Love in Translation | Pentecost 2026

Pentecost by Kelly Latimore Icons

How do you tell someone you love you? 

Perhaps you just say the words—using one of the approximately 7000 languages worldwide. 

Or perhaps you show it. 

Through gifts, like bringing home their favorite snack.

Through gestures, like throwing them a birthday party.

Through acts of service, like doing the chore you know they hate.

Sometimes it’s as simple as holding hands. 

The most effective way to tell someone you love them is a way that they can hear it. You have to speak in a language they recognize. 

If I called my sister this afternoon and ended the conversation with “Biixoo3é3en”—bee-ha-the-then (Northern Arapahoe) she’d probably feel more confused than loved.

And if Ames went home and reorganized all my books in alphabetical order… trust me, I would not receive this as a loving gesture. 

Because love is not only about what is expressed. It’s also about what can be understood. 

At the heart of all these ways of communicating is connection.

Expressions of love towards another in a way they can hear, recognize, and receive. And sometimes that involves a little translation. 

Today’s Pentecost story from Acts 2 illustrates the power of translation.

Pentecost was already a long-standing Jewish harvest festival before it became a Christian holy day. The word itself comes from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth,” because the celebration takes place fifty days after Passover—and for Christians, fifty days after Easter.

Pentecost did not begin as a Christian holiday. It was already a long-standing Jewish harvest festival, called Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, which drew pilgrims from many regions and languages into the city of Jerusalem. 

The word “Pentecost” comes from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth,” because the celebration takes place fifty days after Passover—which for Christians would come to mark, fifty days after Easter. 

So that’s Pentecost, the holiday. The story of Acts 2 is what is referred to as “the Pentecost moment.” 

I love the way the Bible Project summarizes this moment as — “an indoor windstorm swirling through a packed first-century Jerusalem house party, with people’s heads suddenly catching on fire. Everyone is baffled—some amazed, some panicked. And then the people with the fiery heads spontaneously begin speaking languages they had never known before.”

It is this wild story that traditionally marks the birth of the Church. 

The Spirit is described as  arriving like the rush of a violent wind. Blowing through the house where the disciples were gathered. And while God’s Spirit can present itself like a cool summer breeze, here the Spirit is not so gentle. Here the Spirit stirs the pot. It pushes people out of their comfort zones. Like Wyoming winds, the Holy Spirit can sometimes blow us forcefully into a new direction. 

And with that rushing wind comes what looks like flames. 

According to Acts, this is the moment when God’s Spirit descends upon the apostles—those are the ones with the fiery heads—and fills them with God’s divine presence and power.

It’s not the first time fire has signified God’s arrival. 

From the burning bush in Exodus—where God speaks to Moses and promises to empower him to help set the people free from slavery—to the storm of wind and fire on Mount Sinai, and later to the pillar of fire resting above the tabernacle, fire had long signified God’s holy presence. But in Acts 2, the fire no longer rests on a bush, a mountain, or a building. It rests on people.

In this ancient world, the temple was understood to be the place where God dwelled. But now, Luke, the author of the book of Acts, is saying that the Spirit rests not in a building, but within people. The apostles themselves have become a living temple, the beginning of the Body of Christ—the Church.

That is why Pentecost is traditionally celebrated as the birthday of the big “C” Church. It is the moment the apostles are sent out, empowered to carry God’s message of peace, justice, and love beyond their own community to people from all nations.

What enables the apostles to do this is a miracle of multilingualism.

The crowds gathered around the disciples are drawn in by the story of God’s mighty acts—the story of Jesus—not simply because of the story itself, but because they hear it in their own native languages. If the apostles had spoken only in Greek, most people likely would have understood them. Greek was the lingua franca of the ancient Mediterranean world. But understanding the words is not the same thing as connecting with the message.

The Greek would not have touched their hearts and opened their ears in the same way as Parthian and Median, Elamite and Cappadocian, Pamphylian and Arabic did.

Translation is what makes the Gospel compelling. Translation is what makes it possible for people to truly hear its message of love, grace, and hope. New Testament scholar Margaret Aymer writes that “on the day of Pentecost, Christianity became a movement with a divine sanction to multilingualism and to translation.”

This week, as I looked for someone to read scripture, I learned just how many members of our community are multilingual. 

Originally, the scriptures were going to be read in Portuguese. 

Then signed in ASL. 

Then it was Spanish or Polish or Italian. 

All are languages are either spoken, read, or signed by members of this congregation. 

