If I had to summarize the whole of scripture in just a few moments, it would go something like this. God created everything good and made humans so that they would take the good creation and make more of it. But we constantly foul it up, forgetting God along the way. So, God sends people to call us back. And for a bit, we get back in line, but soon we’re back on our own way again. So, God sent his only son, Jesus, to show us the way to full, eternal life, but humans couldn’t abide him, so they crucified Jesus. Still, God’s plan kept going. God raised Jesus from the dead, and left this message of grace and resurrection and hope for the church to carry on. The creation is still heading towards its ultimate end in the fullness of time, although along the way, we are still prone to wander.
I’m convinced that one of the greatest challenges of being human is learning how to trust God more than we trust ourselves.
Today is Pentecost, and on this day, we celebrate the start of the church. We almost always read the account from Acts 2 about that day, and it’s often connected to Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. That story wraps up the first section of Genesis. The first few chapters were about God’s good creation, including God’s instruction in 1:28 that humans are to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. That is, they’re to take the good materials of the creation and make more of them. Only, they quickly begin to doubt God’s goodness. They stray from God’s will and face the consequence of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve’s son, Cain, murders his brother Abel. Humans are mired in the mess of their own creating, trusting in themselves more than God.
So, the story moves next to the account of the flood. God grows so repulsed by humanity’s wickedness that God starts over. At the end of that account, as the water recedes and Noah’s family emerges from the ark, God renews this covenant, signified with the rainbow. We then see that God sends Noah’s family out once again to fill the earth. That is, they scatter far and wide.
Which brings us to Babel. You can imagine what it would be like for the generations after the flood. Wouldn’t you want to play it safe? They just survived a world-altering event. Their purpose unifies, as does their language. They see strength in staying close together and in seeing what they can do with their own hands. So, they make bricks and begin building a tall tower. They use bitumen for mortar, which is not normal. Bitumen is waterproof. It’s what the basket is sealed with in Exodus, before baby Moses is placed in the Nile. These folks are worried that another flood might come, so they’re protecting themselves from what God might do to them, a sign of distrust. They are building a tower of certainty to protect themselves. This is self-reliance.
They believe that what they can do together has no need of God’s partnership or participation.
But do you know what presents a real problem for them? Just because they’re trying to build their way out of needing God does not mean that God doesn’t exist or isn’t invested in what people do with their lives and the creation. So, God sees these folks building their tower and intervenes. Sure, it’s a power play, but it is one that is trying to correct them so they get off this path that will lead to destruction.
God confuses their language, making it impossible for them to carry on building their skyscraper. Their speaking is now an issue. Not only that, but God also scatters them from that one spot. That is, God gets them back to what God wanted from them in the first place. They have a unity of purpose — be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it — and now they are in place to live into the scattering — the filling of the earth — that God envisions. That is, part of God’s plan is living into a unity of purpose while spread out everywhere, using our widening diversity as a witness. God corrects them out of love. This is something that God has done countlessly throughout time.
Some of you may have already heard, but a week ago our family grew by one fur ball. This is Obie, short for Oberon. He’s a two-month old English Cream Golden Retriever. As cute as he is — and he’s calendar-level cute — he’s a handful. With the rest of the family still in school for another week, much of Obie’s care fell to me during the day because I can answer emails, prepare for session, and write sermons just about anywhere.
We love Obie. How could we not? But I spent a ton of my time this week correcting Obie. He’s potty training and doing very well, but when he goes inside, I have to correct him. That’s not what he’s supposed to do. He’s a puppy, so his needle-sharp teeth are on everything. It’s a constant effort. “No, Obie. Don’t chew the couch. Chew your toy. No, Obie. My toes are not a toy. No, Obie. Don’t bite Bandit’s tail.”
I correct him because I want him to live his fullest life, and he will not do so if our house is his bathroom and our furniture ends up in shreds. I correct him because I love him. I am redirecting him to things that are beneficial for him and for his family.
The story of the Tower of Babel is another story of how God corrects and helps get a wayward humanity back on track. Only, we know that humans are super good at straying from God’s purposes for them, so for millennia this pattern has repeated of humans rebelling and going off the rails while God finds ways to set things right once again.
