“Speaking Many Tongues”
Homily delivered by the Rev. Rhonda J. Rubinson
Church of the Intercession, NYC (via Zoom)
Sunday, May 31, 2020
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
When you first read the Bible, it can seem more like “babble” than Bible. In the Hebrew scriptures you can get overwhelmed and confused by an endless stream of what seems like disconnected stories, unpronounceable names of people and places, a jumble of travelogues, history, poetry, prophecy and stories that for all the world sound like folk tales set in places with fanciful names like the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark.
The New Testament is shorter and narrower in time and scope since it’s all about Jesus and his disciples, but it can be just as confusing. The gospels can’t even seem to agree with each other on the basics – was Jesus born in Nazareth or Bethlehem? – and the epistles can read like a strange brew of various agendas and instructions on how to be a disciple. If you read Paul you know that it’s grace and not works have saved you, but if you read Peter you hear that works are just as important as grace for salvation. And I know I speak for myself and possibly some of of you when I say that I have no idea of what anything in the Book of Revelation really means.
But if you keep reading the Bible, you discover that it contains just a very few themes that serve to draw connections between books and across testaments, so as you read you experience the same teachings over and over again in from different perspectives. Since today is Pentecost Sunday, I want us to focus on one of those big central Biblical themes: the power of the Spirit as it manifests in language.
When we think of language, or course we think first of words, which is indeed how the Bible is first communicated to us; the Bible uses words to build its themes. Sometimes the Bible does this by providing what we call “types” of stories and characters that connect to later ones. Other stories are bookends to their reversals; like the fall of Adam and Eve, who were disobedient to God, which is reversed by the actions of Jesus and Mary, who are the paragons of faithful submission to God’s will.
Now the reading we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles about the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is precisely that kind of story: it’s a reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel. That story from Genesis is about God deliberately confusing the language of humankind after they make plans to build a tower to reach the heavens, aided and abetted by their universal tongue. This story is about the power of language to create for good or for ill, and it serves as a cautionary tale of communication disruption as punishment for ambitious, fractious, greedy and prideful people. God knows that inability to communicate renders people unable to create. If you want to spoil someone’s plans, mess with their communication and their plan will inevitably fail.
Remember that the creative power of language is the first very first big theme introduced in the entire Bible, as God speaks creation into existence in Genesis; this very same generative power is the called the “Logos” in the Gospel of John. And it is this creative power of words that the event of Pentecost restores to humankind when the tongues of flame come upon the praying disciples in Jerusalem, enabling them to suddenly understand and communicate with those who are speaking in other languages.
This is a remarkable, and not only for the fact that people could communicate with each other without having learned other languages using Duolingo or Rosetta Stone: it’s remarkable for the redemption that the Lord bestows upon the disciples at that moment – this redemption is a restoration of trust, an incredibly important but often overlooked part of the Pentecost story. By healing the world that had fractured into countless languages and cultures and remaking it into one new, vibrant, diverse but communicating whole, the Lord is entrusting to the disciples the awesome creative power that the builders of the Tower of Babel had abused and lost. This incalculably precious legacy is what enables Jesus’ disciples to go on and continue his work in the world: using their mouths is what makes them able to be Jesus’ hands and feet. Their restored power of language is what enables them to forgive, to heal, to reconcile, to preach, even to baptize – sacraments consist of both words and actions. And it is all given to the disciples in the fire of the Spirit at Pentecost.
Now, we have already seen that the power of language can be used for good or ill, and we all have personal experiences that bear this out. We have heard both the rantings of Adolf Hitler and the Spirit-filled preaching of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr; we have seen the attempts they made to create hell on the one hand, and the Beloved Community on the other, both using the creative power of their words. And we have seen how vicious political rhetoric can tear our country – even our world – apart when words are deployed with the purpose of attack and destruction.
Which brings us to a surprising realization: that speaking the same language does not guarantee that we are communicating. A few years ago I told you the story of an elderly woman with whom I shared an hour of prayer on a bench in the courtyard of a closed church on the island of Corsica without us speaking each other’s language at all. We were communicating in the Spirit – whereas I often barely feel like I’m communicating at all with many others in our own society with whom I share a common language, but not a common Spirit.
This is particularly true now in our age of global connections, where we can feel more of a kinship with people of other nations, cultures, ethnicities, even faiths than we sometimes do with people of our own. This is particularly true in our pandemic time, when politically motivated attempts to divide us from each other and isolate us from the rest of the world threaten to put us right back into the Tower of Babel. But there is Good News: as Jesus’ disciples in the world now, we are given the very same healing, forgiving, reconciling, preaching, sacramental power that fell on the disciples in tongues of fire in the Upper Room on Pentecost.
