So it's wonderful to join this circle of brotherhood that we have internationally.

[0:36] If I could get my first slide, thanks. So we're talking about theologies and theologies. So and is going to be doing a lot of work for me and so bear me, bear with me in my preoccupation and my fascination with this word and, okay.

[0:54] That's I'm just saying. So if we could go to the next slide. I want to, so I want to tell you a little bit about where we are. This is Mexico and on the next slide I'll show you a little part of Mexico where we are living. So this is the Mazatec speaking area. So if you know the south of Mexico, this is right with the intersection of Oaxaca and of Puebla and of Veracruz. There's a little area where there are 11 ! Mutually unintelligible languages. Mazatecan languages. If you go to the next one we have a blowout. Another map. So this is that area. So the little area in black is the area where Mazatlan Mazatec is spoken and then the other areas in gray are where the 10 other languages are spoken. This is a family about the size of the Germanic family, sort of in diversity of the language and also kind of the linguistic diversity of the Germanic family as well. A bit broader than the Germanic languages but so think of you as an English speaker when you listen to Dutch. You could, you can get some stuff you know but if they're talking about, if it's a list of words of like food or whatever you'd be like oh yeah I totally understand beef and that. If it's a longer discourse you're gonna understand less. If they're talking about poetry or theology probably zero. All right so

[2:17] that's kind of what we're doing. This is our team on the next slide. So these are some of the people that have been working with us in Bible translation and teaching. Isabel and I and Mazatec whom we love. We have on the next slide, we have Antonio Seath who is one of our early translators and we have his on the next slide. We have Cydia Moreno who is with the Lord now. May she rest in peace. The next slide. We have Aracely Filio who is our in Spanish we have a word for if you are the godparent to someone's son then you are compadres or comadres which is co-fathers or co-mothers together. She is her comadre and my compadre which is on the next slide Alfredo Seath. We are eternally indebted to them for teaching us their language and for joining with us in this process of Bible translation. So So that's fine. That's great. I'm going to talk about some other stuff before we get back to the slides. So beautifully timed. Thanks.

[3:29] So I do not like healthy food. So there's flaxseed. There's quinoa. There is gluten free cookies. There is dairy free cheese. Anytime something is prepared for that, my response is usually disappointment. So on the menu is this thing and I'm bummed. Now I do not have a special body that runs on fat and sugar. That is not the case. I have the same body as anyone else. There are members of you who enjoy healthy food, who find fulfillment in planning healthy meals that are highly nutritious and that stick with you, right? And I have some of you have tried it. And taught me to enjoy healthy meals. So I am grateful for those amongst you. I am not one of these people.

[4:23] And so my platonic ideal for a breakfast would be fried chicken and waffles and bacon. I would be stoked. However, it would probably do me harm. That's one of those like maybe once every three months or something you can get away with a breakfast like that, if ever.

[4:41] But we have the same bodies. Some of you have better energy. Some of you have better instincts around food than I do. So when it comes to intercultural communication, there's similarly some people who love it and some people who don't. So I love intercultural misunderstandings. I delight in when someone says something innocently and is understood in a vulgar manner in a different language. I'm delighted by that. It's my favorite thing. Some of you may not share that delight. Some of you may be irritated by having to press 1 on a phone to listen to English. I have a story. This is over at Community Covenant Church. It was a VBS program. And we were going around and all of those of us who were going to teach in the VBS were sharing recipes that we had learned which we really liked. And so one of my good friends, we were going around and she says, oh, I learned this recipe called pozole. Right? Right?

[5:50] Right? Right? Right? Right? she made Pozzoli, and I did not understand her. I didn't understand what she was saying. She's probably mortified by the fact that I was just, like, you know, mocking, seemingly, her pronunciation of this word, Pozzoli. And I truly didn't understand. But once I did, I now have to remember you can say Pozzoli for Pozzoli, because I honestly was confused. But it's irritating. It's an irritating thing for me. Like, I was irritated at my own lack of understanding. So I understand when there are cultural miscommunications, and some of you are irritated by that. I would argue that the flaxseed response in these situations is to have fascination by these things and to show interest. It is not to be irritated, right? Some of you might be more irritated, and other of you might be less irritated. But I'm going to say that just as that flaxseed is good for all of our bodies, cultural communication and interest in cultural communication is good for all of us. I love you if you're not interested by these cultural... like, interactions, right? If multicultural contexts make you frustrated, I hear you. I love chicken and waffles. I totally hear you, right? I understand how that feels to be bummed

[7:23] when someone serves you flaxseed and granola for breakfast. I get it. But we all have the same bodies. We all have the same spirits. The better thing is to have flaxseed, and the better thing is to be interested and not irritated. So I'm just putting that out there in case some of you are kind of... bummed by me talking about these intercultural things. Now, my family and I, just to talk about our cultural bona fides, I suppose, we live in intercultural spaces, right? So we speak Spanish and English and Mazatec on the daily. We worship our Lord in these three languages. And sometimes when you ask us to be authentic and just say, , don't say .

