The Danger of the Holy

Image credit: The Tower of Babel – Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

Day of Pentecost, Year C
8 June 2025

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, (25-27)

One of the hardest things about moving to a different country is learning a different language. Though, even if moving to a country that speaks the same language, one will find that laws, protocols, culture, and history require learning, for all these are constant reference points.
Most of our ancestors, and some of us, had to learn a different language when they came to this country. And those already here were forced to learn a new language and give up their mother tongue, rather than the new arrivals learning the languages spoken here, as we expect it today. We cannot imagine such injustice but that is how it was.
When Jackie and I were first married we lived in Germany. Her mum came to visit us but her dad stayed home. He said that he liked old trees better than old buildings. But Jackie suspected that he did not like the idea to be in a place where he could not speak the language. Not speaking the language of a place is a loss of control.
After I had graduated from high school I hitch-hiked to Italy. In Rome I met an American my age and we decided to explore the city together. He said that he had a friend living in Rome and that we could likely stay there. This was in the days before cell phones and internet. We got to his friend’s place, the door to her apartment was open, yet no one was home. We waited around a bit and then decided to leave our backpacks and return later. When we returned, the door was locked but no one was home. Yet at the very least, we needed to retrieve our backpacks. But since we did not speak Italian, we were unable to speak to the caretaker of the building. We stepped into the street, asking passersby whether they spoke English. After some time we found a man who did. He explained our dilemma to the caretaker and he interpreted when the caretaker told us what had happened. We had found the door to the apartment open because someone had broken into the apartment. Later we had found it locked, because the caretaker had repaired the lock. And we learned that my friend’s friend was away on a trip. We must have seemed naive and innocent that the caretaker did not suspect us to have been the culprits but allowed us to retrieve our backpacks.

When we moved to Richmond I thought I should learn some Chinese. I have not yet found the time to do so. But Jordan speaks Mandarin as he has spent some time filming in China. When during the pandemic we set up streaming and Jordan acted as a resource to our Baptist siblings you can hardly imagine their joy and delight when he addressed them in Mandarin.
While living where I have to learn a new language takes away control, speaking someone else’s language means not only that we can communicate but it signals understanding. It is what the majority expects of minorities, and there are reasons for that. But meeting someone not on my terms but on their terms means to enter deeper into relationship because it risks my own vulnerability.

The story of the Tower of Babel begins with these words, “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.” The storyteller suggests that understanding one another runs deeper than having the same language and the same words. We can use the same words but mean different things. Or we can speak the same language but refuse to understand.
Of course, understanding and agreement are not the same.

The story of the Tower of Babel is biblical pre-history. The story is not true in a historical sense, but it is true in a sociological, anthropological, and theological sense. At its root was a tale that sought to explain why there are so many languages in the world.
It is also a story that employs humor. The people sought to build a tower that reached into the heavens, but it is so small that God has to come down to look at it.
And there is the irony that the people intend to build the tower in order to avoid dispersion yet dispersion is exactly what happens to them.
And finally, the story contains a jab at Babylon where Israel would be in exile. Maintaining your own language in a foreign land was part of resisting assimilation. “No children,” the parents in exile say, “‘the gods’ did not build Babylon, people did. And as YHWH allowed the Babylonions to destroy Jerusalem and scatter us to this place, so YHWH will bring down Babylon.”¹

Empires want uniformity and assimilation. A single language functions not only to provide a basis for understanding, it also is a means of control. That is why indigenous languages were suppressed and remain suppressed in many places. It is why we fight over language. What experiences do we permit and legitimize and which do we not?
When seminarians are required to learn biblical languages, they are not generally expected to produce better translations than the ones already available. They are required to learn biblical languages to understand how the Bible thinks.

In Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish-language novel “Flights”, the narrator, who spends most of the novel in airports, marvels at the fact that there are whole countries where people speak only English.

“But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.”²

Could it be that the builders of the tower, who are only ever self-referential, “us, ourselves, and we” (11:4), could it be that their vision is not too large but too small? Could it be that it’s not the size of the tower (which in order to inspect it, God has to come down – v. 5), it’s not the materials they use (though they do not use what God has provided, stone and mortar), but the size of their vision that is unable to imagine community in difference?³

Of course, the challenge of living together in society or in a family is that we don’t all think or function the same way. And while I often act as if I wished my wife was a carbon copy of me, I am glad she is not. I am glad that she is she.

The reading of the Tower of Babel is given us today because it relates so closely to the gift of understanding that comes through the Holy Spirit. What went wrong at Babel is healed at Pentecost. And yet, dispersion happens after Pentecost as well. The disciples are scattered across the ancient world. While this scattering is a result of resistance to the Gospel and of persecution, it is also the living of the vocation of both God’s people Israel, and of the Church. For Israel is to be a blessing unto the nations, and the Church is not to live unto itself.

The multiplicity of languages is not lifted at Pentecost but the disciples are given the gift to speak in such a way that all can hear them, hear the Gospel in their own language. There is no suppression of local languages as empires seek to impose, and it is therefore all the more tragic that in the history of colonization Christians participated in the controlling and subduing work of empires. Walter Brueggemann describes this work as a ‘self-made unity, that seeks to survive on its own resources, and seeks to construct a world that is free of the danger of the holy.’⁴

The people from many different places who witness the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples ask, “What does this mean?” Their question points to the future. A future in which language is not used to suppress, in which unity is not sought out of fear, and in which the world does not rebel against God.
That future is a future in which the disciples will share their possessions, in which Gentiles are welcomed, and in which not only the listeners are changed by the words they hear, but the speakers of those words also, changed by the grace of God by who they encounter, not afraid of their own conversion, and not afraid of the voices of others, for they live in the peace of Christ.

Amen.