There are
times when communication can be very confusing.
Homonyms are spelled and pronounced
the same but have different meanings. For example, pen. I write with a pen, I
keep hogs in a pen, and I can pen a letter to my Mom. Homophones sound the same
but are spelled differently and have different meanings. I won the one-on-one
horseshoe game. On a cruise, you see the sea. Homographs are spelled the same
but have different pronunciations. I’ll never forget my 3rd grade
teacher being confused by the word MINUTE. He knew it as minute, 60 seconds. He
had never heard of the word minute, a small amount.
If homonyms, homophones and
homographs (just those words alone are confusing), aren’t enough, then try verb
tenses and how verbs change. I see it now, I saw it yesterday, I will see it
tomorrow, I have seen it previously, I will have seen it before. I am, you are,
he is. This is among English speakers! I
empathize with people who learn English as a second language.
Communication was not like that
before the Tower of Babel. Everyone
spoke the same language. They could work
together as a team – like a finely tuned Swiss watch. A common language made it so that it almost
seemed like everyone could read the minds of everyone else. God Himself said, “Nothing that they propose
to do will now be impossible for them.”
God was not concerned that they would do something worthwhile and noble
because they understood one another so well, but He was concerned that they
would use their fertile imaginations to dream up all kinds of evil and then
bring those evil things to reality.
In order to slow down the
growth of evil in the minds of man, God confused their language. Vocabulary and grammar changed. No one made any sense to anyone else. The Babel Tower project was thrown into
confusion and the people dispersed over the face of the earth. Now Mankind could list confusion of language
with all the other frustrating curses that our sin has brought into the world.
What was the precise sin that
the people did to earn this curse? The
direct simple violation of God’s law is the violation of His command to Noah, “Fill
the earth.” God commanded mankind
through His servant Noah to spread out over all the earth and care for it as
God’s agents. Instead, the people stayed
together and created a city to glorify their own name.
At a deeper level, though, it
doesn’t take much unpacking of today’s Old Testament lesson to find the same
sin that got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden.
Before we reach for the forbidden fruit or start making bricks for the
tower – before we commit any sinful thought, word, or deed – we must remove God
from His rightful place in our lives. We
may not think it consciously, but before we can commit any other sin, we must
first assume that either God does not know what is best for us or that He does
not want what is best for us. As I often
tell the catechumens, when you break any commandment, you must first break
commandment number one, “You shall have no other gods.”
This is the lie that Satan told
to Adam and Eve when he said, “You will be like God.” This is the lie that the people told
themselves in today’s Old Testament lesson when they said, “Come, let us build
ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a
name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” The
seduction of sin really doesn’t change through the ages.
The first breakdown of
communication already happened in Eden.
When God created Adam and Eve, they had a sweet, intimate, loving
communication with God who was their dear Father. Then they sinned and broke our relationship
with God. Our communication with God
became a time of fear and trembling. God
was no longer intimate or sweet. God was
far away and something to ignore or even despise.
The curse of Babel still
affects us today. We attend seminars on
communication and still manage to hurt the ones we love the most. One person’s expression of concern appears to
be a cross examination to the recipient of that concern. We often accuse those we should forgive and excuse
those we should warn. Mixed signals and
misinterpreted words have added to the frustration that is in this world
because of our sin. The misunderstanding
of Babel is all around us even if we think we speak the same language.
In today’s Epistle reading from
the second chapter of Acts, we receive a glimpse of the reversal of Babel. The Holy Spirit revealed Himself with an
audible roar and the visual appearance of something that looked like flames
resting on the heads of the approximately 120 disciples who were waiting
obediently in Jerusalem. On that day,
the communication barrier dropped. The
Holy Spirit prepared these disciples to witness to the works of Jesus Christ in
every language under heaven.
Because Pentecost was one of
the three great feasts that God gave to His Old Testament saints, the city was
full of Godly pilgrims from all over the world.
The rumble of the Holy Spirit drew these God-fearing pilgrims to the
disciples. They heard, in their own
languages, the mighty works of God. On
that Pentecost, in the city of Jerusalem, there was a unity of communication
between people that had not existed since before Babel. On that day, in that place, there was a unity
of communication from God to man that had not existed since Eden.
In the sweet, intimate, unity
of the divine communication of that day, the disciples did not utter heavenly
gibberish, but they proclaimed the divine story of salvation in the native
tongues of every person who was there.
They told how Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies of the Messiah. They spoke of His perfect life, His innocent
suffering and death, His resurrection, and His ascension. They spoke of sin and its forgiveness. In the perfect communication of that day,
they praised God by telling of His mighty works, especially the work of saving us
from our sin.
Through the perfect
communication of that day, the Holy Spirit changed God’s church. Before Pentecost, God’s people looked forward
to the day of the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ. We, who live after Pentecost, look to Jesus
of Nazareth and believe that He is indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God
and the savior of the world. On that
Pentecost day, the church of the Old Testament became the church of the New
Testament through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s readings are like two
bookends in history. As a result of the Tower
of Babel, God confused the language of the people and dispersed them over the
earth. On that Pentecost when the Holy
Spirit rumbled into Jerusalem and revealed Himself with a fiery appearance, He
drew the people together and clarified their languages so they could hear the
good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Tower of Babel teaches us what happens when we rely on
ourselves. The fulfillment of Pentecost
teaches us about the power of God the Holy Spirit to work faith in our hearts
so that we might believe that God the Father has saved us by His grace for the
sake of his Son Christ Jesus.
From today’s readings, we
receive confidence to confess our faith to the people in our lives. The pilgrims who were drawn by the Holy
Spirit’s rumbling noted that these preachers were Galileans, common laborers,
fishermen, tax collectors, liberation fighters, and so forth. The message of Pentecost encourages all of us
to confess our faith confidently, for no matter how clumsy our communication
is, the Holy Spirit has promised to use it to bring salvation to the people we
meet. Then they too can participate in
the rumble and fire of Pentecost. Amen.
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