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“How is it that each of us hears them in his own native tongue?” 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 the truth of God in his own native tongue?
Holy Scripture has a lot to say about language, about speaking and hearing. It has a lot to say
about words, and about the Word, and about truth, and about the lies that tongues can speak. And there
are two particular stories in Scripture, stories about language and us, that reveal two different ways of
seeing life, and of speaking about it and living it.
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!
Actually, as every child knows, “Humpty Dumpty” is a riddle about an egg. But it began as a
political slogan in 15th-century England, 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.
But we find the same 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 about 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 greatness and cleverness, 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 kings, with all our horses and engines
and laboratories, a story about how we like to take our ideas, and our tools and knowledge and cleverness,
and our language, and see what we can do with them to make a name for ourselves.
It’s the story about how we become so sure that we human beings, with all our power and
shrewdness, are the crowning glory of life that we try “to build towers that will reach the heavens” and
so capture God himself, or maybe even unseat God from his throne so we can sit there instead.
It’s the story of Babel, that ancient city on the plain of Shinar in ancient Mesopotamia in what
is present-day Iraq, the story of the way we have of becoming so pleased with ourselves, and with all our
cleverness and power, that we imagine God himself must be our possession and the supporter of all our
clever ways. We know so much! We have such marvelous tools and industry and information systems! We
have such ingenuity, we imagine, that surely God must be proud of us and of all we can do. He must be our
God, our possession.
But as we know, the story doesn’t end that way. 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.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty 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 Humpty together again.
There are two basic truths about language, about tongues. One is that language can divide and
confuse and separate. This is the truth of Babel. Language can create walls that divide us and separate
us from each other.
There are, according to figures I read not long ago, some 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, but
she is still very tiresome,” he said.
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, as well. We say that money talks. Yes, money, too, has a
tongue. And it often speaks “a broken, poverty-stricken language,” as William Allen White said, such as
the broken, impoverished language of the ad in The New York Times during the height of all 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 Enron and Arthur Anderson, and maybe of Martha Stewart, has a lot of ancestors and
a lot of children. Money can talk. But what a message it sometimes proclaims!
And the language of power can be just as broken and poverty-stricken. 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 righteous from everyone else. And the languages of rank
and social status and government and economics, and even the language of religion, can keep them
separate.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And 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, young and old, Arab and Jew,
Protestant and Catholic, uneasy truces of self-interest among Asian and African and European and American,
uneasy truces of self-righteousness among Muslim and Jew and Christian.
Now 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. But Humpty Dumpty
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 there is a second truth about language, and a 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 this story says that what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and what all the kings
and presidents and men and women everywhere, cannot do, God can do. It is the story of Easter, of which
Pentecost, this fiftieth Day of Easter, is a part.
It’s 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 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.
Pentecost is the story of how God, out of compassion and love for the confused and lost peoples of
Babel, out of compassion and love for the estranged people of his fallen world, out of love and compassion
even for those in Colorado Springs, like you and me, Pentecost is the story of how God sent his Son not to
confound our speech, but to overcome Babel, the story of how God reveals to us, to each in his own native
tongue, to each in ways that he or she can understand, that power and truth belong to God alone, and that
power and truth are ours only because we all belong to God and, because God chooses to share them with
us.
The story of God at Pentecost affirms that God does not belong to any human language or nation or
tribe, not to Latin or Greek, not to Russian or English or French or Spanish, not to the Medes or the
Persians, not to the Iraqis or the Americans, not to Jews or Muslims or Christians. The story of God 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, this gift of love, this gift of ears. It is the language of 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 language of those who “devoted themselves to the
apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. And they 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 speaks to us on the Day of Pentecost. We come here
this morning to claim the gift of the Spirit of God, to claim the gift of ears, to hear the language of
reconciliation and love, to hear the good news of God’s reconciling love in our own native tongues.
We come here today to hear the language of the Spirit, the Holy 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, what clapping hands are to a speaker, what a trumpet is to
a soldier -- that a Paraclete is to the soul.” He 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!” (Anglican Digest,
Pentecost, 1990)
G. K. Chesterton 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 we will use the gift of ears he has
given us and listen, listen not to our own tongues, but to the voice of God, to the Word God
speaks.
What do you see when you see the neighbor God has made for you? Do you hear or see the neighbor
God has made for you as one estranged, or 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 the neighbor God has made for you as one who is in communion with God, and therefore with you? Do you
see and hear, in your neighbor, the estrangement of Babel or the community of Pentecost?
There is an old pastor who has for years examined candidates for ordination. 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.
Who is the Word of Pentecost? What is the truth God is speaking to us today? At Pentecost, the
Spirit speaks to us, to each in his own native tongue, and says: “This way! 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 especially at the ones most unlike
yourself, at the ones who speak and look differently 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 the persons you see
theologically.”
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen
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