Paulette and I spent the last six months of 1995 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  It’s a blue-collar town with lots of ethnic neighborhoods, and we had a good time exploring the city and eating in a lot of ethnic restaurants.  It also has a lot of cultural attractions, including a beautiful art museum on the shore of Lake Michigan, a good repertory theater, and a symphony orchestra, and we took advantage of each.  There are lots of parks, one of which, Henry Meier Festival Park, sits on a peninsula sticking out into Lake Michigan.  Each week during the summer they have a different festival.  We went to two – an Irish festival and an Indian Pow-Wow.  The Pow-Wow had an opening parade, and the highlight of the parade consisted of five elderly men in Marine uniforms slowly marching down the route.  They were the last living Navajo Code Talkers.

            During World War II the U. S. Marine Corps used members of the Navajo tribe for battlefield communications during the island campaigns in the Pacific war against Japan.  This became widely known after the appearance of the movie Windtalkers starring Nicolas Cage.  The movie was very popular, but it did get a lot of things wrong, one being the fact that they were never called windtalkers.  There were several reasons that the Navajos were chosen: they were a large tribe that could provide enough young men, their language was almost impossible to understand or speak by anyone who had not learned it as a child, and no academic linguistic studies of the language had ever been published.  Since the Navajo language didn’t contain words for modern military equipment, the Navajos had to develop a simple code; for example, the Navajo word for tortoise stood for tank.  This is why they were called Code Talkers.  The code was totally secure, and no messages were ever broken.  The biggest advantage, however, was speed; it was much quicker (almost immediate) than any code or cipher system, which was very important for the fierce combat the marines faced.  This meant that there were always Code Talkers in the worst parts of the battles.  The Navajos were never used for high level communications.

            This past Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, and in Acts 2:1-21 we read that there were devout Jews from every nation all speaking at the same time and in their own languages.  The miracle was that each person there understood them all, without knowing the languages.  It was exciting, and they made such a fuss that they were accused of being drunk.  Peter pointed out that it was only nine o’clock in the morning and they were not drunk.  This is what reminded me of the Navajo Code Talkers.  What would have happened if some of those at Pentecost had been Navajos speaking a language that was essentially impossible for an outsider to speak or understand?  While the question intrigued me, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t have made any difference.  Pentecost wasn’t a convention of linguists.  It was the miraculous coming of the Holy Spirit!  It was the birthday of the Church! 

            Please read the exciting story of Pentecost in Acts 2:1-21, and remember:  God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim