Sermon for Pentecost
“We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”
Pentecost. Whitsunday. A day of marvels and mysteries. A day of contrasts and contradictions. And that is the whole point. Wind and fire are elusive qualities, hard to contain and tie down, like Daedalus’ statues in Plato’s Meno – wonderful to look at but unless they are tied down by reason they run away from us as do all of our opinions. Pentecost challenges the religion of sentiment and emotion at the same time as it counters any and every idea of self-righteous importance and opinion, of presumption and pride. In so many ways, it is about a kind of growing up. A growing up into a more spiritual understanding of reality being led by the Spirit of truth who “will guide you into all truth.”
Pentecost means the fiftieth day, fifty days after Easter. It looks back to the ancient rituals of the harvest for Israel but takes on a whole new meaning in the descent of the Holy Ghost to give birth to the Church as the place of our abiding in the life of God. Such is the radical meaning of Pentecost. It is about our life in the spirit, our life with God. Through the descent of the Holy Ghost, something new and splendid happens which challenges and changes our whole outlook on life.
The story of Pentecost recapitulates the ancient story of the Tower of Babel. That story along with the story of the flood, speaks profoundly to our contemporary world and its concerns and confusions. Far more than just historical narratives expressed in mythological form, they are philosophical reflections on the major themes of identity and violence. Pentecost especially signals the redemption of Babel.
The story of the Tower of Babel is at once familiar and yet mostly misunderstood. It is only too often regarded as a just-so story, a story told to explain the diversity of tongues and cultures as if that were a kind of bad thing, as if there should be only one language, one culture. Think about that in relation to western culture which has assumed such a dominance of the world. The truth of the matter is that the story of the Tower of Babel is really a story about human presumption and arrogance. As Samuel Huntington notes in his book, The Clash of Civilizations, the belief in western culture as universal is “false, immoral and dangerous”. Babel means confusion. The confusion is us. We are Babel in our arrogance and ignorance. As Jonathan Sacks suggests in his magisterial work “Not In God’s Name”, if the story of the flood in Genesis is about “freedom without order”, then the story of the Tower of Babel is about “order without freedom.” At issue is their necessary interrelation and interdependence.
