PENTECOST
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Readings: Genesis 11: 1-9 and Acts 2: 1-21
“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.” The opening verse of the reading from Genesis today. It sounds an idyllic world, and walking through the streets of even Worcester one sometimes wishes the whole world had one language and the same words. How schools in multi-cultural areas manage, with children coming in with numerous first languages – not English – one can only wonder.
I like the story of the Tower of Babel, but, like much material in early Genesis, it is a myth, and – as I was saying in the bible talk a couple of weeks ago – an aetiological myth. Let me attempt an explanation. Now when I say ‘myth’, I don’t mean a story that isn’t at all true, which is the way most people use the term today. A myth is a story that contains a deep truth, or perhaps truths, rather than being exactly truthful. An aetiological myth is a story employed to explain how things are, how things came to be. So the question arising in people’s minds when Genesis was written, and probably a good time before that, was “How is it that all people don’t speak the same language?”
Now, just as in the account of the Garden of Eden, in today’s passage God is not thought of as a resident in our earthly realm, but a visitor coming from time to time to see how humans are carrying out the divine commission. On this inspection occasion, God finds that, once more, humans are challenging his authority by attempting ‘to make a name for themselves.’ God seems not to like this potential threat to bridge earth and heaven. So he takes action to prevent it, by confusing language so making it impossible for humans to plot together. They can’t even finish off building that tower.
Language is one of our most precious possessions. It enables us to share thought and experiences with other humans. But we know only too well that words can divide as well as unite. Misunderstanding is almost as easy as understanding. And the ancient myth of the Tower of Babel seems to say that human pride and ambition make it impossible for us to understand others. Maybe it says too that technological achievement depends on a proper humility.
I mentioned a similarity with the Garden of Eden story. In both cases, human beings try to get above themselves, and to short-circuit the authority of God. These stories are an attempt to explain how sin invaded our world.
But there is a wonderful reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel on the day of Pentecost. Somehow, in that outpouring of God’s Spirit in Jerusalem, people all heard the same thing. Language was no longer a barrier, as it had been made at Babel. Communications are now open, as they never had been before, between God and humans, between heaven and earth – and between humans. People weren’t scattered because of sin, as at Babel, but brought together by God’s Holy Spirit. And, as Peter tells the crowd in Jerusalem that day, this is all because of Jesus of Nazareth.
We don’t know how it was that all those nationalities visiting cosmopolitan Jerusalem heard the good news, but somehow the disciples got their message across ‘as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ Either the disciples were suddenly given the gift to speak in other tongues, or the visitors to Jerusalem were given the gift of understanding what was said in another language. It was an understandable language they heard, as opposed to the phenomena of ‘speaking in tongues’, which involves talking in an unknown language. Perhaps the comprehensiveness of what the apostles said depended on the receptiveness of the hearer as well as on the language spoken. But Peter was clear that the extension of God’s rule to the whole world meant that all humankind would have free access to the Spirit. No one who ‘called on the name of the Lord’ would be excluded from the promise.
Maybe another lesson from this reversal of the Tower of Babel story is the truth that God’s Spirit can unite across difference. Surely a very pertinent message of Pentecost, and so relevant today, is that we should celebrate difference, and expect pluralism. Almost certainly, the community for which Luke, the author of Acts, wrote, was a mixed one – different in nationality and religious heritage. Today in a very divided world we see so many places where difference is seen as a threat, with nations turning in on themselves rather than looking outwards, and with some world leaders seemingly encouraging division rather than seeking to break it down.
And we have to guard against the move towards fundamentalism and the desire that everyone who subscribes to a religion should believe exactly the same thing and behave in the same way. We still see it in parts of Anglicanism today, and we see it too in Islam. The Church had its dissenting voices from the very start. And cultures across the globe vary in how they understand the world, in human relationships and in lifestyles.
There are many different Christian viewpoints, and I daresay quite a few here in church today. That doesn’t stop us from being Christian or behaving in a Christian way. We are all called on to exercise judgement, in the sense of trying to decide things wisely. But we are never to exercise judgement in the sense of passing sentence on people as people – however differently they see things. That kind of judgment is God’s prerogative.
So let us celebrate the excitement that Pentecost brings, and give thanks that the Spirit was poured out on diverse kinds of people, as still happens today. Let us celebrate difference, and be prepared to consider another point-of-view as valid, even if we hold fast to our own opinions. We each have our own experience of God, of Jesus and the Spirit. But there may be other experiences of them, just as real, just as valid, but that are not the same as mine.
We sometimes sing that wonderful hymn ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’, by F.W. Faber. I’ve discovered that Frederick Faber started life as an Evangelical; but came under the influence of the Oxford Movement and particularly John Henry Newman, and moved over to be a Roman Catholic. He travelled quite a bit, and wrote a book ‘Sights and Thoughts among Foreign People.’ No doubt he had experiences that made him wonder about differences in culture.
Some of his words in that hymn ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ are very pertinent to what we’ve been thinking about. Here are some of them: “For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind / and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind….But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own / and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own….There is plentiful redemption in the blood that has been shed….There is grace enough for thousands….there is room for fresh creations.”
May we be open to where the Spirit is leading us, furthering the wideness of God’s kingdom; not showing the self-justification and arrogance of the builders of the Tower of Babel, but bending our hearts towards God’s will for us, and becoming that place ‘wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.’