Spirit Linguistics Dr

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

I want to set alongside this story from Genesis a few words from the Pentecost story in the book of Acts. When the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, they began to proclaim the Gospel and all kinds of people heard the message in their own language. Here’s how Acts describes it.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

Yes, what does this mean? What does it mean that the power of the Holy Spirit enabled the first Christians to speak so that many heard the good news of Jesus Christ in their own language? And what does it mean when the Acts story of Pentecost is set alongside the Genesis story of God scattering humans over the whole earth and confusing human language so people could not understand each other? What does this mean?

At the last Session meeting I read this text from Genesis and then asked for reactions to the story. One elder, who just happens to be an engineer, commented that the story seems like a reverse-engineered explanation for why there are many languages. We chuckled about that but the comment was actually quite insightful. Scholars in many disciplines use the term etiology which refers to the “science of causes or origins.” There are many human languages — thousands of them actually — and the ancients knew that. So some sages made up a story to account for this. Many Bible scholars view the Babel story, at least in part, as an etiological explanation for the diversity of languages. Reverse-engineering by another name.

Another elder commented that his recollection from learning this story in Sunday School was that God knocked down the tower. I remember the story that way too. But that’s not what the text actually says. It just says they left off building the city and presumably the tower too. God’s action was to scatter and confuse, not knock down, which illustrates that one of the challenges of Sunday School and teaching faith to our children is not teaching them things that they have to unlearn as Christian adults. The Babel tower story may be only a minor example of this but it points to an important issue. However, reflecting on it would take us much too far afield this morning so we’ll have to leave it for another time.

Another elder mentioned that the text seems to exhibit a primitive notion of God. God appears to be jealous of what humans are doing in the land of Shinar or even afraid of what they might do. Verse 6 puts these words in the Lord’s mouth: “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language … nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” This pictures God rather differently than God the Holy Spirit who came upon the first disciples so many could hear the Gospel in their own language. Is the God of the Tower of Babel story just out to get humans because of jealousy or fear at what they might do?

Answering that question requires a careful look at the way this story is constructed. So now I want you all to find the diagram of the text that I put in your bulletins. [Readers: see the appendix.] I’ve mentioned to you before that biblical writing frequently differs from writing in English. We tend to build an argument point by point and put the most important point last. The biblical writers often put the most important point in the middle and that is perfectly illustrated by this story. Four verses move into the middle declaring what the people of Shinar were saying or doing. Four verses move away from the middle declaring what God was saying or doing. In the chart you can see that. You can also see that verses 1 and 9 have parallel wording, as do verses 2 and 8, 3 and 7, and 4 and 6. Writing this way requires careful planning; it doesn’t happen by accident. And the point is verse 5: “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.”

The Lord came down to see. Note two things about that. First, for all the grandiose pride and technical skill that the people of Shinar invested in their tower, it wasn’t a big deal at all. As the story depicts it, you couldn’t even see it from heaven. God had to come down to take a look at this puny thing.[1] But notice also that God does come down. In many ancient mythologies the gods were too busy to pay attention to humans. Not so with the God of the Bible. God cares about human life. God does not remain aloof from human life and comes down to see what’s going on.

And what does God see? God sees that the people of Shinar not only want to “make a name for themselves” but that they want to do this to avoid being “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11.4) In other words, they want to stay together with people just like themselves and not risk the demands of diversity, not risk being with others who are different in the wider world.

Do you remember what God said when humankind was created as the crown of creation? God said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1.28) The creation mandate God gives to humans is not just to hang together with people who are all the same. God’s mandate is to “fill the earth,” to embrace and celebrate the diversity of the whole created order.

So when God comes down to look at that silly tower, God scatters as punishment but also as grace. By scattering God pushes the human race to embrace again the whole community of the created order which was created for human blessing. In other words, the tower represent humans thwarting God’s will by denying community — we don’t want to scatter; we’ll stay together with people just like us, in our gated, safe place. The scattering pushes humanity again to embrace in community the whole created order.[2]

I think the lesson from the Babel story in the context of Pentecost is that even when God scatters, God wants to bring together. By the power of the Holy Spirit we hear the good news in language we understand. For God wants to bring together even though there are many things that divide. Set’s think for a moment about things that divide the human family, especially how language divides the human family.

In my own family, my wife and children are far better than I at overcoming language divisions. Merrie can speak and hear and write to different degrees in three languages: English, Spanish, and Russian. Our daughter Kristen also knows three languages, English and Spanish, and Ngäbe, which is the unwritten language of the indigenous tribe she lived and worked with during her Peace Corps assignment in the far northwest corner of Panama. Our son David is right now taking an intensive course in German — he will spend the better part of his summer in Germany — and previously he has learned some French and Russian.

