Pentecost 2006

31-PEN-R-C-2006
Acts 2:1-21
James McTyre
Lake Hills Presbyterian Church
June 4, 2006

Pentecost is where God translates the words of the disciples into all kinds of different languages.
To some people it sounds like drunken babble.
But to a lot of folk, it sounds like the work of the Holy Spirit.
God gives the disciples the gift of different languages.
And, God gives the people of different languages the gift to hear.
Pentecost is reminiscent of another story in the Bible, the Tower of Babel, where God curses the world by confusing its talk.
But at Pentecost, instead of cursing the world, God blesses the world.
God translates the Holy Spirit so anyone and everyone can understand the message.

In Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message, he tells the story of Babel like this.
From Genesis 11, verses 1-9.
At one time, the whole Earth spoke the same language. It so happened that as they moved out of the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled down.
They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and fire them well.” They used brick for stone and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come let’s build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches Heaven. Let’s make ourselves famous so we won’t be scattered here and there across the Earth.”
God came down to look over the city and the tower those people had built.
God took one look and said, “One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next – they’ll stop at nothing! Come, we’ll go down and garble their speech so they won’t understand each other.”
Then God scattered them from there all over the world. And they had to quit building the city. That’s how it came to be called Babel, because God turned their language into “babble.” From there God scattered them all over the world.

Pentecost is kind of Babel in reverse.
According to the legend of Babel, we got our different languages when people came together to worship their own ingenuity.
They decided they’d build towers so high they’d almost touch heaven.
God came down to survey the project, and said, “Good Lord. If they can do this, there’ll be no stopping the little devils.”
So God garbled their speech.
God gave them cell phones with limited coverage.
They spent all their time stepping to the side and saying, “Can you hear me now?”
God gave them the Internet and started forwarding jokes to them. And chain emails saying, “If you don’t send this to five friends, thy loins shalt be cursed.”
God gave them addictive TV shows, like “24” and “Law and Order”, “CSI” and “Lost.”
God gave them yell, I mean talk radio, so they could freely air their opinions carefully based on other people’s opinions, and learn to talk about people instead of to them.
God gave them congresses – to debate bills over which languages are official and which languages aren’t, instead of increasing funding for education in any language.
And you know what?
The people liked it.
Even though the Bible says God scattered the people over all the earth, God didn’t have to do that.
The people pretty much did that one on their own.
They invented barbed wire, and security walls.
They started calling each other new names – “alien”, “foreigner”, “economic refugee” – and a lot of other, less-flattering names that can’t be repeated here.
And you have to wonder.
Did God look down from heaven – does God look down from heaven – and say, “Y’all cut it out! I didn’t mean to garble you that much!”?

I did some work a couple of years ago with a small church in a “changing” neighborhood.
They were trying to figure out what to do to attract new members.
They didn’t like my suggestion – which was, “Learn Spanish.”
(It would have worked.)
Go to your local Wal-Mart, Home Depot or Lowes – which are pretty much the only stores our family ever goes to.
Every sign, every label, every set of instructions is printed in at least two different languages.
Nearly every item you buy is made in a country other than this one – usually China – where they don’t speak much English, Spanish, or French, but they sure know how to sell products to the people who do.
It’s a crazy world.
On one hand, you’ve got people preaching words like, “Globalization,” and telling us how wonderful it is.
And on the other hand, you have armed militias patrolling the Mexican border – in Japanese SUVs, Salvadoran shirts, and holstering Austrian Glocks.
The international nature of the world makes for so many “on the one hand, on the other hand” situations that it’s easy to forget – both hands are joined to the same body.
It’s a confusing world.
Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan.
Confusing our language and garbling our thoughts is one case where human beings have way outdone God.
It’s enough to make you want to close your borders, shut your doors, and hang out exclusively with the people who look and talk like you, and you alone.
Just like the people who built the Tower of Babel.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Cyrene, Romans, Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power. (Acts 2:7-11)
Acts Chapter 2 is one of those passages that makes me wonder, “Did the Bible writers really have to be so darn thorough?”
You try reading “Pontus, Phrygia, and Pamphylia” in front of a crowd of people.
Couldn’t they just have said, “And a whole bunch of other countries?”
I have a feeling, though, that the writers wrote passages like this intending to trip our tongues.
They gave us these hard-to-pronounce names of strange places to make us work hard to see what’s really going on.
It’s Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit has been set loose like a wild animal breezing out of its cage.
There are tongues of fire.
There are wild, ecstatic, Pentecostal things going on in little First Presbyterian Church and the neighbors are wondering what’s in the communion juice.
Pentecost is intended to be hard to read, hard to understand.
It’s intended to stretch our xenophobic, parochial minds – not INTO confusion, but – for the first time since Babel – OUT of it.
Pentecost is supposed to make us realize that both the one hand and the other hand, rich hand and the poor hand, the begging hand and the closed fist –
Pentecost is supposed to make us realize that all these hands are joined to the same body.
Pentecost is supposed to make us see that in our human world there are nations and nationalities, races and religions – always have been, always will be.
But realize, too – that the Holy Spirit passes right over our borders – so innocently, so purely that if we try to describe it people will think we’re crazy.
“There go those Christians, again. Wanting everyone to hold hands and sing ‘Kum By Yah.’”
“There they go with all their rose-colored little ‘Visualize World Peace’ and ‘Arms are For Hugging’ slogans.”
Well.
When you think about the alternatives, maybe those naïve little slogans aren’t so bad.
Maybe riding the breeze of the Holy Spirit is less crazy than a following lock-step behind this increasingly crazier world.
Maybe God’s blessing is greater even than God’s curse.
The one hand and the other hand are joined in the body of Christ.
When we stop quibbling over the trite junk that divides us and start marveling at God’s deeds of power we WILL understand each other, in our own native tongues.
On our own, we’ll never get past all the things that make us different from each other.
There’ll always be Phrygians to fight against those darn Pamphylians.
There’ll always be Romans AND Arabs.
And a fair amount of cretins – I mean, Cretans, who live in Crete.
(But there’ll always be the other kind, too, I suppose.)
On our own, we can’t get past these barrier walls.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” you know.
But something also there is “that doesn’t love a wall.”
“That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
So wrote Robert Frost,
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.”
If I were to apply Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” to today’s scripture, I’d say the Holy Spirit is not that “something that doesn’t love a wall.”
Rather, I’d say that the Holy Spirit of Pentecost simply doesn’t see the walls, walks right through the walls like the ghost of Jesus Christ himself.
The Holy Spirit simply ignores the barriers – the language barriers, the border barriers, the mental barriers –
The Holy Spirit simply ignores the confusing walls and thereby breaks their curse, but still leaves the borders intact – for whatever they’re worth.

We DO live in a very confusing world.
That’s the way it’s always been, and always will be.
And maybe, to some extent, that’s the way God made the world to be.
But scripture tells something else is also true – true-er than the confusion and the garbling, the one hand and the other.
Scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit can bring the hands together in Jesus Christ.
We can understand each other.
We can understand what the other is saying, at least we can when we’re talking about God’s amazing deeds of power.
No, we’re not crazy.
Yes, there is hope.
There’s Pentecost.
And God’s amazing Holy Spirit.