Sermon for Pentecost

admin | 5 June 2022

“He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you”

We get it wrong, I am afraid. Pentecost is not some emotive experiential happening, some happy-clapping affirmation of ourselves in our self-assertions. Just as the Resurrection is not a flight from the world and nature, so too, Pentecost is not the celebration of self-identities.

Pentecost is not the celebration of the diversity of our humanity but its unity-in-diversity as grounded in the life of God. Credally or doctrinally speaking, it marks the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to become the Apostolic Church. In the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Holy Ghost” is followed directly by “The Holy Catholic Church” and “The Communion of Saints;” these are strong statements about our life together as shaped and formed by the Spirit of God. This is explicated more fully in the Nicene Creed. The Holy Ghost is “the Lord, The giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets”; after which comes “I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

These strong statements locate the unity of the human community in the unity of God because the human community has no unity in itself. The Pentecost story is the redemptive retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel. That story, so often misunderstood, is not a just-so story to explain the diversity of tongues and cultures as something evil which assumes that there should be only one language, only one culture, just as in reverse, in our contemporary world, the claim is that an endless and indeterminate diversity of identities is the good. The binary is false. It may be, however, that the levelling nature of our global technocratic world ultimately excites a desire for diversity and difference as a yearning for some sense of what it means to be an individual, a person, but that only raises the questions about the categories of difference and identity and what they mean in terms of our common humanity. Which categories and upon what basis?

The story of the Tower of Babel is really about human presumption and arrogance which results in confusion. Babel means confusion. The confusion arises out of the agendas of dominance and the abuse 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 means to return things to a respect for the diversity of tongues which are already God-given out of which we may learn a unity of understanding. Babel confuses the things of God with the vanity of ourselves and our human projects. The confusion is us in our competing assertions for dominance and control of one another.

The story is clearly not an account of why there are diversities of language and culture for that has already been established in the preceding chapter in Genesis which tells of “the generations of the sons of Noah” after the flood: “the sons of Japheth in their lands, each with his own language, by their families, in their nations” (Gen 10.5), “the sons of Ham, by their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations” (Gen. 10. 20), and “the sons of Shem, by their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations” (Gen. 10. 31). “From these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood”, the chapter concludes (Gen. 10.32). Nations here refers to gentes, to peoples in general.

The story of the Tower of Babel, by way of contrast in Chapter 11, is the attempt to impose one language and one culture upon all peoples. It is a human and utopian ideal, but a false universal. As the story shows, it is undertaken in an attempt to rival God. It is a false universal because it negates the God-given and created differences between peoples and cultures and languages. True unity cannot be at the expense of the God-given diversities of creation but can only be grasped in and through them. The story of the Tower of Babel is about tyranny which is simply the assertion of a partial truth or interest upon all, “the interest of the stronger,” as Plato says, and who points out its self-contradictory nature. We may be quite mistaken about our self-interest, after all, and by reducing others to our own agenda we negate the reality of which we are a part; order without justice is tyranny. Justice has to be for all.

The biblical story may reflect the attempts historically by the neo-Assyrians to impose one language upon the diversities of language and culture in their empire. But it reveals a telling feature of all imperialist agendas, including the cultural imperialism of our own times with respect to the proscription of language in the pronoun wars of identity politics. The imperialist agenda is always the agenda to impose.

Thus the story illustrates a false universal, one vainly created by us and not by God who is the true universal who 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, 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.” What the Pentecost experience in Acts shows us is what the Church proclaims and teaches under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, throughout Eastertide readings from John, undertakes to teach us about the Holy Spirit who in turn teaches us and keeps us in the teachings of Jesus. “He shall teach you all things and bring all things to remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you,” Jesus tells us. This is the true universal, the truth that is communicated and known in and through the legitimate differences of languages, cultures and peoples but which cannot be reduced to any one of them. Wisdom and truth belong to God, the Spirit of truth, who comes down as a gift from God to us. That is the mystery of Pentecost.

The teaching of the Holy Spirit speaks to the radical truth of our humanity as spiritual creatures and thus to the true life of the Church. It is perhaps wonderfully expressed in John Cosin’s translation of the Veni Creator. “Teach us to know the Father, Son,/ and thee, of both, to be but One,” for that is the truth of our lives in God, “That, through the ages all along,/This may be our endless song:/Praise to thy eternal merit,/Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” In the Pentecostal mystery we are awakened not just to the wonderful works of God but to the wonder of the mystery of God himself.