Pentecost

Our differences are by design and for our common good.

Photo by David Bumgardner on Unsplash

Novelist Marilynne Robinson offers a fresh retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel in her new(ish) book Reading Genesis. She suggests that in undertaking the construction of the city and its tower, the humans were walking headlong into a huge disaster in the making. She further suggests that God’s intervention was a mercy, not a punishment as we understand it. The materials used for construction—bitumen and bricks—could be efficiently produced and could build great structures, but the height of the tower the humans aspired to build would push these construction materials to their engineering breaking point, literally. “With luck and skill, using these materials it would have been possible to make structures that were very tall by the standards of the time, ziggurats, towers with their tops in the heavens,” Robinson writes. “But their height and the materials used in building them would also have made them fragile and have made a collapse spectacular, the stuff of regional lore.” The fragility of the Tower of Babel is representative the effects of human overreach. God knows that if they succeed, “nothing shall be impossible for them.” What else might the humans do with little if any forethought if we are not compelled to collective contemplative deliberation? What horrors might we unwittingly unleash upon creation if our hubris is not constrained, if we are not forced to slow down and listen carefully to the wisdom that comes from one another? Weapons of mass destruction? Industrial systems that promise shared-abundance, but exploit the riches of creation and impoverish billions of people for the sake of the few? Systems of government that strip people of their liberty or deny their human rights for the sake of safety and security?

God’s response to his human creation is not a punishment. Robinson writes, “The first thing to be noted is that He [God] does not disable them. He scatters them and He disrupts communication among them, impeding the expression of their plans and aspirations as harmlessly as might be, without any intrusion on their human nature.” The human imagination needs sanctification—to want to desire the things of God, not to be God—and in the meantime, without imposing upon the brilliance of human nature, God creates our differences as a way to slow down our self-destructive impulses. Diversity within the human family is an expression of God’s wisdom and mercy.

The Tower of Babel has a fresh word to share with our contemporary world. Difference and diversity are necessary for a society, for the world, to achieve its moral transcendence. A community, a society, our global family begins to collapse under the weight of its own self-acclaimed brilliance without the thoughtfulness that accompanies attempts to speak across lines of enduring difference where we have to seek to understand the other more than we seek to be understood by them. Attempts within our country to limit the freedom of speech, to attack institutions of higher learning, to stifle conversations about human rights abuses, and to erase uncomfortable parts of our history all emerge as figurative Towers of Babel. They promise a world of safety and security rooted in sameness, but they yield fragility at best and calamity at worst.

The story of the Day of Pentecost offers a new way to think about difference and diversity. If Babel teaches us that difference and diversity are gifts given to encourage us to greater deliberation and reflection before undertaking potentially monumental decisions, then Pentecost teaches us that we need divine aid to achieve the humility and empathy that make such deliberation and contemplation possible. The miracle of Pentecost isn’t only that people spoke in various tongues. The full miracle also includes the fact that people heard them. Without the speaking and the hearing, Pentecost would’ve been a day of empty, ecstatic religious experience with no impact on the community or the world. The Holy Spirit enables the Gospel to be translated into the various languages of the ancient Mediterranean world. In so doing, the Holy Spirit’s action demonstrates that difference and diversity aren’t barriers to communion. The problem lies in our inability or unwillingness to bridge those differences. In both stories—Babel and Pentecost—the difference is language, but it is worth asking what seemingly unbridgeable differences exist in our world and, relatedly, what a new Pentecost might look like?

From where I sit, the various challenges the humans family from the climate crisis to ascendent autocracy all come down to our inability to speak and listen in ways that lead us toward love. Human being are unique creatures. We have been blessed with “memory, reason, and skill” enough to address are biggest challenges. Yet, we can, and too often do, use our power in life-negating ways. Perhaps, as we watch growing civil unrest as a result of inhumane governmental policies, destructive and inhumane wars, the erosion of social and political norms for the sake of ideological expediency, and the expansion of social inequality, we need a new Pentecost, one that will teach us what it means to be human in community with other humans in the direction of God’s reign of peace. According to the tradition (and Isaiah 11:2-3), the Holy Spirit imparts seven gifts to the faithful:

1. Wisdom

2. Understanding

3. Counsel (Right Judgment)

4. Fortitude (Courage)

5. Knowledge

6. Piety (Reverence)

7. Fear of the Lord (Wonder and Awe)

Perhaps we need the Holy Spirit to lead us beyond “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and political propaganda and into all truth. Maybe we need the Holy Spirit to move us beyond competing value systems and toward a greater communion and love for all our fellow human beings. We need the Holy Spirit to empower us with speech that is as loving as it is just and as humble as it is urgent. We need the Holy Spirit to give us words for prayer and action when we don’t have the right words, or words at all. We desperately need the Holy Spirit to give us the courage to stand up for what is right, even if we have to stand alone.

The good news about the Holy Spirit that we can take from the story of Pentecost is that God yearns to give us this gift. In fact, in Christ, we already possess this gift. Jesus tells his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” Striving to love is all that is required to receive the power of the Holy Spirit. When we seek to do the hard work of loving in an age defined by apathy, hate, pride, and indifference, we will discover power from on high that will help us when we need it most. Even though this work is isolating, we are never alone. The power and love of God dwell within us.

Pentecost is not primarily about a self-contained ecstatic religious experience. Pentecost concerns a collective spiritual encounter that has practical, social, communal, and political significance. At Pentecost, God empowers the church to proclaim to the entire world God’s supreme agenda—the triumph of suffering love—and then to draw wandering human hearts to our common home in the embrace of God. In this home we learn to see one another not as fundamentally different or even fundamentally the same. In this home we come to see each other as God sees us: equally beloved. This is the news the moved thousands of people to give their lives away. This is the kind of love that will turn our world back from is self-destructive impulses and towards the dream of the Reign of God.