Pentecost 2024
Genesis 11;1-9; Psalm 33:12-22; Acts 2:1-11; John 7:37-39a
Some years ago, I was lucky enough to direct the very first production by the Stage Company of Poplar Bluff in the newly cleaned-up Rodger’s Theater. Basically all we did was clean the trash and pigeon poop out of there and sweep it out. We got it clean enough so that we could mount a production. Not a great venue, but the price was right — just some elbow grease. Well, a lot of elbow grease. The show that we put on was Godspell, which is based on Matthew’s gospel, and just happens to include several hymn texts that were found in the 1940 Episcopal hymnal.
While I was preparing to direct the show — and believe me, when you direct a musical, the is a LOT of prep work — I was surprised to find out that the very first musical number was often omitted. The number, titled “Tower of Babble,” (spelled B-A-B-B-L-E) features a set of philosophers — Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Frederic Nietzsche, and more — all singing part of their writings in turn. Eventually, they start singing over each other, each trying to drown out the others, and the scene degenerates into a melee. In the middle of the fight, a shofar, a ram’s horn, is sounded and the character representing John the Baptist enters from the back of the theater singing “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
When I discovered that this was often left out, I was surprised, because to my mind, this is the perfect way to begin. Yet I had never heard of it. The one production I had seen on stage didn’t use it. The movie production replaced it with scenes of arguments breaking out in New York City. I think it often didn’t get used because directors either didn’t understand it or didn’t want to make their cast work that hard. It’s not an easy piece to sing, with 8 actors all singing something different in a kind of crazy fugue. The more I looked at that piece of music, the more I realized I had to keep it in the show. Because that number, to me, epitomized the divisions that we put up between each other, the divisions exemplified by today’s 1st Reading; the divisions that only disappear in fellowship with Christ. Jesus isn’t on stage yet, but when John sounds his call, everyone stops and…listens. They run to John for baptism, then run out. When they come back in and meet Jesus, they are new people. The philosophers are gone, replaced by disciples. Their man-made divisions are gone.
I wanted go use the Genesis reading today because Pentecost is in some ways a kind of reversal of Babel. At the Tower of Babel, people began by all speaking the same language. According to the story, God confused things so that no one understood what anyone else was saying. Because of this, people just wandered off, leaving the tower unfinished.
At Pentecost, the apostles are speaking and everyone can understand them. People still don’t all speak the same language, but as the apostles are speaking, everyone hears it in their own language, all at the same time. Instead of people wandering away, they are drawn in to this miraculous event and to what Peter has to say in his sermon that follows.
That’s pretty cool.
The Story of BABEL is a fun story, intended to explain why there were so many languages. The important thing about it, as in so many stories in Genesis, is not whether it is factually true, but what it can teach us about the world we live in now. BABEL, according to the story, fractured humanity into factions that couldn’t communicate with each other. As we all well know, that is bound to cause problems. Those problems are what I call the legacy of BABEL.
The legacy of BABEL is gathering ourselves into separate nations and acting as if OUR nation is so much better than any other.
The legacy of BABEL is looking at those who have different beliefs from ours, or different gender orientation or sexual preference, and deciding they do not deserve the same rights as people like US.
The legacy of BABEL is what prompts us to pass laws restricting human rights because those people just don’t deserve them. BABEL is what prompts us to want to make our religion the Only True Religion ™ and insist that everyone else is completely wrong.
But the legacy of BABEL is also what gives us our diversity, the differences in language, and culture, and belief that can enrich our Iives and our viewpoints. We’re not all the same, and that’s a good thing. Those differences can actually make us stronger if we accept them and learn from them.
Unfortunately, we tend not to use BABEL that way. We use BABEL as an excuse to divide ourselves, to build differences between them and us. To put up walls to keep them out. To build Iron Curtains. To put up border walls.
But notice what happens at Pentecost. Pentecost doesn’t actually reverse BABEL, it just…sidesteps it. It acts as if it’s just not there. At Pentecost, people’s languages didn’t disappear; they just weren’t a barrier any more.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t put up walls. She doesn’t necssarily break them down. Instead, she passes right through them, as if they’re not even there. The Holy Spirit, on Pentecost, made the barriers of language, that legacy of BABEL simply … obsolete.
The legacy of BABEL will always be with us, as long as we live on this unreconstructed Earth. It’s part of us. We can’t escape it entirely and, as I said before, it can have some positive features if we recognize it for what it is and learn from it.
If we learn the lesson of Pentecost, if we allow the Holy Spirit maybe not to break the walls, but to pass through them as if they weren’t even there, we can be part of that beautiful new world that God wants to create, that He is creating through His Spirit. A world where walls don’t divide us. A world in which there really are no barriers.
Amen.
Becoming Dominican 