The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
May 11, 2008

The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-11
1 Corinthians 12:4-13
John 20:19-23

“Aren’t all these men Galileans? How is it that each of us hears them in his own native tongue? What does this mean?” they asked.

We’ve just heard the good news of God proclaimed in seven of the thousands of languages in which it will be read and preached and heard today, and every day. How does this happen? How is it that each of us hears good news from God in his own native tongue? What does all this mean?

Holy Scripture has a lot to say about language, about speaking and hearing. It has a lot to say about words, about the lies that tongues can speak, and about the Word, about truth. And there are two particular stories in Scripture, stories about language and us, that reveal these two different ways of speaking and living.

The first is this: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Or, as an earlier version put it: “Three score men and three score more couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back as he was before,” which is why, in Through the Looking Glass, Alice says that the last line is much too long for the poetry!

To children, “Humpty Dumpty” is a riddle about an egg. But the egg seems to have been the creation of later illustrators, because there is no mention of an egg in the riddle itself, which originated, many think, as a political slogan in 15th-century England, a tale told by those who were loyal to King Henry VII. They told it about the pride and ambition of Henry’s rival for power, Richard III, who had such a great fall at Bosworth Field that all his horses and men couldn’t put him together again either.

Anyway, I suppose it won’t surprise you that I find a similar story in Scripture as well. It’s the story of another broken egg, the story of Adam, the story of the ways of men and women. It’s the story of how the sons and daughters of Adam and the sons and daughters of Noah peopled the earth, and how they all spoke the same language, the language of ambition and power and pride.

And mighty proud they were, too! Just like Humpty Dumpty and Richard III. And they said, “Look at all the things we can do! Let’s get to work and make bricks. Let’s build ourselves a great city, a city worthy of our cleverness and power, a city with a tower that will reach to the heavens. Let’s make a name for ourselves!”

It’s the story about the way it is with men and women and presidents and kings in this world, with all our engines and laboratories and all our horses and men, a story about how fond we are of our ideas and tools and knowledge, and of the names we strive to make for ourselves.

It’s the story about how we have become so sure that we human beings are the crowning glory of life that we build towers that we think will reach the heavens, where we might expect to capture even God himself, we think, and unseat him from his throne so we can sit there instead.

It is, of course, the story of Babel, that city on the plain of Shinar in ancient Mesopotamia in what is present-day Iraq, the story of how we have become so pleased with ourselves that we imagine God himself must be our possession and the supporter of all our clever ways. We have such marvelous tools and industry and information systems! We are so bright, we imagine, that God must be surely be proud of us and of all we can do. He must be our possession, our God.

But the story doesn’t end that way, of course. In the end God confounds the tongues of the people of Babel, and through the confusion of their language, God ends the work on their tower and brings them back down to earth.

Adam and Eve had a great fall. And ever since that time, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and even all the king’s languages and tongues, have not been able to put Adam and Eve back together again.

There are two basic truths about language, about tongues, two in particular, at least, that I want to focus on today. One is that language can divide and confuse and separate. Language can create walls that separate us from each other. This is the truth of Babel.

There are, according to figures I read not long ago, 2,796 different languages in the world today, and that doesn’t include the dialects of teenagers. Two thousand seven hundred ninety-six native tongues, each of which serves as a kind of wall that insulates the people who speak it from all other people, some of whom may live only a few miles away across a river or in the next valley.

And these walls of language, which are often walls of hostility as well, are part of what diplomats and statesmen and people of business and scholarship, and all people of good will, spend a lot of time trying to overcome. And it’s not easy! Because, even with good will, the gift of tongues, if not used carefully or precisely, or if one person is not really listening to the other, can serve to confuse and confound. The foreign-exchange student had a hard time making himself understood when someone asked him about his wife, who was convalescing after an illness. “She is not as painful as she was,” he said, “but she is still very tiresome.”

