June 6, 2019 – The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday
© 2019 Evan D. Garner
The problem with Babel wasn’t the tower. Although the people had planned an impressive structure, at the end of the story, we learn that the city was left unfinished with no mention of the tower, which suggests that it wasn’t integral to their plans. Nor was the problem the people’s desire to make a name for themselves—at least not directly. We may be tempted to interpret their efforts as an attempt to strive with God, but, when God came down to see what they were up to, God did not take issue with their desire to erect a monument to themselves. Instead, God named the real problem when God said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language.”
As strange as it sounds, the problem with Babel was the unanimity behind it. As Rabbi Shai Held wrote, twice in first ten chapters of Genesis—once in the creation story (1:28) and once following the flood narrative (9:1)—God blesses humanity with the command, “Be fertile, increase, and fill the earth.” But, in the story of Babel, we read that humanity refused to accept that vision because being “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” filled them with fear. “What they most fear,” Held wrote, “is what God most wants.” [1] Of course, human beings can accomplish much more if they are all of one mind, one opinion, one language, one vocabulary, but how will they account for the beauty of God’s diversity when all individuality is sacrificed for the sake of uniformity? How can their labors be of God when there is no room for a minority voice?
The Day of Pentecost was not a moment that undid Babel. It was a moment that embraced it. On that day, the disciples were all together in one place. After several encounters with the risen Jesus, the disciples, who had been so slow to believe, had finally embraced the truth of the resurrection. They had joyfully bid farewell to Jesus as he ascended into the heavens. Seeking God’s guidance, they had reconstituted the fellowship of the twelve by choosing Matthias to take Judas’ place. Everything had come together. They were all set, safely behind closed doors, until the Holy Spirit showed up. Like a violent wind, the power of the Almighty filled the house where they were, threatening to tear the building apart. Manifest in tongues of fire, the Spirit descended and rested upon each of them, giving them the ability to speak in other languages: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs”—all of them heard the disciples speaking in their native languages. Before Peter got up to address the crowd, one of the disciples leaned over to whisper to his colleague: “You know what this means, don’t you? A road trip.”
God’s vision of the end—of the fulfillment of all things—is not a totalitarian theocracy in which all people are assimilated into one. It is the church—the body of Christ—being given the ability to recognize and respect the wonderful diversity of the nations—the entire breadth of humanity—who all hear and understand and know in their own language that they, too, are created in God’s image and are loved by God, who calls them God’s own. The salvation of the world is all peoples coming together not to sacrifice their identity for the sake of the collective but to represent the fullest identity of God because of their diversity. And the Holy Spirit gives the church the power to step outside itself so that it might be possible. The refreshing uniqueness of the Christian gospel is that God loves all people and all peoples as God’s own, and Pentecost is the moment when the church begins to recognize it.
It seems that we have all of that figured out here at St. Paul’s. We know and proclaim the power of God’s unconditional love. Our worship is as beautiful and meaningful as that of any congregation. We care more about serving others than serving ourselves. If only everyone could come and see what we have and what we know. Come to think of it, why haven’t they? Why isn’t everyone a member of St. Paul’s? Why isn’t everyone an Episcopalian? We are God’s gift to this community and to the world. Shouldn’t everyone come and be like us? Maybe we should build a city for ourselves, with a high tower that stretches to the heavens—high enough to see everyone and everything in order to be absolutely certain that they are all doing it our way, the right way, God’s way.
God’s will is to bless us by scattering us to the ends of the earth. The instinct to celebrate who and what we are always leads to the temptation to think that we are good and that the rest of the world could be good, too, if they would just become like us. The thought of being dispersed and diffused throughout the whole world fills us with fear. We don’t want to risk losing the thing we know and love best—our own identity. We, too, are most afraid of the thing that God wants most. But that thing is the original blessing. It is the fullness of God, which can only be known in the exquisite diversity of humanity—all made in God’s image.
The Holy Spirit comes not to bring us together but to fling us apart—to empower us to recognize God’s salvation within the peoples and languages and cultures and traditions that are most different from our own. For too long the church has been a monument to Christians who look and think and act like us—a white, European, colonial beacon to the nations that requires that they find our God on our terms. But that kind of approach to God isn’t evangelism; it’s an assault on the one who has made all people in God’s image. It’s the kind of theology that denies the goodness of other human beings. It’s the kind of theology that is used by white Christians to justify slavery and lynching and segregation and mass incarceration and the shooting of unarmed black men. God is bigger than that. God has always been bigger than that. And we must be, too.
The only thing that can wrap its arms around the diversity of the human race is the one who made us, the one who shows us that we belong to God not because we are the same but because we are different, the one blesses us by scattering us to the ends of the earth. May God send the Holy Spirit to scatter us so that we, too, might finally see the truth that God has always seen—that salvation is all people made by God and loved by God.
[1] “The Babel story is about the dangers of uniformity,” The Christian Century, 24 October 2017. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/the-babel-story-is-about-dangers-uniformity; accessed 8 June 2019.
I really like this one!
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