Acts 2:1-21
It is easy, in an age of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, an age when neo-Fascists are working hard to erase the story of Black America and to drive the LGBTQI+ community back into hiding, when small-government hypocrites insert themselves between a doctor and their patient, to forget how far we have actually come in pursuit of safety and equality.
Take, for example, the 2006 Academy Awards, when the gay-themed “Brokeback Mountain” was expected to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Some in the gay community, including me, had a love/hate relationship with the film. Seeing queer characters on television and in film was still relatively rare, so there was the positive of any representation, but it was still tragic representation.
For decades, we were usually depicted as criminally insane. If we were not monsters, then we were victims, dying of AIDS, tortured by unrequited love, mourning a lover who died tragically. Queer characters couldn’t just be, they had to be pathetic. Even if society did not punish them with incarceration, murder, or apathy, the universe would, some deus ex machina, a meteorite from the sky.
Today, there are same-sex couples on the Disney Channel and in Hallmark Christmas Movies, but in 2006, the Academy could not quite give an Oscar to a film about queer love, so the Best Picture controversially went to the Paul Haggis film “Crash.”
It is not that “Crash” was a bad film, though its exploration of racism in America has been critiqued as shallow by folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates. In fact, “Crash” might be seen as the high-point of a particular style of filmmaking that exploded in the first decade of this century, the networked narrative that tied seemingly disparate stories together. That same year, another film in the genre reached theaters, one that took as a theme the biblical story that starts this morning’s exploration of Pentecost.
“Babel” was about an American couple on vacation in Morocco when the wife is shot. It is about the Moroccan boys who are supposed to be using the rifle to protect the goats, not to shoot tourist buses. It is about the deaf and mute daughter of the Japanese hunter who brought the rifle to Morocco. It is about the Mexican nanny, working illegally in the United States, who is caring for the children of the American couple on the bus. Most of all, it is about the many ways we fail to understand one another, with a healthy dose of the “Butterfly Effect,” where one small act has unpredictable and life-changing impacts far, far away.
Babel, tower myth not movie, is a biblical tale meant to explain diversity in a pre-scientific age that didn’t yet understand evolution, but the depiction of God isn’t exactly flattering. What sort of deity feels threatened by human ingenuity? Yet, there we are. God takes action, creating many languages so that humans cannot understand one another.
For the record, we seem more than capable of a failure to communicate even when we supposedly speak the same language.
Pentecost is the anti-Babel. At that ancient construction site, God made language an obstacle to communication, and therefore to cooperation. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit does the opposite, enables communication despite language barriers.
Jerusalem and the Second Temple were still the center of their religious life, but the Jewish Diaspora was already a thing, for some fled the Babylonian conquest to places like Egypt, while others never returned from the captivity, and the eastern Mediterranean was connected, commercial, and cosmopolitan. Though everyone in today’s reading is identified as a Jew, communication occurs in many languages.
And it might be worth noting that the text says this diverse crowd gathered outside of the house heard them speaking different languages. Now, the “Twelve (male) Apostles” were invented after the execution of Jesus to reflect the twelve tribes of Israel, but within the context of that story, the context in which Luke operates, there should only be eleven men in that room, yet the text seems to point to more than eleven languages and dialects, which makes me wonder if the magic happens at the speaking, or if the magic is in the hearing.
I am very inclined to believe the latter, that the most powerful work the Holy Spirit does is not supercharging our speaking, but is instead perfecting our listening.
And Pentecost as anti-Babel isn’t even the most remarkable thing about this story.
Scholars have a pretty good idea when and how the Torah was formed, and no, Moses didn’t write it on the mountain.
A very early layer was a combination of a text from Judah, the southern kingdom, and one from Israel, the northern kingdom. In the southern kingdom text, God is depicted as embodied, something you can still see if you re-read Genesis 2, God molding clay into human form and blowing life into its lungs, God later physically shutting the door on the ark that would save Noah, his family, and his menagerie from the flood. In the Exodus story, God no longer has a human form, but is still localized, a divine fire in a bush that is not consumed, a pillar of smoke and fire leading the escaped slaves across the desert.
They would imagine that God was wherever the other Ark was, the Ark of the Covenant, with some ancient texts describing the Ark as the “footstool of God.” When they built the Temple of Solomon, they understood God to be present in that Temple, leaving to the east when it was destroyed. By the time of the Second Temple, by the time of Jesus, God was understood to be present specifically in the “holy of holies,” the innermost chamber of the Temple that was only entered by the High Priest.
We can always find counter arguments, because scripture is complex, contextual, and contradictory, but I think it is fair to say the Israelite people generally thought of God in relation to a place, often an elevated place like a mountain, for in ancient cultures, high places were places of mystery, a mountain with a Burning Bush, the Temple Mount, or an abandoned tower in Babel.
All of that changes at Pentecost. Never mind the many spiritual gifts. Never mind the tongues and the ears that enable communication, enable the spread of the Good News of God’s Love. The real revolution is not that holy mystery can make real the inexplicable. The real revolution is that the Holy Spirit is fire with each of those disciples, and would spread throughout the community of believers, so that Paul, writing to the Corinthians, could describe the diverse gifts of the Holy Spirit in that community, disconnected in time, place, and culture from the Jewish Diaspora that was gathered in Jerusalem fifty days after Passover all those years ago.
God is not only not in one place. There is also no longer one mediator for God, no longer someone who controls communication with God. God is out of control in only the best way, because believers have been baptized in the fire of the Spirit, just as Jesus promised before God beamed him up.
Now, humans being humans, we’ve got two thousand years of people claiming they speak for God. Jesus supposedly put Peter in charge, and Peter moved to Rome, and Rome has been in charge ever since. Or some caliph, or Mormon President in a Tabernacle tower, recreating the old theology of high places. And none of it is true. Even Peter did not operate that way.
When Paul wanted to exempt Gentile converts on the Way of Jesus from the complex laws of Judaism, especially from dietary restrictions and circumcision, he went to Jerusalem. But it was not for Peter to make that decision alone. It was a council, and the leaders of that council, plural, were both Peter and James, the brother of Jesus.
It might be a stretch to say that Pentecost “democratized” God, but in some ways, that modern idea fits. And just as citizenship in a functioning democracy confers both a right to vote and a responsibility to vote, so participation in a functioning Christianity confers both a right to discern the shape of our life together and the responsibility to discern the shape of our life together.
Peter is not the church. I am not the church. You know those networked narrative movies where people are connected in ways that are not always immediately obvious? Where small decisions have an impact? You’re living in one, and if you are paying attention, there is a little flame hovering just over your head, the Spirit of God helping you listen, giving you good gifts.
How terrifying is that?
How amazing is that?
Amen.