Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 23, 2010, Pentecost Sunday

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The story of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost that we just heard from Acts is, I suspect, rather familiar to most of us. We hear it every year on Pentecost Sunday. I has vivid and striking images—a sound like the rush of a violent wind and tongues as of fire. It has what I think is one of the funniest lines in the Bible. When the disciples start babbling on in all sorts of languages—more about that shortly—Peter tells the crowd “these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” I always hear him saying “Give us time. We’ll get drunk later,” although I suppose that wasn’t the inference that the author intended. I almost know this passage by heart, so familiar is it to me, and perhaps to you. It’s easy for familiar passages like this to become trite, or to become so familiar that we glide over the surface of them, seeing in them what we’ve always seen in them, seeing nothing new.

Yet as often happens with these very familiar Bible texts when we take the time to read them closely and carefully, something struck me when I approached this text yet again this year for Pentecost Sunday, that hadn’t really struck me before. It came from the way the Revised Common Lectionary, which specifies Bible texts for each Sunday, paired the story of Pentecost with the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. It struck me that both passages deal with language, but they do it in very different ways. Let’s start with the story of the Tower of Babel.

That ancient story starts out with all the people of the earth speaking the same language. Apparently all the people of the earth lived together in one community. The story posits that in the beginning there were no divisions among the people of the earth. Their unity is expressed in the way that they all spoke the same language. When they decide to build a tower with its top in the heavens, the God Yahweh, called “the LORD” in our translation, sees this unity of the people as a threat. He apparently is concerned that in their unity they may actually become rivals to God. So he decides to break them up, to scatter them. to destroy their unity. And he does it by “confusing their language,” that is, by dividing them into groups that speak different languages. The story sees difference in language as the prime characteristic of the differences between nations. And it sees difference in language as something that divides one people from another. Any of us who have traveled in countries whose language we do not know get that I think. The inability to communicate with people of another nation truly does create barriers and divisions between people. The movement in the story of the Tower of Babel is from unity in uniformity to division in difference.

Then we come to the story of Pentecost in Acts. Jesus’ disciples receive the Holy Spirit when tongues as of fire touch them. Now, I suppose a lot of things happen to people when they have this kind of direct encounter with the Holy Spirit. Some do crazy things like go to seminary when that happens. The disciples didn’t go to seminary. Instead they all began to speak foreign languages that they hadn’t been able to speak before. Any of us who have worked long and hard to learn a foreign language envy them, I suppose, or resent them. They didn’t have to work long and hard at it, for them it just happened through the power of the Holy Spirit. They began to speak the languages of all of the foreigners who were in Jerusalem, the languages of most of the known world at that time. Before the coming of the Holy Spirit the disciples, all of whom were Galileans who spoke only Aramaic, were separated from all of these others by the barrier of language. With the coming of the Holy Spirit that barrier was removed, and people who had been separated from each other were now joined together, no longer separated by language as they had been.

But notice the difference between the connection established at Pentecost and the connection that had existed before God confused the people’s language in the Tower of Babel story. There the connection had been one of total uniformity. They all spoke the same language. In the Pentecost story it’s different. The connection of Pentecost is not unity in uniformity as it had been before the Tower, nor is it the previous division in difference. It is now unity in diversity. The Holy Spirit didn’t remove the language differences that the Tower of Babel had created. Those differences remained. But in the Holy Spirit those differences no longer meant division. They no longer meant separation. They no longer meant isolation of one people from another. The differences between peoples, represented here by the differences in their languages, didn’t disappear; but they no longer divided the disciples from the other peoples. Division is overcome and is replaced by diversity.

There is, I think, a real lesson in that for us. The world today is a lot smaller than it was in the first century. We live not with people from the region of the eastern Mediterranean, the people mentioned in the Acts story. We live with people from all over the world. We used to be able to kid ourselves that our nation was rather homogeneous, rather uniform in race, language, religion, and culture. It was never as homogeneous as we deluded ourselves into thinking it was, but most of us who grew up in previous decades lived in a pretty uniform world. No longer. Today the diversity of the people in our country is a lot greater and a lot more obvious to us than it used to be. Something like twelve percent of the population of Monroe is Hispanic. In our country there are large communities of Arab Americans and other Muslim Americans that we are learning more and more about. There are émigrés and refugees from all over the world in our country today. Even if we don’t see them in person every day we hear about them and see them on the television. America today is more culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse than it has ever been before.

And let’s be honest. That diversity is causing problems. The growing diversity of our country makes a lot of people, mostly Euro-American people like most of us, uncomfortable. Sometimes that discomfort is expressed as opposition to “illegal immigration” Illegal immigration is a real issue, and I don’t mean to suggest that it isn’t; but some of us can’t help but suspect that that professed passion for the law is actually, to some extent at least, veiling a dislike of those who are different. Many Americans are perfectly comfortable with airport authorities racially profiling anyone who appears Middle Eastern or Muslim. Many Americans approve of Arizona’s new law that virtually directs Arizona law enforcement personnel to racially profile people who look Mexican, or the law in the same state that virtually prohibits meaningful ethnic studies courses in public schools. Our growing diversity makes us uncomfortable. We long for a unity in uniformity that never really was but that we imagine once was. The way Genesis depicts the world before the Tower of Babel looks pretty good to an awful lot of us.

The story of Pentecost, however, tells us that unity in uniformity is not God’s way for us humans. It is not the way of the Holy Spirit. Rather, God’s way, the way of the Holy Spirit, is the way of unity precisely in diversity. It is the way of diversity and reconciliation, not the way of homogenization. St. Paul knew that truth. In his second letter to the church at Corinth he wrote that God has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation. 2 Cor. 5:18-20 He meant first of all the reconciliation between God and humanity effected through Jesus Christ, but the story of Pentecost tells us that that cosmic reconciliation is a model for reconciliation here on earth as well. Reconciliation does not mean elimination of differences. It does not mean papering over differences and pretending that they don’t exist. Reconciliation means unity in diversity. That is the unity that the Holy Spirit brings. St. Paul expressed it again when he said that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Galatians 3:28 He of course knew full well that there were both Jews in Greeks in his world, and lots of other people as well. But he also knew that in Christ those differences, while real and really to be respected, did not have to lead to division, to separation, to antagonism. In Christ there is reconciliation between peoples. In the Holy Spirit there is unity in diversity, not unity that eliminates diversity.

So on this Pentecost Sunday let us drink in the Spirit of Reconciliation. Let us be ambassadors of peace between peoples. Let us respect and honor differences between peoples, between cultures, between religions. All people are God’s children. All people are people of the Spirit. Maybe before the Tower of Babel all spoke the same language, but in the Holy Spirit the disciples spoke to all in their different languages. Let those with ears to hear listen. Amen.