"Babel Revisited"

Genesis 11:1-9

Acts 2:1-21

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

May 27, 2007

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

Like Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost seems to be yet another time to celebrate in the life of the church. On this Pentecost Sunday, I want us to look a bit deeper, beyond the miracle of Pentecost back to the events of Babel. But I am concerned that we don’t know enough about the situation of Babel to truly understand Pentecost. Or maybe better put, we understand the situation of Babel so much that we cannot understand Pentecost.

Last year’s blockbuster film Babel was a film about people misunderstanding each other. It seemed that the characters misunderstood each other whether or not they spoke the same language. Sometimes language is a lot more complex than the way we form our words. There is the language of the tongue, the heart, the language of religion of culture of prejudice. This is all a part of Babel.

So I invite you to indulge me for a few minutes this morning as I lead you through the stories of Babel and Pentecost. Let’s see what looks familiar and what doesn’t. And maybe in the end, we can actually capture a little bit of that Pentecost Spirit.

In Genesis, the story is that people were multiplying at a great rate. They were a fine and wonderful people. But they were also a scared people. They were afraid of being scattered to the farthest reaches of the known world. So they decided to build a huge city, a fortress for themselves and for their God.

God saw that they were one people and had only one language.

God saw how huge they were and it seems from the Biblical text that God was a little intimidated by all of this. Maybe intimidated is not the right word, but God was concerned about the people thinking too much of themselves.

God was concerned about the hubris of the people speaking for God.

God was concerned about the possibility of the people not learning anything new since they already seemed to be a nice homogeneous community. So God decided to add diversity to the mix.

God made it so people did not understand one another. The people stopped building that great city and they scattered themselves over the earth.

Their diversity made it either impossible or highly unlikely that they would work together again.

Ever since, Babel has come to represent individualism. The nature of capitalism comes from Babel. Each individual has the right to make a profit. Each individual has the right to better themselves.

Baptists believe in a kind of Babel inspired theology.

It’s the part of our theology that says every individual has the right to make their own determination of the interpretation of scripture (with the Holy Spirit as the guide and the community as the sounding board) and the conduct of your soul.

Our Babel component is lived out in individual spirituality and an arrogance that says "I have the only right answer."

Individuality speaks its own language. Since it is so personal, it cannot be experienced by another.

Individual spirituality is one way Babel lives today.

Our Babel component is our first-worldness, our materialism our economic and military domination.

Our Babel component is everything that had built up the Berlin wall, the Israel/Palestine wall, the US/Mexico wall, the disputes between Pakistan and India, the former rifts in Ireland and Northern Ireland, the plethora of Baptist denominations which see unity only by throwing others out. Our Babel component is the fact that most Americans can only speak one language and we expect others to learn ours.

We are addicted to Babel. We grew up believing that Babel is the God of true spirituality. Rugged individualism is the stuff of Babel. Individual thought is the stuff of Babel.

Babel isn’t all bad. From our Babel component we get cultural diversity. We get to push ourselves outside of our own understandings. We get humor and most things that are fun in this world.

But Babel is also what makes injustice thrive.

Babel is what makes a distinction between rich and poor.

Babel is what makes people think they can own other people.

Babel is what makes people think they can condemn other people.

Babel is what makes enemies.

Babel is what makes wars to happen.

Babel is often lived out in individual and corporate sin, because we tend not to look to God, but to ourselves for the ultimate answers. And what we end up with is confusion. None of us speak the same language anymore. We all have a Babel component.

Pentecost is a snapshot of the opposite. The Holy Spirit comes to everyone, the intellectual and the unsophisticated, the committed and the apathetic, the Jew and the Gentile, the fundamentalist and the pagan, the man, the woman and those in between. And for an instant, they all speak the same language.

The people on the Titanic, the rich and the poor all knew the experience that changed their lives. It was an equal opportunity iceberg. The economic and ethnic diversity on the ship for an instant was eradicated by the fact that they all experienced the iceberg and their oceanic cruise was to come to an end. After a moment of Pentecost, they reverted to familiar Babel by making distinctions, rich vs. poor, women vs. men, and so on.