Let’s go further. These days, we can broaden the usual meaning of language, to include many other means by which we human beings communicate and interact with the world around us. Think of all the non-linguistic languages we use every day: the language of mathematics for example, or music, which we commune with today, thanks to Bill and Justin. Think of all the languages that go into the technology we are using right now to communicate this worship service, including physics equations and computer code. And think of the language of our genetic code, our DNA, the instruction manual on how to construct and run and reproduce every living thing on earth, which is written in the letters, words, sentences, paragraphs that make up the novel of our individual genomes.
Furthermore, we can communicate with aspects of our world that don’t speak our language at all – we all know that pets like dogs or cats make themselves understood to us all the time without raising a paw and saying, “I’m hungry” or “I want to go for a walk.” Which leads me to what may seem like a strange question: are there are parts of creation that we could commune with, on a very deep level, if we only listened to the messages being sent our way, like perhaps our planet? Is that a ridiculous notion? I don’t think so. We see changes everywhere that amount to messages – from coral reefs that are turning bright purple because they are in distress to more severe and frequent storms. At that same time, as we locked down and stayed home due to the pandemic, we saw signs of our planet trying to heal itself, rapidly; we first spoke of this a few weeks ago. The earth is communicating with us through myriad signals, and we have the ability to understand them. The question is: will we listen? And will we take heed of those signals and adjust our behavior in response?
So God’s word can be written in many languages, and reading the Bible enables us to discover the internal connections that join all of those languages together. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the incarnation of that link, that Logos, that Word through whom all things that were made. There is creation all around and within us. First there is visible universe which speaks to us of God: Psalm 119 says, “The heavens speak of the Creator’s glory, and the sky proclaims God’s handiwork.” And Albert Einstein said this about us struggling to comprehend creation: “We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues.” Immanuel Kant connects that outer universe with the inner one of soul and spirit, saying “Two things continue to fill the mind with increasing awe and admiration: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
It is the Spirit sent by Jesus on Pentecost, to replace his presence on earth, that repairs what we broke back at the Tower of Babel, and that he came to earth to restore. At Pentecost, we are infused with the power that was available while Jesus was alive in the living water. That awesome power is available to us, if we are willing to tap into it for the good of God’s world.
How do we do that? By using all of the languages that we have been given, in whatever form, to create and not to destroy. By fighting the ambitious, fractious, greedy and prideful words and actions that seek to control the world in God’s stead, replacing them with words and actions of healing, reconciliation, preaching, and the blessing.
Yes, we are in a confusing and dangerous time now with the unrest following the barbaric murder of George Floyd and the pandemic that is creating suffering, fear, and uncertainty, and we are moving into a possibly even more perilous time as we approach our November election. Language – and even the words of the Bible – are being used to kill and destroy. We can already see and hear the Tower of Babel being rebuilt right now. But know this: God will not come down again to disrupt it, because on this day, Pentecost, about 2000 years ago we were already given what we need to prevent that Tower from being successfully reconstructed. It’s up to us – as Christians, as God’s children, as Americans, and as citizens of the world in our time. The task, as always, is to create a just society, a just world, without which there can never be true peace, only the absence of violence. The prophet Isaiah says, “They have not known the path of peace, and there is no justice in their ways.”
My prayer is on this Pentecost that the Holy Spirit fill our words and our actions with grace, wisdom and power as we seek to create world of peace, through the power of Spirit.
Amen.
The following remarks were added during the Announcements time of the service:
The horrific murder of George Floyd – which had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with hatred - has lit the fuse on the beginning of the summer and the election season. As always, protests are never about one event, they are about embedded patterns of abuse and bigotry – and of course in addition to the awful history of police abuse we have in this country, because of the pandemic we have all seen the structure of our society, and how institutional bigotry can do nothing but feed the despair and the sense of powerlessness in communities of people of color. It is that sense of powerlessness that Pentecost gives us the very powerful tools to address. In looking for guidance on practical applications for our time, both Canon Steve Lee, the Vicar of St. Saviour at the Cathedral and I had the same idea at the same time – the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s last address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “Where do we go from here?” This is the famous speech where King says “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice” towards the end, but speech itself addresses a moment as incendiary as ours. Please pray, and please act – but please don’t forget the prayer, action without God’s will and way behind it is guaranteed to fail.