The Many Tongues of the Kingdom

tl;dr: A sermon about Pentecost and the beauty of diversity.

Scripture Texts

Tower of Babel: Genesis 11:1-9

Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21

Transcript

For anybody who doesn’t know me, I’m Ryan Robinson and I’m a bit of a language nerd. I don’t actually speak any languages other than English, but I do always like learning about language. I’m also a theology and Bible nerd. It makes sense that today’s Scripture passages are fascinating to me. It also makes sense that I was excited when I recently saw this comic from XKCD that hit on that same combination.

In this version of the Babel story, after the humans have built a tower to God, God congratulates them for their achievement. God asks them what they would like as a reward. One of the group says that words are really cool. God quickly grants them lots of languages to study before the rest of the group can express regretting that they brought a linguist with them. That’s kind of how I feel thinking about the Tower of Babel story. I think it’s kind of cool that we have all these languages with some similarities but also lots of differences to explore.

I’m not saying that XKCD is equivalent to biblical canon, but I do think there’s something to be said for reading the Babel story with the idea that lots of languages is a good thing, not a punishment.

Babel

The story of the Tower of Babel is early in our Bibles. It’s part of the book of Genesis' "pre-history," the stories that are clearly more mythological in nature, not tied to any literal history.

It is placed in the biblical story after that of Noah and before Abraham. I think this whole chunk of Genesis pre-history, from chapters 3 through 11, is best understood as the story of human evil – or sin if we want to use a religious word – spreading across the world. The world is just getting more and more violent. The Darren Aronofsky Noah movie from a few years ago starts with this, with some imagery of the darkness spreading across the earth.

God tries to get it under control again with a flood, but that doesn’t help for long. The Noah story ends with him getting drunk, passing out in a field, and cursing one of his sons. The Scripture narrative continues with human evil getting out of control again, until it builds up to the Tower of Babel. That might seem like an overstatement reading it out of context in English. Modern readers often boil it down to a story of human hubris and God punishing that. God doesn’t like tall buildings, or something like that.

But there are a few important symbols in this story that I think make it more than just a tale of hubris. The most obvious: Babel sounds a lot like Babylon. The general scholarly consensus is that this was written around the time of the Babylonian Exile. Israel had been conquered by Babylon and scattered all over their Empire. It is important to remember that the original readers did not hear Babel and think of building big cities. Babel was the oppressive Empire who uses violence to get what they want and sees some lives as more valuable than others.

Another of the trademarks of the Babylonian Empire was building ziggurats – these big towers with steps up the side. So a Tower of Babel would be something that Israelites literally saw regularly reminding of their oppression.

A third symbol is the bricks. A tower made of bricks is not a neutral term. There's a parallel in Exodus, where we hear that the enslaved Hebrews (they weren't called Israelites at that point) were forced to make bricks for Egypt. The story of Babel comes before that in our Bibles now, but the story of the Exodus likely existed much earlier. That’s the most foundational story of Hebrew identity. While the Tower and the name Babel references the current Empire for them, the bricks also call back to a previous violent Empire they were enslaved by. Importantly, they escaped that Empire with God’s help. That is a subtle reminder already in the story that there is hope in the face of this Empire because God is a God of liberation.

Most of this is lost without context in an English translation. We can easily be mistaken to think that everybody was happily working together equally to build this tower. But digging a little deeper and that doesn't hold up. It is probably meant to convey that the Tower was being built on the backs of slaves or otherwise exploited people for the benefit of the ruling class.

So, if this is really about the exploitative nature of Empire, not simply hubris, that changes how we see God’s response. Unlike the story of Noah, God doesn’t try to solve the problem with violence. Instead, God solves the problem by introducing diversity, specifically, a diversity of language. The Empire's violence could no longer hold up in the face of this diversity and the people scatter all over the world, many of them scattering to their freedom.

Pentecost

Fast forward about 600 years after the Babylonian Exile. If you’ve been around churches long enough, you may have heard the idea that the story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is a "reversal of Babel." I contend that this statement is half true. The Holy Spirit descends and people are suddenly able to speak languages they’ve never known before. They are empowered by the Spirit to communicate across languages, but really importantly, it’s not that the diversity of languages goes away. And most of the people present went home to their own nations afterwards. They were still scattered and they were still different. If Pentecost were a total reversal of Babel, you would expect that everybody now speaks Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek – whatever, as long as it’s all homogenous – and that they would immediately start working together to build one Empire again. If Babel is in part about diversity as a tool against oppressive empire, there is nothing in the Pentecost story that reverses that. In fact, it reinforces the importance of human diversity and rebukes ideas like "colour-blindness" that encourages us to ignore that diversity.

