Collect: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Lessons: Gen 11:1-9; Psalm 104:25-35,37; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-27
Welcome to St. Mary’s church on this Feast of Pentecost. This morning I’m going to try to articulate a way of looking at Pentecost that’s maybe a little different from what you’ve heard before. But first, let’s look briefly at the history and significance of the feast.
Pentecost has its roots in the Jewish festival of Shavuot. Jews celebrate Shavuot fifty days after the first day of Passover. This year is a little bit unusual in that the first day of Passover and Easter were on the same day, which means our Jewish friends are also celebrating Shavuot today. When Jerusalem still had a temple, Shavuot was a pilgrimage feast for bringing the first-fruits of the harvest to the temple, a thanksgiving for the bounty of the land. But when the temple was destroyed, Shavuot became mainly a celebration of God’s gift of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. These two seemingly unrelated themes, the fruitfulness of the land and obeying the Torah, are interwoven throughout Scripture. You’ll hear that interweaving several times this morning.
In the Christian celebration of Pentecost the background is not mainly the agricultural festival but the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, with the result that everybody is speaking languages they don’t know but that are recognized by the crowd. What is it that they’re talking about in all these languages? What was the message that was so important that the Holy Spirit wanted each person to hear it in their own language? The answer appears in Acts 2:11. Thousands of pilgrims heard their own languages in the apostles’ mouths recounting “the mighty works of God.” “The mighty works of God” is a stand-in for the whole sacred story of God’s people, culminating in the resurrection of Jesus and, more immediately, in the gift of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost can be viewed as the crowning moment for the season of Easter. The whole point of Holy Week and Easter is the salvation of the world, and Pentecost is when that really begins to happen. At Easter the good news was limited to Jesus’ immediate followers, but with Pentecost it starts to look global.
Shavuot and Pentecost take place fifty days after Passover and Easter. The number 50 is symbolic: seven weeks of seven days each are 49 days. The end of the 7th week was yesterday and today is the beginning of the eighth week. Two passages in Scripture will help to understand the symbolism. First, in the creation story God creates the world in six days, rests on the Sabbath, and then starts something new on the eighth day. The eighth day is the day of going forth into the world. Second, in Leviticus God tells Israel that every fifty years would be a Jubilee year: all debts are cancelled, all slaves are released, and property that has been sold reverts to the original owners or their heirs. So it seems clear to me that the symbolism of 50 is about a cycle of history leading up to a a reset that enables a new start. In Jerusalem they heard the story of the “mighty acts of God” on Pentecost, and they no doubt realized that God was doing something new — something in continuity with all those works of salvation but beginning a new phase.
This brings me to the two stories that were our lessons this morning. The first is the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11, and the second is the story of the first Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. At first glance it seems that Acts 2 is the antithesis of the Babel story. In Babel, so this reading goes, communication starts out easy and becomes impossible. God seems to find building a city to be threatening, and so confuses their language. I think this reading is either shallow or just plain incorrect.
Here’s what I think is a better reading. The Babel story is the first major story in Genesis after the story of Noah, in which God reiterated the command given to Adam and Eve that they “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” The story is set in the “plain of Shinar,” which is the Hebrew name for what we now call southern Iraq, the homeland of the Babylonian Empire. When the city is named Babel on account of the confusion of languages there, every ancient reader would understand that this is the Babylon that spawned the empire that destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. Maybe there’s a little backhanded snark in identifying Babylon with confusion. When God comes down to see the city and its tower, He finds that their unity and solidarity, empowered by a common language, is preventing them from carrying out the divine command.
Now God’s commandment that they “be fruitful and multiply” is hardly a restriction on their freedom and happiness. He commands them to make babies and enjoy God’s creation! It’s a joyful commandment whose sole reason for existence is to promote a human flourishing. But the Shinarites’ cohesion as a group interferes with the command, interferes with their ability to go forth into the world, to embrace and contribute to its bounty. There’s a reciprocity and a synergy between the fruitfulness of the land, the fruitfulness of the animals, and the fruitfulness of humans. Together they help to create the bountiful world that God is making. That task is important to God because people are important to God, so God opposes any obstacle that stands in the way of it.
