Pentecost Sunday
June 9, 2019
Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21
The first computer in my house was an Apple IIc. Anyone
remember those? Or have one? You had to insert a floppy disk start-up disk just
to turn it on, and then you could put in the disk for whichever app you wanted
to run. This is pre-internet days, no downloads here. You had to go to Circuit
City or Best Buy or your local computer store to buy the software in person. The
box for “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?” came with a copy of the world
almanac so that you could look up the clues. There was another game we had for
our Apple IIc that I played a lot, the name of which I can’t remember, but one
step was a cryptic message which said, after you solved it, “Variety is the
spice of life.” I never thought much of that as a kid, although I had
experienced much diversity having already lived in Missouri, Texas, Maryland,
and overseas in Egypt by that point in my life. I think I never thought much of
it, because I had lived it, because I
took it as a fact of life, so why did it really need saying? And why was it put
in a kid’s computer game in the 1980s? Turns out that phrase was written by the
English poet William Cowper in his most famous work, “The Task,” published in
1785. “Variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavour.” In a poem whose rambling topics include the
church, pastors, and preachers, William Cowper seems to have also summed up
what happened at Babel and on Pentecost. Variety is the spice of life. Diversity is needed to give flavor to
life. Too often Pentecost is read as a healing of Babel, as if Babel was a
problem to be solved. But as you heard me read to the children in
Babel wasn’t a punishment! That word is nowhere in the story. Instead, God’s
plan was bigger than anyone had dreamed! God’s plan is still bigger than we can
dream or imagine. And variety, or diversity, is not a punishment but a gift from
God. Listen to the story once more, this time from a new translation called The
Voice:
“There
was a time when everyone on the earth spoke the very same language. As many of
these people began moving from the eastern regions into the western part of
Mesopotamia, they settled down on a plain in the land of Shinar. Since stone
was not readily available, they discovered how to make bricks and use tar for
mortar to build their structures.
“People
(to each other): Come on, let’s make bricks out of mud and bake them in the
fire. Then we can build all we want. Let’s go build ourselves a city with a
huge tower that reaches into heaven. That way we will make a name for
ourselves. If we don’t, we’ll run the risk of being scattered all over the
earth.
“The
desire to settle in one place and build a city runs counter to God’s command to
spread out across the earth. They want to make their mark on the world rather
than conform to God’s plan for their lives. They want power and prestige. They
want to ensure that they will not be scattered; that is, they want to choose
their own destiny. But God has a different plan and purpose. God is the One who
determines destiny.
“The
Eternal One came down and took a look at the city and the tower the children of
Adam were building. God was not pleased.
“Eternal
One: Will you look at that! The people are all together on this. With one
language they are able to start this kind of project. This is only the
beginning of what they will do. Soon they will think they can accomplish
anything and everything on their own.
Let’s go down and break this up! If We confuse their language, they won’t be
able to understand each other’s words.
“This
is how the Eternal scattered people from Shinar all across the surface of the
earth. Since they were unable to communicate, they stopped working on the city
and went their separate ways. So this is why the city was called Babel: because
it was there that the Eternal confused the language of all the peoples and
scattered them across the surface of the earth.”
You’ll
notice that the sin wasn’t pride but the myth and delusion of self-sufficiency.
I can do it by myself. When we hear a two year old say it, what do we do as
adults? We laugh, don’t we? It’s cute, and we know the toddler is learning how
to put their shoes on, or whatever the skill may be, and they may or may not be
actually able to do it themselves on this occasion. But they sure want to try.
While much of our United Methodist liturgy comes from the Anglican Church,
because we started as a revival movement within the Church of England, when we
adopted the liturgy to form our own prayer book, we changed a few things, as
you might expect. One thing we did was to shorten the responses in the
baptismal liturgy. The answers in our hymnal all say “I do” or “I will.” In the
Anglican/Episcopal Church, they say, “I will, with God’s help.” I will keep
these vows to love my neighbor, with God’s help. I will resist evil, injustice,
and oppression, with God’s help. When Methodism left England and hopped across
the pond to America, we edited that liturgy with a bit of our American value of
self-sufficiency, and just said, “We will,” implying we can do it by ourselves,
without God. [pause] As if we can keep
our vows by ourselves without any help! You can’t keep your marriage vows by
yourself because there are two people
in a marriage! You can’t keep your baptismal vows or membership vows by
yourself, because in baptism you join God’s family, and in becoming a member of
a local church, you join that congregation. We’re all in this together. We
cannot do it by ourselves, in spite of thinking like the people of Babel, “we
can accomplish anything and everything on our own.” As if we don’t need God.
Another
sin you may have picked up on was the people’s rejection of God’s mandate to
spread over all the earth. By Genesis 11, God has already said this twice. God
says it first in Genesis 1:28, with the instructions to Adam and Eve, “Be
fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and take charge over it.” God
repeats this instruction after the flood in Genesis 9:1. “God blesses Noah and
his family, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the
earth.” It sounds like God is serious about this. Have babies and fill the
earth. But, here in chapter 11, the people have stopped filling the earth.
They’ve found a spot and want to settle down. They don’t want to fill the earth
anymore. Instead, the people want to stay the same and preserve their uniformity.
“They want to make their mark on the world, rather than follow God’s plan for
their lives.” Sometimes the story of the tower of Babel is read as a critique
of empires, which impose one dominant language over the empire in order to
enforce unity and conformity. But God’s plan is bigger than our plan,
especially if our plan takes God out of the picture and is directly contrary to
what God has told you to do.
You
know who else did something completely contrary to what God told him to do?
Jonah. God told him to go to Ninevah, the capital of the Babylonian Empire.
Jonah immediately hopped a ship going the exact opposite direction. God caused
a storm on the sea, the sailors threw Jonah overboard in order to calm the sea,
and after spending three days and nights in the belly of a whale, kinda like Pinocchio,
when Jonah found himself back on dry land again, God again said, “Go to
Ninevah.” And that time, Jonah went. He still wasn’t happy about it, but he
went. The people at Babel said, “Let’s build a city and a tower so we won’t be
scattered.” God said, “Uh, no. Scatter.” And you can almost imagine God
flicking a finger scattering them off the tower and around the world.
God
values our diversity. Otherwise Pentecost would have been everyone hearing the
Gospel in one universal language, not
everyone hearing the Gospel in their own
language. Pentecost isn’t a reversal
of Babel. It isn’t a healing. It’s a fulfillment.
Go, fill the whole earth. And now that you’ve done that, hear the good news of
Jesus Christ, each in your own native tongue. You can go a lot of places around
the world today and speak English. But you know what the lingua franca used to
be less than 100 years ago? French. And at another point in history it was
Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Variety means we’re not all the same.
Diversity means we get to learn about other ways of doing things, that aren’t
better or worse, just different. Different understandings, different
approaches, different opinions, different ways of seeing the world. Diversity
should not mean you have to build walls or put up your defenses or learn how to
argue or how to protect yourself. Instead, diversity is God’s gift to us all. We’re
not all the same, Pentecost kept those differences, didn’t erase them, but
embraced the fact that God has made us all so wonderfully different. Thank God
for that.