Ultimately, this is what God does through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The God we know in Jesus Christ enters the world and all of its messiness and shows us the way to life. Some are attracted to him. Some are indifferent. Some are repulsed by him and even feel threatened. It says something pretty remarkable about humanity that we have it within our capacity to kill Jesus. It also says something remarkable about God that God would still send his only Son out of love for the world, knowing that this was the inevitable result. We see how God loves humans far beyond our deserving in that God pushes past our wickedness and makes a way, once for all, by raising Jesus from the dead.
The Lord is always active in history, shaping things toward God’s created purpose for them.
This finally brings me back to the purpose of today — Pentecost. It’s now been fifty days since God raised Jesus from the dead. (Pentecost means “fifty,” by the way.) Ten days earlier, Jesus told the disciples to remain in Jerusalem until they “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon [them]” (Acts 1:8). So, they waited until the Day of Pentecost when “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”
I learned a new word this week — irruption. This was an irruption of the Spirit into their waiting world. An “eruption” is a violent spewing out of something, like a volcano. An “irruption” is an unexpected invasion into something. Pentecost is the day the Spirit irrupted into the world.
So, the Holy Spirit filled them and empowered them to be witnesses to what God had done in Jesus. What happened at Babel created difficulty in speaking. What happened at Pentecost reversed that and created the possibility of hearing and responding. That is, the scattering — the filling of the earth — that God had in mind continues in how God now made it possible for all people in all places to hear and understand the magnificent work God had done in Jesus Christ.
And so God births the church in this small gathering of waiting disciples. God through the Spirit empowers them to bear witness to the ends of the earth. We didn’t read the whole of Acts 2, but that is precisely what Peter does for the rest of it. Peter, the one who had only recently denied knowing Jesus is now boldly putting into words what God is doing in a way that all can understand. He turns to Scripture to show how this new thing is aligned with God’s plan from the beginning. (In the spirit of Peter, that’s what I’ve been trying to do today.) Peter uses his proclamation to put into words what they’re experiencing. His words create worlds, to borrow a line from the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Which brings me around to the last thing I want to share with you today. Yes, we are gifted with that Pentecostal spirit that enlivens, shapes, and directs the church today in its various forms throughout the world. The church is part of God’s plan to fill the earth — to be scattered far and wide — and to be unified in its purpose to serve Jesus in its many, varied forms. But I want to close today by focusing on the power of our speaking.
We have to be careful with our tongues. (I might add, given our digital world, that we have to also be careful with our fingers and what they post and email.) The book of James is so clear and descriptive about this. “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” James writes. “And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue — a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so” (James 3:5b-10).
I like how Walter Brueggemann puts this. “Language is decisive for the shape and quality of human community. More than anything else, language determines the way in which human persons care for each other. Language shapes the ways in which human communities conduct their business and arrange power. Language is the way we bestow upon each other the gifts of life and death.”
The way our culture and media are shaping how we think it is appropriate to speak and post reveals how right the Bible is when it comes to our tongues and speech. It has become far too easy for us to lash out, to write something cutting but witty, to reduce another person or idea down to a soundbite. Pentecost empowers the church to speak and hear well what God is up to, and when we don’t tame our tongues, we are rebelling against God’s power on display at Pentecost.
The gospel work of the church from Pentecost all the way to today is to build up the world in the love we’ve experienced in Christ. When we’ve flooded our lives with the opposite, it should be no surprise that people have tuned out the church and decided Jesus isn’t worth their time.
Going all the way back to the beginning of the Bible through Pentecost and on to today, the work God has given humans to do unites us under God’s creative purposes for us and scatters us to the ends of the earth to share that love in diverse, winsome, and compelling ways.
It’s this mission that keeps me in the church. It’s what keeps me getting up here week after week, even when it feels fruitless or even when it feels like people still aren’t hearing what I’m saying. It’s what gives me hope even though I know I’ll never have as much influence as the podcasts you listen to, as the cable news you watch, as the talk radio you consume, as the books you read.
In these post-Pentecost days, my prayer is that those tongues of fire might penetrate our lives and cause us to proclaim God’s love to the whole world in all the beautiful and different ways God calls us to do that.
