by CCW | 4 June 2017 15:00
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.
The story of the Flood is really an indictment of our humanity. Left to ourselves without law and order, we are destructive, dangerous and evil; in short, wicked. In response to human wickedness, God undertakes to renew and re-establish the relation of our humanity and world to him as its cause and principle. The Flood is God’s great clean-up mission and one which establishes a covenant between us and God imaged so wonderfully in the rainbow, the sign of the covenant which God establishes. Order is established in response to our disorder, to our freedom in destructive disarray. Order is signalled in the covenant which will be more fully developed in the Law. The Law is our freedom, a point, too which is emphasized at Pentecost. “If you love me,” Jesus says, “keep my commandments.”
It is a mistaken view to think that the story of the Tower of Babel is an account of why there are diverse nations and languages. In the immediately preceding chapter, God is said to have already created many peoples with diverse tongues. The assumption that there should be one language for all the peoples of the world is a human and utopian idea. And a false one. The story of the Tower of Babel is about the imposition of one language upon all peoples. It is a false universal at the expense, get this, of the God-given differences between all peoples and all individuals. Unity is not to be at the expense of diversity but expressed in and through it. The story of the Tower of Babel is about a false universal, the imposition of one language and one culture at the expense of diversity and difference. It is about tyranny. Order without freedom is tyranny just as freedom without order is tyranny. The Neo-Assyrians, historically it may be said, attempted to impose one language upon the diversities of language and culture within their empire. Such is the impulse of imperialism, the impulse to impose.
The biblical story makes it clear that the Tower of Babel is about human presumption and arrogance which always results in domination and the misuse of power. “Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves”. Such is presumption and arrogance, an attempt to rival God. The divine response is to “confuse their language” which is to say to return things to a respect for the diversity of tongues which are already God-given. Babel is about confusing the things of God with the vanity of ourselves.
The story illustrates a false universal, one vainly created by us and not by God who is the true universal which embraces all that is truly diverse. Unity is to be achieved in and through the legitimate differences of creation and not in spite of them. That is the amazing and wonderful thing about Pentecost. It is the fullest possible redemption of the story of the Tower of Babel. One thing is understood, yes – the wonderful works of God, not man – but only in and through the diversity of tongues and languages. That is the Pentecostal mystery and miracle. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”
The human community in and of itself has no unity apart from tyranny, a false and destructive unity. The object is to make everyone sing and speak in the same language and behave and act in the same way. Yet that is precisely the presumption of our humanity in its destructive disregard for the radical nature of creation. Truth and unity are to be found in and through our diversity, in and through the things which make for our true individuality and the true forms of our communal and collective life. Truth and unity are far more and far greater than our arrogant pretensions. We are recalled to God in whom we find our truth and unity.
This is the radical meaning of Pentecost. It is about the coming down of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to set them in motion as Apostles, those who are sent not in the name of themselves but in the name of God whose truth cannot be reduced to the petty tyrannies of human ambition and vanity, the things that are and have been so much on display in our global world for a long time. We live in a world of false universals, of unity asserted in the name of diversity but at its expense, at the expense of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.
That truth and unity is not something that we can create. The diversities of language and culture, too, are not simply of our making and choosing. They, too, belong to God and to our life in and with God. Such is the radical meaning of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, the creedal mystery which enlivens and vivifies every other article of our Faith. Just as every eucharist recalls Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, so too, every mass recalls Pentecost, the bestowal of the gifts of the Spirit without which we have no life. It is only in the Spirit that we are taught “all things” and have all things brought to our remembrance, “whatsoever I have told you,” as Jesus says. We live in the power of the Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the divine unity which unites the diversities of creation, the diversities of language and culture.
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/06/04/sermon-for-pentecost-6/
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