23 May 2010
Genesis 11.1-9; Acts 2.1-21
The Day of Pentecost—with Easter and Christmas, the third major festival on the Christian calendar, and the only one that hasn’t been corrupted by secular customs and commercialism. There’s not much of a market for Pentecost cards, even among Christians! Secular culture doesn’t quite know what to do with the Holy Spirit anyway. And so the Day of Pentecost remains ours!
I chose this morning to read the alternative set of lessons, which included the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel. It is such a wonderful story, and the only time it shows up in our lectionary is as the alternative lesson on Pentecost. But if the story is fairly well-known, perhaps the connection to Pentecost isn’t so obvious. In brief, the Christian Church has always understood Pentecost as the undoing, the reversal, of what happened at the Tower of Babel. At the Tower of Babel, languages were confused; at Pentecost, languages were understood. At Babel, the people were scattered; at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit began the process of gathering all nations and peoples back together into the community of Christ. So we might say that in the story of Tower of Babel, we get a view of what went wrong with the world, what got distorted and pushed out of shape by human sin and pride. When we have understood that, then we begin to see how the Holy spirit puts things back together among us.
In a sense, both stories are about community. In the one, human beings try to build a community that excludes God. They work on this tower, intending to reach into heaven and thereby offer them security. With this tower built, they think, no one will be able to “scatter them abroad.” But in fact trying to do that without God simply leads to disintegration and destruction.
I’m especially struck by the phrase God uses in this narrative. Observing the prideful schemes of the people, he says, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” Walter Brueggeman points out that the word translated here as “understand” can just as well be translated as “listen to.” Now that is an interesting possibility! In this effort to build themselves a city without God, a tower that will reach to heaven, what results is God confusing them so that they will not listen to one another. Not just that they can’t understand, but that they cannot listen. They refuse to listen to God, and they end up refusing to listen to one another.
What remarkable repercussions that has had in human history, and even in our own lives! Refusing or failing to listen is not something that only happened long ago, but a continuing problem for human beings, manifested in so many ways.
Consider international relations. How difficult we find it to listen to other cultures, other nations! We assume that everyone in the world thinks the way we do, has the same values we do; but of course that isn’t true. And when conflicts break out, it is often almost impossible for nations really to listen to one another.
We are preparing for a trip to Turkey in July, and I’ve been doing some background reading about the Ottoman Empire, which finally fell apart in the early 20th century, just as Europe was descending into the chaos of World War I. One stunning part of the story is just how stubbornly the British government refused to understand what was happening in Turkey. They had a few diplomats who really got it, who understood the language and customs and politics; but back home the British government simply refused to listen to what these diplomats were telling them.
The same thing seems to be true of different groups in our own country. The divisions between us—racial, ethnic, but also political, moral, religious divisions—the walls are so high we often can’t even listen to one another.
A specific example: For quite some time there has been tension in Los Angeles between African Americans and Korean Americans. One complaint sometimes heard from blacks is that when they shop in Korean stores, the shopkeeper will just plunk the change on the counter instead of handing it to the customer. To the black customer, it seems like an insult—like the shopkeeper is reluctant even to touch the customer because of his race. But in the Korean culture, it is quite rude to touch another person unnecessarily. What is intended as politeness is read as prejudice or arrogance. No one is right or wrong; the problem arises because neither group can really listen to the other.
Maybe you’ve heard this story before, but I can’t pass it up here. A certain man who lived in a major Southern city took his five-year-old son for a walk in the park each day. They would pass by a statue of Robert E. Lee, mounted on horseback, and each day they would say, “Good afternoon, Robert E. Lee.” The man received a job transfer to another city, and so the day before they left, he and his son took a final walk. This day the boy said, as they passed the statue, “Goodbye, Robert E. Lee. We’re moving, and we won’t be seeing you again.” And then as they walked away, the boy asked his father, “Daddy, who is that man who’s always sitting on top of Robert E. Lee?” Human communication is difficult stuff! We are more likely to misunderstand than to understand. And because we don’t want to admit that, we very often simply don’t spend much energy listening to one another.
Now back to the Holy Spirit. The Small Catechism says that the Holy Spirit “calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies.” Those four words all have to do with listening! First, we say the Holy Spirit calls us. The implication is that through the Holy Spirit, we hear God. We listen to God. And listening to God is the first step in listening to one another.
Most of us listen primarily to ourselves. Our own needs, our own desires, echo loudly in our hearts and minds. But when the Holy Spirit calls us, it shifts our attention away from ourselves. We begin to listen to God. And in learning to listen to God, we open ourselves to listen to each other.
Then we say the Holy Spirit gathers us. At the Tower of Babel, human beings were scattered. They no longer lived in a single community. They became isolated one from another. But when the Holy Spirit came, the process of gathering began. Through the Holy Spirit, we are no longer isolated individuals, but we are gathered into a new community. And in that community, as the Pentecost story shows, we begin really to hear one another for the first time, in spite of our differences, in spite of our past refusal to listen. Now we hear, for we have been gathered together.
And the Holy Spirit enlightens us. I think that has to do with listening as well. One of the works of the Holy Spirit is to turn our hearts toward one another—to enlighten us by allowing us to listen to one another. In this community into which we’ve been gathered, we can listen to one another’s hearts, hear one another’s feelings, share freely and lovingly who we are and what we need, our hopes and our fears. That’s part of what “enlightenment” means. It is realizing that we don’t need to be afraid of one another, that we can be honest and open with each other, because here, in the gathered community, we listen to one another with love.
And then we say the Holy Spirit sanctifies us. That word simply means that the Spirit makes us holy, makes us more and more like Christ, brings us more and more into his image. And that, too, has to do with listening, because Christ is the one who listens carefully to us, who hears not just the words we say but what is in our hearts. If we are growing into Christ’s image, then that kind of careful listening to one another is part of that growth.
Amazed and astonished, the crowds asked, “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” When the Holy Spirit comes, we are enabled to listen—as different as we may be, as scattered as we may be—here, in the gathered people of God, the confusion is taken away by the Holy Spirit. We listen to each other. We learn to listen. Come, Holy Spirit, come! Burn away our stubborn selfishness, and turn our hearts toward one another!
Pastor Richard O. Johnson
Peace Lutheran Church
Grass Valley, CA
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