[8:07] Sometimes we have a hard time understanding where our... identity lies on these cultural threads that are interwoven, right? Some of you who have grown up in different cultural contexts might understand this, like, where is the me, right? Where is the me in all of these things? So I'm not exactly sure how to be authentic. And sometimes that reads, and sometimes people see multicultural people as not authentic. But that, in all the places, sometimes not authentically American, not authentically Mexican. And my kids struggle with that, trying to figure out who they are.

[8:40] But there is a place in the church for all of us. Can we get to our scripture? Do we have...we could try it out. I just want to look at Acts 2, which is a reading. I know that Pentecost Sunday was two weeks ago, but it's so good. And I'm going back because it's rad and it speaks to me.

[9:06] So reading from...I'm going to read it from here, I think. So from Acts 2. Acts 2, verses 1-12. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Next slide. Now, there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one had heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, Aren't all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our own native language? Next slide.

[10:00] Parthians, Medes, and Alamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, and the rest of the world, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues. Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, What does this mean? Some of you might imagine fourth grade production of the Pentecost where three kids in chorus raise their shoulders and say, What does this mean? In a sort of pedantic way. We all understand that this means that God is joining us all together. I'm going to ask you to sit on this, what does this mean, a little bit. For all of these Jews that were joined together, they were joining together as Jews, celebrating their highest of holy days. It would have made so much more sense for God to enable all of them to understand Hebrew perfectly. Right? As English speakers, as Mandarin speakers, we'd be like, Oh yeah, well of course. Well they should just use their lingua franca, should be Hebrew. But they didn't. They heard this in all of their native languages. And that was confusing. What does that mean? What does it mean? I'll propose we still, today, two thousand years later,

[11:25] don't really understand what this means. We resort to different sorts of instincts when it comes to these languages. We think of things as commodities. We think of language as access to resources, to jobs. This is the way we tend to look at things. But the Holy Spirit here speaks to everyone in their own language. What does this mean?

[11:55] Alright. Alright. Could I go to the next one? Oh, yeah, the next one. Okay. The Spirit, the Spirit is saying something, something with the diversity of languages at Pentecost. This is the beginning of the church becoming radically multi-ethnic. Now, I'll remind you, this, we haven't even entered into the multi-ethnic part of the Christian story. This is pre-Christian right here. These are all Jews. All of them Jews. And so, even before this commandment to go into all the world and make disciples of all peoples, we're already seeing some sort of a revelation about the internal diversity of the Jewish people. What does this mean? What is this? There is one God. We are one people. We are joined together in brotherhood and sisterhood. What does it mean that all of our languages, that God will speak, and he will speak to all of us in our own language, that I will understand him in my language, and my brother, my sister will understand it in a different language?

[13:03] What does that mean? Is this some sort of decoration? Is this some aesthetic statement that God is making? What does that mean? In our church, in the Covenant Church, I had a conversation with Dob Demers this last week, who many of you know. He attended here for many... Bob Demers? Demers. I'm saying it wrong. Bob Demers, I think. Many of you know him. And he was raised Catholic, but he started coming to the Covenant Church because he said they had a way of disagreeing without being disagreeable.

[13:40] And this is a practice that we have. We have different beliefs, primarily on baptism, but other beliefs, and we have a way of saying, well, you know, I baptize my son, but I understand that you want to dedicate your son, and that's fine. We can figure out ways of doing this. So this is a covenant value that we have, of disagreeing without being disagreeable, of claiming sisterhood and brotherhood without breaking those bonds over certain theological discussion.

[14:08] So I'm not talking about moral relativism here. I think that's an easy way to dismiss sometimes disagreements that we have is like, oh, well, it doesn't matter. I suppose it doesn't matter. I suppose you don't care about any of these things. I suppose your faith isn't important to you, and that's why you'll just accept whatever anybody says. I'm not talking about moral relativism. Chicken and waffles is not good for me. It's not.

[14:35] And snap judgments about intercultural communication isn't good for us. It's just not. Now, that doesn't mean that any one of us can understand everything, can understand the entire Scriptures, and understand the different cultures.

[14:51] Can I go to the next one? So I'm going to talk about– this is slightly nerdy– many of you are nerds in your respective fields, and so you don't have to be scared– if you're irritated by pedants, or you're irritated by nerdiness– bear with us– look at this as a cultural situation– So– So in language we have three main types of function, which are reference, attribution, and predication. We're not going to talk about predication too much. Let's go to the next slide.

