Babel Undone

Acts 2:1-21

Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

May 23, 2010

By all accounts, my husband’s grandmother Nelle was a real knockout as a young woman and she loved the effect she had on the opposite sex.  In the early days of their marriage, she and her husband were avid partiers, which is what they would always do when he got back from his road trips selling Blue Cross insurance. And then came the day when one of Nelle’s girlfriends invited her to a Methodist church revival.

Well, Nelle wasn’t particularly interested in “getting religion”  but Fred was on the road again and she didn’t have anything else to do.  She also thought that it would be fun to shock the kind of good folks who tended to show up for revival meetings.  With that goal in mind, she put on her best party dress – which was red, and her favorite hat – which was red as well --  and sashayed down the aisle to take a front row seat in that small Kissimmee, Florida, Methodist Church.

Evidently Nelle hadn’t realized that the color red also signifies the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, and so what happened next caught her completely off guard.  As she described it years later, she was knocked off of her feet by the Holy Ghost and Slain in the Spirit – and her life changed forever.  When Fred got back from his business trip a couple of weeks later, he discovered that Nelle had put their furniture into storage and joined in with the continuing revival that had moved itself to her girlfriend’s house once the church event had ended.

Nelle’s husband, known as “Pop” to all of their grandchildren, never quite recovered from her conversion, nor did their marriage, but they stayed together until his death some fifty years later.  No longer a party girl but playful to the end of her life, Nelle became a rock of stability and the spiritual center her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Nelle Reller’s conversion experience is part of our family story.  It contributes to my children’s sense of identity – along with stories about other family members – which includes a hymn writer, a mortician, an itinerant piano tuner, and a Union soldier.  

Whether you’re talking about a family, a nation, or a religious faith, these stories of origin are important.  They tell us what brought us to this point – why we do some of the things that we do – they connect us with our roots so that we can be fed by them.   

That’s what the story of Pentecost does too – it takes us back to our origins as a community of faith.  Just as Nelle’s willingness to leave one kind of life for another echoes and rhymes itself down to and through her descendants, the transformation of Jesus’ followers from a small group of individuals into his resurrection body throughout the earth echoes and rhymes itself down through successive forms of church to this place and hour and moment, with us.  

On that day, Luke tells us, that day of transformation, the marketplace in Jerusalem was teeming with people from every corner of the world. This in itself was not unusual – Jerusalem was a major trade center.  But then some of the locals started talking – speaking not only in the three common languages of the day:  Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, but in the tongue of every foreigner who had come there to do business.

Suddenly, the common topic was no longer the exchange of money and goods – but the story of God’s mighty acts – how a recently executed rabbi had been resurrected by the power of God and had even been seen by the ones who were speaking.  How God desired goodness for every person, not just the select few.  Taken on its own,  the story would not have held the attention of this diverse group – each with their own unique faith tradition;  but the way that it was told to them – in their own language so that all could understand  -- meant that there was no language barrier to get in the way of the story.  It went from the disciples mouths to their ears without the loss of meaning that usually happens when you’re listening in a language other than your own. 

Heard this way, many believed.  Including the speakers themselves who were taken to a deeper level than they had been before they had begun the telling.  After all, they were in that particular location only because that’s what Jesus had told them to do.  Wait in Jerusalem for further instructions.  Nothing to do with individual initiative or planning – they had no idea what to expect.  I doubt that it occurred to them that they were about to become God’s change agents.

But that’s exactly what happened.  The Pentecost event made leaders of Jesus’ disciples as well as his followers. It breathed new life into them. It changed their relationship with him from one of passivity to one of initiative and risk taking.  Which is why the Jesus story became a worldwide movement for all people, in every place and time.  In fact, this incident in Jerusalem marks the beginning of Christianity as we know it today – a global phenomenon that also reflects the local reality of its followers. 

The Pentecost event continues to echo and rhyme down to this place and time.  It tells us something about ourselves and about God works in and through us.  It gives us clues as to how we, like the disciples, can be change agents for God.  And what it means to be church. Or should mean.       

While it is difficult to rank these lessons according to importance – they’re all important -- I would say that our first lesson needs to be the understanding that, for us, community is not an ideal but a necessity.  In order to be church, that is.  The Pentecost event did not occur in isolation – behind closed doors in an upper room -- but in right in the thick of things. The disciples received their individual language abilities as a group and while they were surrounded by total strangers.  In other words, the Spirit only manifested itself in gathered community and then proceeded to expand the boundaries of that community to include those who were around them.   

If we don’t function as community we can’t expand our community to include others.  “How these Christians love each other!” was a phrase used to describe the early church.  Their lives were intertwined, they took care of each other – they actually became the Beloved Community that so many of us still seek. 

The Beloved Community, called into being at Pentecost -- still glimmers through today.  Echoes and rhymes in our daily lives together.  We see it in the way people get checked up on if they’re not in church.  The way the Deacons make sure that shut ins are not forgotten.  The way we value our children – including them in our worship life rather than keeping them out of sight and out of mind. 

Have you ever been the recipient of one of those batches of bread batter that has been passed from one household to another, sometimes spanning several generations?  Or one of those house plants? It doesn’t take much more than a cup of batter to be mixed with new ingredients for the original to continue on.  All it takes is a small cutting from one of the great grand-daughters of the mother plant and we have in our possession the same living thing that sat on the window sill or kitchen table of a great grandmother one hundred years ago. 

When it comes to being Christ’s Beloved Community,  we are that five hundredth generation bread starter.  Filled with the same spirit that filled and animated those first followers; transforming them and transforming the world.   

A second lesson, flowing from the first lesson.  If we want to continue to be community the church must be hospitable and outward reaching.   It  must welcome and embrace others.  And it must do so on their terms not ours.  God came to us as one of us.  The Spirit spoke through the disciples so that all could understand in their own language – there was no attitude of “Learn to speak Hebrew if you want to be one of us!” 

This is really important.  The God’s spirit did not choose to transform the foreigners in the market place so that they could suddenly understand the native tongue of the speakers.  Rather, rather, the speakers were gifted with the ability to speak in the native tongues of the hearers.  A profound, yet surprisingly hard to accept lesson.  This work that we’ve been tasked to do, is not about us.  At all.  It’s not about doing things on our terms.  Our timetable.  Our comfort level.  Or our standards.  It’s about getting the message out there. Christ’s message, not ours.   To them.  The ones who haven’t heard it yet.  Who haven’t experienced the immense relief of letting go and starting over.

The gospel cannot be held captive to one way of thinking or speaking or doing – not even that of the original disciples – as they discovered on Pentecost. 

But all too often we get caught up in the mechanics of building maintenance and ordering curriculum and special offerings.  We forget how we ourselves got here and what we’re here for.  We forget that, like the first followers of Jesus, we once were dead and have been called back to life by God’s own spirit.  That we have been reborn into the resurrection community of Jesus Christ.  A body that has lived and breathed for the last twenty one hundred years.

Finally, Pentecost teaches us that God has a way of doubling back and looping over and redeeming the worst of our botched messes.  Humanity lost its ability to fully communicate with each other when it tried to build a tower that would intrude itself into God’s house.  That ability was restored at the Pentecost event when God’s Spirit descended on the marketplace gathering, struck down the barriers of language that had divided human beings since Babel, and became totally accessible to us. 

Which takes us to the bottom line – the good news; the best news:  we don’t have to be perfect – just willing to be transformed. Amen.