What we read in the Babel story is not mere unity but a pathological unanimity that prevents the people from embracing God’s living world. Maybe they find the wide world too fearsome. Maybe that’s why they want to build a “city and a tower.” Cities and towers in the ancient near east were not about wealth and convenience and entertainment; they were about defense. Cities and towers were military installations. The tower “reaching to the sky” and the desire to “make a name for ourselves so that we won’t be scattered abroad” is the language of the Mesopotamian empires worrying about their security. At first blush the story gives the idea that they’re all just working happily together as friends to build a nice little monument to themselves. But this has a dark side that isn’t mentioned in the text yet surely would have been in the minds of ancient readers: public works like these are built not through common, egalitarian effort but through enforced and slave labor. The language of unity is a code, in their world just as so often in ours, for everyone rallying behind some powerful person in what they want to do. So God’s confusion of the languages and the consequent destruction of that pathological unity is an act of grace. It is a judgment against the coercive regime in favor of the people.
Our Epistle reading, the story of the first Christian Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, is a deliberate inversion of the Tower of Babel story. In Acts, the apostles are all gathered together on the 50th day after Jesus’ resurrection and Jesus, as promised, sends the Holy Spirit. Divided “tongues” “as of fire” come down and rest on each person, enabling them to speak the truth in many languages. In the Babel story, the diversity of language is the divine gift that sets humans back on the way of blessing rather than allowing them to stay entrenched in their morbid defensiveness. In the Acts story the many languages are simply a fact; the miracle, the gift from God to the Church, is the ability to speak and understand one another despite the many languages, by means of them, and to begin telling the good news everywhere. In other words, in both stories, in Babel as well as in Jerusalem, God gives the gift of diversity. Hold onto that thought.
Returning to the idea that the Feast of Pentecost is the climax of the Easter story, let’s unpack that a bit. Did you catch what Jesus said in the Gospel reading? That the disciples would soon start doing “greater works than these” and that whatever they ask in Jesus’ name He would do. John’s Jesus ties this promise to “the Paraclete,” which means both “comforter” and “helper.” This is John’s distinctive vocabulary for the Holy Spirit; no other NT writer uses it. The idea here is clearly that the Paraclete is the source of the apostles’ miraculous power that would go beyond even that of Jesus. Obviously Jesus’ eye-catching miracles, like healing blind people or calming storms at sea, aren’t really part of our experience today. So we have to entertain the possibility that the “greater works” he refers to are of a different kind. What if language — and languages! — are also miraculous? In John’s gospel Jesus is the Word, He’s the message of love that God has always been speaking in the world, now embodied in an actual person. But Jesus only spoke two, maybe three languages, and He could only give His love to a few followers, just because of the limitations of being one person in one body. Jesus’ followers, though, were becoming more numerous daily, so their ability to spread the good news exceeded his. The same goes for their ability to bring God’s love to the world. These miracles are not big attention-getters like some other miracles, but they are the real power from God that enables us to do God’s work.
Greater things, even than Jesus. Sometimes I wonder if we lose track of the fact that Jesus was a real human being just as we are. We get caught up in talking about His wonder-working and his exaltation to divinity. We find it impossible to believe that He really did think we would be doing greater things than He did. Of course He doesn’t say that we’ll doing it by our own power; He says it would be by the power of the Paraclete. In giving the Spirit, Jesus gives the capacity to discern the Truth, to speak it and live it, so that God’s will is done on earth just as it is in heaven. He gives the ability to understand and love those who are different from us. That’s the miracle, the “greater things” that we must do to help complete God’s work in creation and in Christ’s resurrection.
The world of the early Christians was, like ours, a messed up place. Everywhere people tell us that what we need is more unity. By that I think most of them mean “more love” or something like that. But a demand for unity as such, even when it is couched in seemingly friendly terms, is in some degree coercive. Love exists not in unity but in diversity. To love someone because they’re the same as me isn’t love, it’s narcissism. Only when someone is different from me can love develop. Diversity is dangerous only to those who insist on conformity. How do we resist the forces that seek to train us all into a single controllable mold, that try to enlist us in projects that actually do us and our neighbors harm? How do we resist the forces in the Church and all our institutions that want to circumscribe our thoughts and convictions? We take our many voices into the world, glorifying God and freeing people from their bondage, living joyfully in the refreshing diversity that is God’s gift to us. Because diversity is the soil in which love for one another can grow. I’m going to do what I can to declare that there is room for radical diversity of every kind, that it is a gift much to be sought, in the Body of Christ. Now, on day 50, we have another Pentecost, another invitation to go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit to “do the work God has given us to do.” Pray that God will make us increasingly diverse; pray that God will increase our love for one another. Jesus promises that He will ask the Father, and it will be done.
