A God of Pizzazz A Sermon for Pentecost

“A God of Pizzazz”
Genesis 11: 1-9/ Acts 2: 1-11/ John 14: 8-27
Day of Pentecost/ Year C/ May 23, 2010

On Pentecost, the awesome power of God is revealed. Seven weeks after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the disheveled and mournful band of followers has gathered in Jerusalem as Jesus directed. They gathered to worship, sing, remember and pray. They came together as the group with whom Jesus had spent intimate time preaching and teaching for three years. Having lived with Jesus everyday they had come understand that he had an almost supernatural connection with the God of their ancestors Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, Moses and Aaron, Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea. These disciples believed that the son of Mary and Joseph was Emmanuel – “God with Us”-now the living Christ.
They had scattered after the events of Easter. But now they felt the need to come together to support one another because they were now a minority and lived a faith that the majority in Galilee did not. As they gathered in that upper room to worship that morning, there was a noise so loud it could not be ignored. So startled were they that they lost control of themselves. Their sensory systems were flooded with adrenaline so that their minds and bodies processed intensely the sound, energy and feeling of the coming of the Holy Spirit. She had come as Jesus had promised, and it was an experience that came from deep within, not something cognitive. They were changed from a frightened, rag-tag bunch of people into a bold and vocal group proclaiming the awesome power of God revealed in Jesus Christ. No one was excluded. Nothing human made could have engineered what the disciples felt that morning. The coming of the Spirit filled them with life, joy and enabled them to speak in languages from every corner of the known world.
It was absurd to hear eleven people for Galilee speaking the local languages of Asia Minor, Egypt, Libya, Rome and other places. But God is a God who does not do things in a small way. God uses what ever means God wants to achieve God’s purposes for humankind.
To understand what happened that day in Jerusalem we must go back into Israel’s pre-history recorded in Genesis. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the descendents of Noah have banded together as one people with one language. God was concerned that the people would not learn anything new, since they were already a nice homogenous community. God was concerned with the pride and excessive ambition of the people, thinking they could speak for God. These mortals decide that the way to make a name for themselves is by building a city with a tower soaring to the sky. They want to become known in the world, and to protect themselves from being scattered over the earth. They believe that to make a name will bring the people together in one place with one language. God comes down to take a look at humanity’s handiwork and God is not impressed. God says, this is just the beginning. Nothing they can imagine will be impossible for them. So let us confuse their language so they will not understand one another’s language. And so God scatters the people and confuses their language . Their diversity had made it either impossible or highly unlikely that they would work together again.
And so ever since, Babel has come to represent individualism. The nature of capitalism comes from Babel. Each individual has the right to make a profit. All individuals have a right to better themselves. Our Babel component is our materialism, our economic and military domination. Our Babel component is everything we have built to separate ourselves from one another; The Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the Israel/ Palestine Wall, the U.S./Mexico wall, the disputes between Pakistan and India, Islam and the West, the plethora of denominations that seek unity only by excluding others. Our Babel component is that most of us Americans can only speak one language and we expect others to learn ours.
We have become addicted to Babel. We have grown up believing that Babel is the God of true spirituality. Babel is rugged individualism. Rampant Nationalism is the stuff of Babel.
But Babel is not all bad. From Babel we get our cultural diversity. We get to push ourselves outside our own understandings, our comfort zones and establish relationships that enrich and deepen our understanding of ourselves, our brothers and sisters and our God.
But Babel is what makes injustice thrive. Babel is what makes a distinction between rich and poor. Babel is hat makes people think they can own other people. Babel is what makes people think they can condemn other people because they are different. Babel is what makes people enemies. Babel is what makes war happens. Babel is often lived out in individual and corporate sin because we tend not to look to God, but ourselves for the ultimate answers. None of us speak the language of God anymore. We have lost the language of love and compassion, justice and peace, toleration and acceptance.
Pentecost is a snapshot of the opposite. The Holy Spirit comes to everyone- the intellectual and the unsophisticated, the committed and the apathetic, the fundamentalist and the pagan, the man and the woman and everyone in between. In that instant they all speak the same language. With Pentecost, the early church changed the way it did things. They got rid of their class distinctions. They came together as a disparate group with one message. The Kairos of God came and they saw the world in a different way. The Spirit moved among them and they no longer saw each other as people to be suspicious of, but as fellow children of God. ON Pentecost they were given a new chance, a new freedom to be a different of community.
To affluent and competitive people like ourselves, God’s invitation on Pentecost is join in the new creation, to slow the feverish pace of life and rest in the assurance of God’s love that is given and not earned. To poor marginalized people and congregations, God’s promise is that our ultimate value does not lie in our making a name for ourselves does not depend on our building gleaming cities and towers of achievement but upon God’s dazzling and soaring love.
This story is before us to remind us that we do not need to make a name for ourselves, because, as Jesus said, our names are already written in heaven. We are children of Pentecost and children of Babel. We long for the ideal of Pentecost but we always return to Babel. We all come from different walks of life. We are different ages, races, genders and sexual orientations. We have achieved different educational levels. Different life experiences shape us. Sometimes when we talk to each other we talk in different languages. We live in Babel. We work in Babel. We are the children of Babel. But with Pentecost, we find that God is not interested in a people united for the purpose of making a name for ourselves and our own safety. Rather, God is a God who relishes having a world full of people of different colors, sizes, shapes, ideas, and languages. Our Creator is a God who loves Pizzazz, who celebrates diversity, and calls us to tear down the walls we build. In this story of the first days of the church, we find a God who loves unconditionally every aspect of our humanness and invites us to join in proclaiming that love to the whole world. Amen