But for various reasons none of the options worked out, and so I settled on German. 

When I went looking for the German translation I would have read, the first one I found was from Luther’s 1545 translation.  

That is a lot older than the NRSV translation I use most weeks, which was updated only in 2022, while I was still in seminary, and is considered the most scholarly and accurate translation available. 

But I immediately recognize it was the perfect version to use—due to it’s deep significance to the multilingual, multicultural character of the Global Church to this day. 

In the time of Martin Luther, Latin was the official language of the Catholic Church. The Latin Vulgate had been the Church’s official Bible since 405 CE.

But Luther believed that keeping scripture in Latin kept ordinary people distant from the truth of the Gospel. He believed the Bible should be translated into the language people actually spoke and understood.

He wrote:

“One may not ask the Latin language how to speak German… one must ask mothers in the home, children on the street, the common man at the market, and watch carefully how they speak. After that one may translate.”

Now, most people at the time could not even read, so in some ways Luther’s vision was ahead of its time. But as reformers pushed to make scripture accessible to ordinary people and sought to democratize church authority, literacy rates across Europe began to rise. The growing theology of the “priesthood of all believers”—the belief that ordinary people could encounter God and engage scripture for themselves—helped spark movements toward mass literacy.

And that is why all or parts of the Bible have now been translated into more than 4,000 languages and dialects.

That includes Cornish, a language spoken by only a small number of people in southwestern England; Aleut, spoken by the Indigenous Aleut people of the Aleutian Islands stretching between Alaska and Russia; and Kreyòl Ayisyen—the native Creole language of Haiti.

English alone has more than 450 translations. One that some in this congregation may know is the First Nations Version, which remains in English but uses Native American and First Nations concepts and naming conventions to help the Gospel speak more directly within Indigenous cultural contexts.

Several centuries later, even the Roman Catholic Church would reform, officially approving the use of local languages in the Mass instead of Latin, which had itself been further codified in response to the Protestant Reformation.

But it is important to say that the reformers’ passion for democratizing translation, literacy, and interpretation did not always lead to true democratization—or to good theology. Women, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and LGBTQ people were often excluded from the circles of interpretation and authority. 

Missionaries around the world frequently used scripture to enforce rigid ideas about race, gender, God, and salvation. Too often, the Church became a tool for colonial ideologies rather than a witness to the God of Pentecost.

So I wonder if, as an English-speaking congregation, we have not only what Margaret Aymer calls a “divine sanction” to translate, but also a responsibility—a kind of debt—to learn different languages and ways of speaking about God.

English is not just a common language; it is also a language shaped by empire and colonialism, one that has been forced upon many people in this land and around the world.

So perhaps part of Pentecost’s invitation is not only to speak so others can understand us, but also to encounter the Gospel beyond the comfort of our own language. To let ourselves become a little disoriented. To hear God’s good news in ways that unsettle us, stretch us, and open us more deeply to one another.

Again and again throughout scripture—and especially in the book of Acts—we see that the Holy Spirit makes relationship across difference possible. The Spirit crosses borders humans create. The Spirit liberates the detained, welcomes the outsider, and reminds us that God’s holiness shines brightest not in exclusion, but in love, justice, and belonging.

Peter understands this when the crowds begin grumbling about the chaos unfolding at Pentecost. He hears the accusations of drunkenness and responds by quoting the prophet Joel: God’s Spirit will be poured out on all people. Young and old. Women and men. Servants and free people. Not a small, pure, homogeneous few—but anybody and everybody.

The divided tongues of fire resting on the disciples empower this small group of Judeans to speak to strangers in their own native languages. Pentecost becomes God’s declaration that diversity is not a problem to solve, but a blessing to embrace.

I think about this every time I remember my home congregation in New Jersey, Westminster Presbyterian Church, where I was ordained one year ago. Westminster's services are mostly English, but Pastora Karen intentionally incorporates our various cultures and languages in each service. 

When we get to the Lord’s Prayer, Pastora invites up a group of people to lead the prayer together in multiple different languages. She then invites the congregation to say the prayer in the “language of their hearts.” The result is an imperfect, even messy, multilingual moment as Spanish, Korean, German, and various English dialects swirl all around. Each week we have our own mini-Pentacost. 

And perhaps that is how the Spirit is still at work today: drawing us ever towards Beloved Community, teaching us to listen across difference, and leading us into the wild, fiery, justice-seeking love of God.

Preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 5/24/26.