Whitsunday C 2025; June 8
Gen. 11:1-9; Ps. 104:25-35, 37b
Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17
WILD
My first Bible was a birthday gift from my grandparents, when I turned seven years old. It was an illustrated children’s Bible, The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, by Kenneth Taylor. I still have it.
Mom would read them to me, in the mornings, before I walked to school. We sat on the kitchen floor, with our backs against the cabinet under the sink.
I had never heard any of the stories before. Church and Sunday School were not part of my early childhood. My parents played Tennis on Sunday mornings and my brother and I played in the woods and the river around the tennis courts.
I loved hearing Mom’s voice reading those stories to me before school. And there were so many of those stories, each with a colorful illustration, they were wonderful, and dramatic, and usually kind of scary. I loved them.
I couldn’t read yet. Reading came slowly to me, so the strangeness of God, and the mystery of reading were all wrapped up together.
I then walked to school through the woods. A world full of God, a world full of trees and woodland critters, a world teeming with stories and mysteries, my eyes growing wider and wider.
The Tower of Babel was one of my favorites. That was when I first heard it.
I’ve read it many times since then and my understanding of it has changed. It is often one of the options for Pentecost Sunday, pairing the confusion of language at the Tower of Babel with the interpretation of native tongues in the reading from Acts.
It has often been read as God cursing the people so that they could not understand one another, because they rejected God and wanted to replace God, and then at Pentecost the gift of the Spirit brings people back together so they can understand one another again.
I now think that a more careful reading lends itself to a different understanding of the Tower of Babel, and the connection to Pentecost.
The problem wasn’t building a tall tower so that they could take over heaven with new management.
The problem was monolithic conformity and sameness, for fear of being scattered. We all have to be the same or else we are threatened.
The Genesis creation story (only nine chapters before this) is not a world of sameness, it is rather a world with evermore diverse life, every day bringing more wonder and goodness, the words teeming and swarming are used, along with the command to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth.
It is a vision of the world full of ever-growing differentness, and wildness, and freedom.
Not fear. Not uniformity.
The Tower of Babel story depicts a people circling the wagons just after the Noah episode, soon after the world starting over. They fell for the lie that unity requires uniformity. A culture that became inbred and paranoid, full of fear. So they built a tower rather than caravans going forth.
The curse of confusing their tongues can be read as a blessing, a healing, a restoration. God restoring the wild diversity of the world teeming and swarming and scattering far and wide.
The gift of the Spirit at Pentecost can be understood in much the same way.
They didn’t all suddenly speak the same language.
The Mighty Acts of God, the resurrection of Jesus, was now for everyone to hear, no matter what language. The good news was for everyone in their native tongue.
Many tongues proclaiming the good news, many ears and hearts and eyes growing wider and wider.
The diversity of the Gospel and the fruitful teeming liveliness of life in the Spirit bring the mystery and adventure of God back to the world that had become inbred with uniformity of fear.
The wildness of the world and the wildness of God, free, unfiltered, unmoderated, like the rush of a violent wind filling the house, like many divided tongues of flame, the good news could not be proclaimed or contained by any one language.
These stories open for us the strangeness of God, they help us read the mystery of the world with wide open eyes and wide-open hearts rather than fearful mistrust.
They show us that God is always working to bring the freedom that is love, the unity that is love, the un-conformed different-ness that is love, the wild teeming and swarming that is love.
May our eyes and ears and hearts grow wider and wider, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.