In the early church, there was much confusion as to who was to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul talks about the different gifts that we have and that some have received the gift of tongues, some have received the gifts of prophecy, still others have received the gift of teaching while others have the gift of evangelism. They revisited Babel by trying to declare which gift of the Spirit was the best one.

But on the feast of Pentecost, they left Babel behind. Fifty days after the death and resurrection of Jesus, all the people were gathered in the holy city of Jerusalem. The scripture says that the Holy Spirit came like a rushing wind that filled the house where everyone was sitting. This windy and fiery spirit got inside each person gathered there and they began to understand one another. The Spirit’s presence manifested itself as people no longer let the barriers of class and culture or even language set them apart.

People who had never understood each other had aha moments and for an instant, everyone was on the same page. Now that was a different kind of church.

They started to believe that their sons and their daughters would proclaim God’s message.

Young people started seeing visions.

Old people started dreaming dreams.

There is something about the Holy Spirit which calls and causes us to go across the lines in order to understand people from a different situation, a different religion, a different culture.

Right after Pentecost, the early church changed the way they did things. They got rid of their class distinctions. They held all of their money together and gave it out as people needed it. The kairos of God came and they saw the world in a different way. The Spirit moved among them and they no longer saw each other as people to be suspicious of, but as fellow children of God. They had a new freedom, and chance to be a different kind of community. They didn’t have to go back to Babel.

It would not last. Babel was too familiar. A few short chapters later in the book of Acts, the early church fought against each other and said that it was better for the new foreign converts of be circumcised and stick to the tired old dietary laws of the Jewish culture.

Here we are as children of Pentecost and children of Babel. We long for the ideal of Pentecost, but we revisit the comfort and predictability of Babel.

We come from very different walks of life, most of us. We are different ages, different genders, and different affectional orientations. We have achieved different educational levels. Different life experiences shape our beings. Sometimes when we talk to each other, it is like we are talking in different languages. We live in Babel. We work in Babel. We breathe Babel. We are the children of Babel.

But we are also the children of Pentecost. We know of the power of the Holy Spirit, which can come down and make believers out of us. What we all long for is the breakthrough of God. That is what makes all of this worthwhile. That’s what makes all of what we do mean something. It is the fact that the breakthrough of God happens. Those kairos moments when we know that the Holy Spirit has broken down all of our barriers.

I have seen it happen here.

I saw it five and a half years ago, when we were all gathered in grief and horror on September 11^th and we held each other tight in this sanctuary.

I see it each year on All Saints Day when we ring the bells representing those who have died, remembering that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

I have seen it on Christmas Eve when we hold our candles singing Silent Night and witnessing to the power of the light of God amidst the darkness and the bitter cold of our world.

I have seen it when we have used our gifts at the Cabarets when we celebrate the gifts we have, when we mix laughter and tears and are surprised by the gifts of the Spirit within this congregation.

I have seen it when we celebrated Lynn Welton’s Ordination and held each other close as the events of that ordination made us unwelcome in this region and welcome in a new region of American Baptists.

I have seen it when we liturgically explored the resurrection of Mary Magdalen during Lent a year ago.

I saw it when we heard the voices of the victims of Sexual trafficking in the production of Body & Sold.

I see it when we serve meals at Loaves and Fishes.

I see it when we create and give out prayer shawls to those in need. They mean so much to their recipients.

When we experience these events, we are of one mind. We all speak the same language. And for a while, we do what redemptive communities do, we help people in their healing.

These Pentecost experiences don’t always last. They don’t last because we have a strong Babel component which causes us to confuse our language and get everything mixed up.

Church is at its best when it makes it possible to recognize the breakthrough of God. When we leave our Babel component behind and we begin to see the possibilities of community together. For each time that happens, Pentecost happens again.

Sisters and brothers, Pentecost is the birthday of the church, because it is the one time that the people of the early church left behind their Babel component and risked being community one for another.

Pentecost is not everyone understanding one language.

Pentecost is everyone understanding everyone’s language and that event, that breakthrough of God, making everyone wanting to do community in a new way.

What we need to cling to is God’s ever changing and ever renewing Spirit of gentleness, challenge and understanding. When we revisit Babel, which we will, let us also seek to revisit Pentecost and experience that unity, inspiration and understanding that makes God’s presence so obvious.