I grew up in the 90’s in a small town that was almost entirely white, pretty much the peak of the colour-blindness idea. This is the idea that it is a good thing to avoid talking about racial differences. At its worst, this encourages us to turn a blind eye to racial injustice. For example, when somebody points out that police violence disproportionately targets Black people – and Latine people and indigenous people – one of the worst things we can do is pretend that race isn't real and therefore racism isn’t real. It is true that race is a social construct invented by white people for our benefit a few hundred years ago. That does not mean that it isn't real or that it doesn't have deadly consequences. We can’t even start to address those harms if we pretend we don’t see race.

But that's not the only problem with the colour-blindness idea. It also leaves us unable to appreciate all the incredible diversity of humanity, which we as Christians believe is the image of God.

I didn’t want to add a third text to make the Scripture readers do today but one other option would have been Galatians 3:28.

There it says that in Jesus there is no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. Some of the early church believed that when we are resurrected with new bodies, we would be sex-less, literally neither male nor female.

That’s a really interesting idea, especially with what that would mean for non-binary and intersex people – maybe that means they’re already a step closer to the Kingdom of God - but I think I disagree. I don’t think God is interested in wiping out our differences. I read stories like Babel and Pentecost and think that God wants us to embrace the full spectrum of humanity: different languages, different genders, different abilities, different orientations, different races, everything. This text makes more sense to me when we look at it as demolishing societal hierarchies, not erasing the differences. The differences themselves are a good thing.

I remember an episode of the Freakonomics podcast a few years ago talking about language and specifically about diversity of language. They had some experts on to talk about a couple purposes of language. One is obviously to communicate, to convey information from one person to another. But there’s also something to be said for the opposite: languages can divide us from each other by creating in-groups who can only communicate with each other without the out-group understanding it. This is the reason lots of children create their own languages or codes. It may exclude the out-group, but it really strengthens the bonds of the in-group to have something in common that not everybody else does, too. In the Babel story, we saw that a language barrier also makes it hard to force large amounts of people to do something against their will.

One of these experts concluded that in the ideal world everybody would speak two languages. There would be one language that the entire world spoke. We would have no barrier to be able to communicate with anybody when we wanted to. But then we would also have the language for our own in-group that would strengthen the bonds within that group. It would be both unity and diversity.

That’s what Pentecost does. Pentecost doesn’t reverse Babel. It doesn't make everybody speak the same language again. That would have been the easy way if the goal were to allow everybody to communicate with each other. God offers a much better gift to humanity: the ability to speak across that barrier without erasing the differences.

That makes me think of another comic, from the "naked pastor," David Hayward. All the people are drawing lines between each other and Jesus is walking around them with an eraser wiping it all out while they give him dirty looks. But he isn’t wiping out their distinctiveness, only the lines between them.

The Pentecost vision shows us something much better than colour-blind ignoring our differences. It’s better than simply accepting differences. Instead, we celebrate differences like the Spirit embraced those languages brought together at Pentecost. When we have an opportunity to hear from somebody new, especially marginalized groups, we are eager to catch what new glimpses of the image of God we see in them.

A few weeks ago, we learned more about the new Voices Together hymn book, including that it has more songs in languages other than English. I think this offers the potential for a small taste of the vision cast by God on Pentecost. We also had a song that week that summed up that Pentecost vision:

Summoned by the God who made us rich in our diversity Gathered in the name of Jesus, richer still in unity Let us bring the gifts that differ and, in splendid varied ways Sing a new church into being, one in faith and love and praise

We won’t be perfect at living out this vision, of course. There are a lot of complicated systemic factors at play. We are all human. We will always have to fight against our worst impulses including the impulse to settle in comfortably with the people just like us instead of reaching across those social barriers. Even after Pentecost, the rest of Acts still has more stories of the early church relearning what it is like to break down barriers. We will need to show grace to each other. But the target that we bring each other back to is this Pentecost vision. May it be so. Amen.