And in addition to all the natural languages of the world, there are lots of other languages that serve to confound, to conflict and divide. We say that money talks. Yes, money, too, has a tongue. And, as William Allen White observed, money often speaks “a broken, poverty-stricken language.” Such as the broken, impoverished language of the ad in The New York Times during the height of the speculation just before the stock market crash in 1929. In the ad, the language of money enticed people to deal in human flesh. It urged speculators to buy stock in the newly-formed National Waterworks Corporation on the grounds of the chilling prospect that if disaster struck the city’s water supply, one could make a killing by controlling the only source of drinking water. (J.K. Galbraith, The Great Crash) The language of today’s banks and oil cartels and credit card contracts has a lot of ancestors, and it conceives a lot of children of its own. Money can talk. But what a message it sometimes proclaims!

The language of power can be just as shifty and divisive. Witness the convoluted spin of our political campaigns! The language of power can wrestle the weak into submission. It can separate black from white, male from female, rich from poor, insider from outsider, pharisee from sinner. The languages of rank and social status and politics and economics, and even the language of religion, can serve to keep us estranged one from another.

On the plain of Shinar we had a great fall. Human tongues became so confused that ever since then the best that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have been able to do is patch together unlikely coalitions of people who speak conflicting languages of self-interest and make uneasy truces between rich and poor, men and women, labor and management, red and blue, young and old, Palestinian and Israeli, Protestant and Catholic, uneasy truces of self-interest among Asian and African and European and American and uneasy truces of self-righteousness among Muslim and Jew and Christian. The sons and daughters of Noah built a great tower and had a great fall, and ever since that time no man or woman or king or horse has been able to put things back as they were before.

But before Babel “the whole world had one language and a common speech.” And before Babel also they had a common Lord, who had created them for a common purpose and a common life. And that leads to the second truth about language and to the second story in the Scriptures. It is the story of the language, not of men and women, but of God. It is the story of the language, not of coalition, but of community, the story not of the languages of Babel, but of the language of love and peace and hope.

And this story says that what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and what all the emperors and presidents and men and women everywhere, cannot do, God can do. It is, of course, the story of Easter, of which Pentecost, this fiftieth Day of Easter, is a part.

This second story is the story not of the gift of tongues, but of the gift of ears. It’s the story not of man’s speaking, but of God’s speaking to man, of God’s speaking to each of us in his own native tongue, and of men’s and women’s hearing. The focus and power of Pentecost is not on our speaking in a variety of tongues, but on our hearing a common Gospel, each in his own native language, and of our asking, “What does this mean?”

Pentecost is the story of how God, out of compassion for the confused and the lost, the children of Babel, out of love for the estranged people of his fallen world, out of love and compassion even for those of us in Colorado Springs, you and me – Pentecost is the story of how God sent his Son to reverse Babel, the story of how God reveals to us, to each in ways that everyone can understand, the love and peace and hope of Christ, if only we will hear!

The truth that God reveals at Pentecost is that God does not belong to any human language or nation or tribe, not to Greek or Russian or English or German or French or Spanish or Kinyarwanda, not to the Medes or the Persians, not to Iraqis, not to Americans, not to Jews or Muslims or Christians. The truth that is spoken at Pentecost is that God is God, and that we belong to God, and that because we all belong to God, we all belong to each other as well.

The gift of God at Pentecost is not the language of coalition, but the language of community. It is the gift of the Spirit, the gift of ears. This is the gift received by those who “were together and had everything in common” and who, “selling their possessions and goods and giving to anyone as he had need, continued to meet together.” It is the gift received by those who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer,” the gift received by those who “ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all people.” (Acts 2:42-47)

And that, friends in Christ, is the truth God would have us hear on the Day of Pentecost. We come here this morning to claim the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, to claim the gift of ears, to hear the language of reconciliation and peace.

G. K. Chesterton hit the mark when he said that “we make our own friends and we make our own enemies, but God makes our next door neighbors.” God makes for us the people we can love, if only we will acknowledge them, if only we will use the gift of ears God has given us and listen, listen not to our own clever tongues, but to the Word God speaks.

