After this, I saw a large crowd with more people than could be counted. They were from every race, tribe, nation, and language, and they stood before the throne and before the Lamb. They wore white robes and held palm branches in their hands, as they shouted, “Our God, who sits upon the throne, has the power to save his people, and so does the Lamb.” – Revelation 7:9-10 (CEV)
One of my favorite moments in weekly worship during my years on the faculty at Sabah Theological Seminary in Malaysia was saying the Lord’s Prayer. The seminary is among the most diverse around. All courses are offered in three separate languages: English, Bahasa Malaysia (the official Malaysian national language form of Malay), and Mandarin Chinese. Within the student body, however, there are countless native tongues. The students in the Bahasa Malaysia department, for instance, come from at least six or seven different indigenous groups, each with their own language. Chinese students, likewise, consider a variety of different languages to be their first language, including Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Add in a variety of international students and faculty and you have a gathering with perhaps 15-20 different primary languages. For the Lord’s Prayer, then, everyone would pray in the language of their choice. The prayer was a chorus of different languages, each with its own intonations, timing, rhythms, and pace.
Some people were bothered by having different languages spoken at the same time, with different people ending at different times and no clear line breaks. I can appreciate the power of speaking in complete unison and the feeling of togetherness that this brings. At the same time, to me the prayer time was a foretaste of the eternal praise gathered around God that is promised to us. For people of every nation and tongue to shout together means that it is done with different languages and accents, different rhythms and emphases. The unity of the church gathered by God is not in its uniformity of speech and practice; it is found in the diversity that is brought together in praise of God’s loving and healing transformation of our lives.
I was reminded of this sense of a diversity of voices lifted up together and yet each being unique during a Zoom meeting this past week. Quite a few members of St. Matthew were in the meeting together, and attempted to read a prayer in unison. Due to digital lag times it did not work. We caught snippets of different people at different places in the prayer. It was a bit chaotic, to be sure, and did not have a sense of all of our voices joining into one in the way that reading prayer in unison normally does. I can understand why some might prefer having one leader and others praying along while muted. At the same time, it was also beautiful in my estimation. It witnessed to the ways that the ongoing prayers of the church are an ever-flowing stream of voices that are simultaneously both unique and closely connected. Our prayers are never only our own, even as they are personal. Our church is not just us and our way of doing things, but always includes voices and tongues and cultures and nations vastly different from ours. It is a blessing from God to participate in a sea of prayer and praise that vastly outstretches our capacity to comprehend. Thanks be to God!