[15:26] So reference usually happens established by nouns. Attribution is usually established by adjectives. And predication usually by verbs. Not exclusively. Language has lots of ways to make a noun into an attributive thing. All languages have a way to make a verb into a reference-y type of thing. But these are the basic ones. Go to the next one. Now I want to look at the concept of and when it comes to these functions. So this main function, which is attribution, the word and, how does it behave? The concept and. So let's have a set. And if the set is boyfriends. So let's say you have a daughter. And she's... She's great. The daughter's great. And so she wants to have a boyfriend. And so the first thing she's going to look for, I want to have a Christian, a Christian husband. That purple doesn't read that great. Christian husband. Okay, well that's a subset of the set of boyfriends, of possible boyfriends, right? Let's put an and in there with another attribute. We want to have a boyfriend who is a Christian and is educated. The blue doesn't read that well either. Sorry. So the blue is educated. We want a Christian boyfriend. We want an educated boyfriend. Okay, so we want those two attributes. Let's do it for a third attribute.

[16:46] And kind. That's super important. Christian, educated, kind. Let's do a third and. Tall. She's a good girl, but she has some superficial issues. You know, we all do. You know, it's understandable. But you notice in all of these attributes that we are restricting. If I go to the next slide.

[17:07] So and is reductive. When applied to attribution. That is the function it has. So it will take us one set and it will lower down. It will like increase the scope on or the focus on a subset inside that. So things are a little bit different when it comes to reference.

[17:31] So if we go to the next one. So let's go back to early, early humanity where we're just starting to get along with wolves, right? We're getting along with wolves. We love our wolves. We call them dogs. So we have dogs. This is our set. This is our understanding of us as humans. And we have dogs. Things go on later and all of a sudden people are having this relationship with cats. All right. And there is something. There's something that the way that people have these cats that is I'm a dog person, but I see that cats something in their relationship with their cats is similar to what's happening with my dog. And so this invites us to have a bigger category of what? A pet is. Right? So there's something bigger. I guess it's not just a dog. It's something slightly larger than that. And then we go much farther into human sort of companionship. And then we see people with turtles. Does anyone have a turtle? Has had a pet turtle? Right? Speaker 4 Yes. Speaker 1 Okay. Oh, Victoria. So people have pet turtles and like that's different than what I thought before. You know, that doesn't map on to what I've understood, but I have to admit, I understand there's something tender in that relationship. That does, so it does resound, resonate with me as a dog person.

[18:44] And so I have to make my set bigger. So in reference, when we are having and statements, we have to reset, right? We have to expand our understanding of what that is. We have to learn. There are types of relationships I hadn't considered there, right? I didn't, I guess I wasn't thinking of that. I guess this is different. And so you have to continually expand. Speaker 4 Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah. You have to keep your idea of what it means to be a pet.

[19:11] So we go to the next one. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So, and is augmentative, right? So we are increasing our set of references when we add things. And I'll argue that as we live in an increasingly diverse church with increasingly diverse sisters and brothers, we are meeting more and more of these. If any of you have multiple children, you'll understand that your morning routine with one child is not the same as your morning routine. If you have a child, you'll understand that your morning routine with two children, or three or four, right? Or if you've never had a child and then you had one child, that morning routine is radically different, right? So and if your understanding of a morning routine never changed when you had a second child, well, you're not paying very much attention to that second child. As our church is expanding and our understanding of God isn't changing, we are not paying much attention to our brothers and sisters. So if I can go to the next one. Speaker 4 Yeah.

[20:08] Yeah. Speaker 5 So there's a book that's out right now called Lost and Found. It's a beautiful book about this woman whose father is passing away, right? And she meets someone that she will eventually marry. And so she's simultaneously bracing herself for the death of her father and falling in love. Now if any of you, and I know many of you in this congregation have suffered the death of loved ones this past year. It is a brutal process. Speaker 4 Yeah. It is a brutal process. And as you experience this grief and you experience joy simultaneously, your understanding, that multiple valency totally resets who you are as a person. And sometimes you feel like you've collapsed and have no capacity for emotion at all, and sometimes it grows you into be more understanding with more and more people, right? Speaker 4 Yeah. is struggling with that and she plays around and she contemplates this concept of and. She talks about being lost and found simultaneously, different modalities, right? We have joy and grief, happiness and duty. I love my wife and I make coffee for her every morning because I'm the early riser. I love that. She depends on my coffee in the morning, right? But I love that. I, I, I, that duty, that practice, that discipline makes a special kind of love that is beautiful.

[21:40] I really like that. There is happiness and play, which is a totally different type of thing than making coffee in the morning, right? Or joking with each other about something. These are, they increase our understanding of happiness, right? They increase our understanding of love.