God makes our next door neighbors. What does this mean? What do you see when you see the neighbor God has made for you?

I want to close with two stories about the power of the language of the Spirit. The first comes from last Wednesday’s Gazette in its series on the “best and brightest” of the Class of 2008. It’s about a senior at Palmer High School named David Siegel. Siegel is a violinist, and one day he played a concert in the public area of an assisted-living facility in town, and at the end of the concert a hospice nurse asked him if he would be willing to take time to come down the hall and play also for one of her patients who was too ill to attend the concert. Siegel said he would.

The patient, a former violinist himself, was an elderly, dying man who had not responded to people for the past five days. And Siegel, having been told that the man was a Holocaust survivor, chose to play for him a Hebrew song about hope for the future. Then Siegel left. But “driving home,” he said, ”I received a phone call from the hospice staff [telling me] that after I had left,” the man showed “the first sign of life in several days.” He began to cry, and “he continued to cry gently for about an hour. And then he died.”

David Siegel’s gift that day, both his decision to spend time with a dying man and his choice of what to play on that occasion, was, I am convinced, a response to a word from the Spirit – good news for an elderly, dying man in a language he could understand.

The second story is about an old pastor, and about you and me. One of the things this pastor does for his church is examine candidates for ordination, and for thirty years he has asked every candidate only one question, always the same question. He wants to know how the candidate sees and hears. He begins by asking the candidate to look out the window, and he asks him to let him know when he sees a person out there.

“I see one,” the candidate finally says, as someone makes his way across the grounds.

“Do you know that person personally?” the pastor then asks.

“No, sir,” the candidate replies.

“Good,” says the pastor. “Now, my question is this: Will you please describe that person theologically?”

In three decades of experience in asking this question, the pastor has found that the candidates tend, in one way or another, to give one of two different answers.

Some will say, “That person is a sinner in need of the redemption of Jesus Christ.” These see a person living in the land of Babel, a person estranged from God, and therefore estranged from themselves.

Others will say, “Whether that person knows it or not, he is a child of God, loved and upheld by the grace of God.” These see a person reconciled to God, and therefore reconciled to themselves. They see a neighbor who is a friend, because he is a friend of God, one whom God loves.

We come here today to hear the language of the Spirit, who is God’s cheerleader! So says Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest and poet. The Holy Spirit, in the voice and language of Hopkins, is “one who cheers, one who encourages, one who persuades, one who exhorts, stirs up, and urges forward, one who calls us on. What the spur is to a horse,” Hopkins adds, “what clapping hands are to a speaker, what a trumpet is to a soldier – that a Paraclete is to the soul.” The Holy Spirit is the one who walks beside us in Babel to call us out of Babel: “This way!” he says. “This way to God’s Church! Come on! Come on!” (quoted in The Anglican Digest, Pentecost, 1990)

What does all this mean? What do you see when you see the neighbor God has made for you? Do you hear or see him or her as one estranged, or, what is worse, as an object of indifference? Or do you see a friend? In the language of the Gospel, in the vocation and invocation of the One who became flesh and dwelt among us, not to condemn the world but to love it, in the Word of Pentecost, do you hear the Spirit cheering you on to see your neighbor, whom God has made for you, as one who is loved by God, and therefore to be loved by you? Do you see and hear, in your neighbor, the estrangement of Babel or the community of Pentecost?

At Pentecost the Spirit cheers us on, cheers each of us, whether through a well-chosen tune or through a thoughtful, loving word, with a message of peace in a language each can understand. “This way! This way!” he encourages. “This way to God’s Church! Jesus came not to confound and condemn the world, but to save it. Look around you,” the Spirit urges. “Right now, look at the neighbors God has made for you today. Look at the ones in the pew in front and behind. Look especially at the ones most unlike yourself, at the ones who speak differently and look different from you, at the ones you have not understood. He who has ears to hear and eyes to see, let him hear and see.”

Now describe those neighbors as God sees them.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.