What about moi? Well, I took two years of German in high school but I only remember a couple of words. I studied New Testament Greek in college and both Greek and Hebrew in seminary. But these biblical languages are not spoken languages. I can still use a few language tools to prepare a sermon or Bible study but that’s about it. English is the only language in which I speak and hear and write or dream and think and imagine. That linguistic chauvinism divides me from so much. In today’s world I am embarrassed to be monolingual.

But even though different languages divide us, they need not hide our common humanity and I’ll tell you a story that expresses this better than anything else I can think of. When Kristen was in the Peace Corps in Panama, Merrie and I visited her for twelve days. Three of those days were spent in her village of Pumona. That Ngäbe village was two hours by canoe from the nearest town. No electricity, no sanitary facilities, no one who spoke English. But despite the Ngäbe being at the bottom of the social ladder in Panama, they are a proud and gracious people. Life is painfully hard for them, especially the women, but they always seemed cheerful and in many ways happier than a lot of folks I know.

The children in Pumona do attend a government-run school. But beyond taking care of the necessities of growing and preparing food and making clothes, there isn’t much to do. So the folk gather together and talk … and talk … and talk and talk. Because we were guests in the village they came to Kristen’s hut and stayed until late in the evening, talking and laughing together. Kristen translated. Some of them, especially the men, spoke Spanish and both Merrie and Kristen translated for me. But with a many-voiced conversation going on, I was only able to understand a few bits and pieces.

Except for a conversation with one of the older men of the village. On the afternoon of our second day in the village, this gentleman — and I use that word intentionally — came to talk to me. He spoke Spanish and Merrie translated for us. There was a little chitchat as is always the case when meeting someone for the first time. But then he said — and this was the whole purpose of his visit — “I want you not to worry because we will take care of your daughter.”

Remembering those words can still move me to tears. Here was this man from whom I was divided in almost every way. I could not speak or understand either his native tongue or his acquired Spanish. He could not understand my only language. Our separation was also more than linguistic. We were separated racially and culturally, economically and politically, geographically and educationally. We were probably separated religiously. The Ngäbe people do have an indigenous religion of sorts but even Kristen could never get much sense of it. The Catholics had been in the village at one point and the Methodists and some fundamentalists too. But they were all gone now. So I don’t know if he was religious at all. This man and I were separated in almost every possible way. But he was also a father and he knew that as a father I would worry about my daughter. Man to man, father to father, he went out of his way to assure me it would be okay.

Language divides us as do so many other things but it does not hide, unless we let it, our common humanity. And it is this common humanity — this community — that the God of the Babel tower and the God of Pentecost — the same God really — wants us to embrace.

I think what the Spirit would teach us on this Pentecost Sunday is what the folk in the land of Shinar failed to celebrate. Language divides us and many other things also divide. But we must not let those divisions keep us from celebrating our common humanity as children of the one, true God.

As I was preparing this sermon I ran across the text of a hymn written by Shirley Erena Murray in 1987. She originally called it “A Hymn About Racism.” Murray wrote in an introduction, “Singing our faith in the present tense means having to stock some corners of the Christian household with new themes. For me, human rights and racism need singing about, and words to sing are hard to find.”[3] So she wrote this hymn, the last verse of which goes:

That’s why what my title calls “Spirit Linguistics” is so important. The tower story is so we can hear what God wants. The Pentecost story is so we can hear what God wants. The language of the Spirit is so we can hear what God wants. It is so we can hear, as our father John Calvin said, “ … although [our] language may differ in sound, [we] all speak the same thing, while [we] cry, Abba, Father,”[5] when we cry out to the one, true God.

God comes down that we might hear and learn the language of Christ’s love. Dear people, may we have ears to hear, and hearts to obey.

[1] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 1 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987) 240. “God’s descent to earth to view the tower is no more proof of the author’s primitive anthropomorphic view of God than is God’s asking Adam and Eve where they were hiding in the garden an indication of his ignorance. It is simply a brilliant and dramatic way of expressing the puniness of man’s greatest achievements, when set alongside the creator’s omnipotence.”

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982) 99-100. “The unity willed by God is that all of humankind shall be in covenant with him (9:8-11) and with him only, responding to his purposes, relying on his life-giving power. The scattering God wills is that life should be peopled everywhere by his regents, who are attentive to all parts of creation, working in his image to enhance the whole creation, to bring ‘each in its kind’ to full fruition and productivity. This unity-scattered dialectic does not presume that different families, tongues, lands, and nations are bad or disobedient. They are a part of his will. And the reason God allows for that kind of differential is that all parts of humanity look to and respond to God in unity.”

[3] Lindajo H. McKim, The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) hymn 385.

[4] The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990) hymn 385.

[5] John Calvin, Commentary On Genesis, trans. and ed. John King, CD-ROM. Public domain electronic text downloaded from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library by OakTree Software, Inc.

B And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. [2]

C And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. [3]

D Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” [4]

E The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. [5]

D' And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. [6]

C' Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” [7]

B' So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. [8]

A' Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. [9]