Words Have Power/ Don’t Babel

This text is offered as an alternative First Reading for the Day of Pentecost, with the instructions that if it is chosen, then Acts 2:1-21 gets used as the Second Reading.

Certainly, there have been connections made between Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21, with people understanding God’s gift of speaking in tongues as a reversal of the confusion of tongues at Babel. Most of us know the Pentecost story and wait to hear the story.

Pentecost is the story of the festival when Christians celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is celebrated on the Sunday 50 days after Easter (the name comes from the Greek pentekoste, "fiftieth").

Pentecost is regarded as the birthday of the Christian church, and the start of the church's mission to the world.

The arrival of the Holy Spirit!

The Holy Spirit is the third per of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is the way Christians understand God.

Celebrating Pentecost is a happy festival. Ministers in the church often wear robes or stoles with red in the design as a symbol of the flames in which the Holy Spirit came to earth.

Pentecost comes from a Jewish harvest festival called Shavuot.

The apostles were celebrating this festival when the Holy Spirit descended on them.

It likes a very strong wind, and it looked like tongues of fire.

The apostles then found themselves speaking in foreign languages, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

People passing by at first thought that they must be drunk, but the apostle Peter told the crowd that the apostles were full of the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost is also considered the birthday of the church. Maybe, or maybe that’s when the church learned to walk on its own. Maybe that’s when empowered by fire and wind, the church spoke on its own, but used words learned from the one who gave it life.

On Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Spirit to raise the church out of hiding and out of despair to give the church wind at the back and fire in the bones, and to encourage the church to proclaim; no—to live the good news of Jesus Christ outwardly and invitation-ally.

But I want to suggest today that as we see in life Joy and Pain have a tendency to hang together.

Have you ever noticed that one moment you feel like maybe you are making some progress?

• One moment you have your vision, your goal, and your plan.

• One moment everyone is on board and ready for your next steps.

• One moment you feel like maybe your thing will actually work—whatever this thing is.

• You feel as though you are on top of the world.

• But then the next moment comes, and it is all different.

• You’ve been there.

The plans fall apart; the hopes are crushed; it all seems like dead ends. The relationships crumble: those who were gung-ho and onboard are now abandoning ship as if they’ve hit an invisible iceberg and are going down fast.

And the worst part? You have absolutely no idea what happened. What seemed to be such a wonderful idea, what seemed to be just what everyone wanted, became a source of confusion and misunderstanding. You thought that you had it going on, but you forgot that it's you’re your story but God’s. You thought the vision and plans were yours but they were supposed to be God’s. Maybe your story was nothing but Babel.

You know the story of the tower of Babel. The babbling story; the tower and the languages and the scattering and the sin. Except, it is sometimes hard to see that their sin was self-talk. It seems as if God causes confusion because they had gotten stuck in themselves. I know, I’ve heard the explanations. They were thumbing their noses at God. Well, maybe. I tell you what they did wrong they were talking their talk and not God’s talk.

This text is a bookend to the first part of the Bible, which begins with creation and the command from God to fill the earth. But here we see people choosing not to fulfill that command.

They wanted to stay in one place. They built their city to not do what God wanted them to do. They said let’s make a building “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The People in this text say We will instead of God's will. I want to focus on that, be careful when you tell God what you are gonna do, as a matter of fact, be careful when you get so full of yourself that you feel you have a right to say I’m gonna do this and I’m not gonna do that. You might want to realize that it is foolish to correct or reject God.