[21:59] Can I go to the next one? Okay. So, in our two readings today, we had a reading from Leviticus and we had a reading from Isaiah, right? And there was a conflict, it seems. So, here we have, and the first four chapters of Leviticus are all about ritual sacrifice. How to prepare it, right?

[22:19] What to sacrifice. In this first one, I'm not going to read all of them. We talk about first chapter is all about offering livestock and how to prepare it, how to do it right. In the second chapter of Leviticus, because I'm going to read all of them, I'm going to read the second one too. Yeah. So, it's all about grain offerings, right? In the third one, we have a sacrifice for the well-beating, which is an animal of the herd. In the fourth chapter, we have, excuse me, a bull of the herd without blemish offers a sin offering for the community. The author of Leviticus is very concerned with ritual purity, right? How to prepare, which is a beautiful instinct, you know, to prepare oneself, to come into the presence of the Lord. To prepare one's people.

[23:01] Right? Right? Right? and of reference happening here, right? There's an and of reference. These are different perspectives. You can go to the next slide. So we hold Leviticus and Isaiah to be true. Once more, we hold them to be sacred, right? We hold these as holy, right? These are sacred to us. I'm not sure what a meeting of Isaiah and the author of Leviticus would be like. I imagine there might have been some tension in that conversation, right? If they were to read each other, they're things which would become scripture, and he said, here's what you need to do to prepare your sacrifice. And Isaiah says, I hate the sacrifice. Thus says the Lord, it is detestable to me. Please stop talking about it. There's probably some tension. Well, it seems like the truth is and. Neither one of these is wrong, but there's an and there. And so we have to think of what the bigger picture is. We're forced, because we hold these to be true, we hold these to be sacred, we have to figure out who is God, who is this God that has both of these things that are true, right? Genesis 1 has this wonderful first day through seventh day presentation of the creation, right? So on first day, we have the heavens and earth, then the skies,

[24:54] made on the second, the lands, plants, and vegetations. On the third, day four has sun, moon, and stars. Day five, the animals of the sea and the birds. Day six has the land, animals, and humans. Humans, man and woman is implied, right? And we have rest, okay? Now, when we go to Genesis chapter two, so right in the middle of verse four, we have a repetition of this story, right? We have, we started around days of creation, right? We have the first, earth is dry and has no plants, then streams birth forth from the land, then God creates Adam from dust, right? Then God plants a garden and puts man there, then God makes trees, God tells man to work the land and not to eat of the tree of good and evil, and then later God makes Eve out of Adam's rib. This is a different order of events, right?

[25:54] Sequentiality. So, essentially, if you're concerned with sequence, these are different. These, 100%, these are different sequence of events. If you go to the next slide. We hold Genesis one and Genesis two to be true. We hold them to be true. And we hold them to be sacred. So, on the next thing, so we hold them to be sacred. So, what does this mean then for creation? Well, both of them are true, so our understanding has to be an and of reference. We have to have a bigger understanding of what that means. Right into what this text means. Now, if we enter into conversations with our brothers and sisters, where we have it all figured out, and they have a different concept, and we just say, no, there's no anding here. This is the truth. This is the understanding of the scripture. And if you have a different view, then you're wrong, right? There can be wrong. We can be wrong, right? That can happen. People can be mistaken. I can be mistaken. But we have to enter into these conversations wondering what the and is, right? We know that people from every tribe, every tongue, and every nation will be there at the second coming, or we'll all be singing together in all of these languages. So that church, I think, looks really different than the church that we have

[27:36] today. Today, Mandarin and Spanish and English and French have a huge, huge pull on the language that people speak in churches. Huge pull, right? We mostly want to speak in the languages that have access to resources, depending on what the national language is of the country that you live in, right? There's a huge pull. I don't think that pull is coming from the spirit. I think that pull is coming from someplace else. And I think oftentimes it's because we don't have an and referential approach when we have our brothers and sisters. We have a not approach, right? We have an or, and as it turns out, it's ours, right? If it's ours or yours, then it's ours. But I think we need to have an and.

[28:23] So in our scriptures, our spiritual fathers preserved these differing opinions in the same scriptures, in the same scriptures. And so the different authors of the Bible do have different perspectives, right, that are sometimes, really conflicting, right? And they're preserved as sacred for all of us, all of our community, those of us who believe in the book. We hold these to be true, and we find ways to interpret it where all of this is true, because different speakers, different authors have different ways of understanding. So let us wonder at God's greatness, respecting our brothers and sisters' insights into who God is, being humble when we understand things that seem to conflict with our brothers and sisters.

[29:17] Right is changing as it grows. Thank you, President Sistar.