Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school my church youth group packed up and went on a week and a half long mission trip to Puerto Rico. We were there to join forces with a local organization and help build houses in the neighborhoods of Juana Diaz. Bless whoever thought it was a great idea to give power tools to 80+ inexperienced and wild teenagers. There’s simply no way those houses are still standing.
We were staying in a hostel with a few other church groups, some from other areas of Puerto Rico and some not. At night we’d have worship services in a giant open building - picture a gigantic picnic shelter nestled right smack on the beach with the most dazzling sunset you can imagine in the background, complete with palm tree silhouettes and a heavy breeze blowing in from off the Caribbean Sea.
One night in worship we were led in the familiar contemporary worship song “Prince of Peace”. As I began to sing the words that I knew by heart, I heard around me that someone was singing the words wrong - actually a lot of someone’s. I listened closer and realized that the words weren’t being sung incorrectly - they were being sung in Spanish. Half of the worshippers were singing in English and the other half were singing the exact same song in Spanish.
I had to stop singing. For the first time it hit me that my God was big enough to understand and receive praise in two languages at once. This was my first true glimpse at the universal church, right there standing sweaty in the Puerto Rican humidity, my jaw left hanging open. Our God is so big and the Body of Christ, so thrillingly diverse.
“I had to stop singing. For the first time it hit me that my God was big enough to understand and receive praise in two languages at once. ”
I recently heard a different interpretation of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis that gave me pause. Rather than God making the people of Babel speak different languages as a punishment for arrogance, this interpretation views these different languages as God’s way of preserving the diversity of God’s church. In other words, God made us as different as we are on purpose. The Kingdom was meant to be a mash-up of a thousand different cultures, practices, languages, and people.
I truly believe that the whole of the church benefits when we recognize diversity as a strength and honor it as such. When we offer our differences to God as a gift to be shared, the Kingdom moves a little closer. It is so important to make room at the table for all without homogeneity being a pre or post requisite - because that’s what we’ve been called to do, that’s how we love our neighbor.
Our theme for this month’s blog posts is Unity with Diversity. It could mean a million things - what fertile blogging ground. There is so much to pull from, so many stories we could share, so many voices to be heard and thanks be to God for that. But this is the picture that stands out in my mind: one church joining in the same song of worship to God in a hundred different languages. Just imagine what that would sound like.
I bet a sound like that could change the whole world.