Unity vs. Uniformity

Feast of Pentecost, Year A
Text: Acts 2.1-21; 1 Cor 13.1-31; Jn 20.19-23

We heard this same reading from John’s gospel account at the beginning of the Easter season. You remember what happens next: Thomas, who was absent, comes back and doesn’t believe, but his unbelief turns to belief when Jesus shows him his wounds. That part of the story is left out today, directing our focus to the first part: the giving of the Holy Spirit.

I’ve noticed before that when Jesus gives the Spirit, he does so along with the authority to forgive or retain sins. In the context of the larger story, we see the disciples receive this authority—along with the Spirit—and then exercise it with Thomas: they forgive his “sin,” his separation from them and Jesus in his denial, for a whole week, which allows him to eventually come to belief. But today, without that part of the story to draw my attention, I’m noticing that there is another party in play here. I wonder if Jesus gives the disciples this authority not only for them to exercise with Thomas, but also with the Judeans, against whom their doors are locked out of fear. Will the disciples forgive the sins of the Judeans, or retain them?

The reading from Acts wrestles with the same question. Again, this is a story we’ve already read from this Easter season—twice. A few weeks ago, we got the remainder of Peter’s sermon in two parts. You may remember that the thrust of that sermon was to call his fellow Israelites—the Judeans who convicted and executed Jesus—to repentance, and to proclaim the good news to them. What’s more, the crowd receives that good news and repents. St. Luke goes on to recount that about three thousand people repented that day and joined the community of believers.

In both of these stories, I see God moving to bring people together. The Acts story portrays this message powerfully with the image of speaking in different languages. The Pentecost event brings all these Jews from across the known world together to hear a single message: the message of God’s deeds of power. If you’re very familiar with your bible, you might recognize this story as an echo of a much older story: the story of the tower of Babel. In that story, God’s deed of power was to scatter and confuse the citizens of Babel so that they would be unable to complete the large tower they were erecting to unite themselves.

In the old story, God creates disunity by separating out different languages; and in this story, God brings many languages together to create unity. One might wonder what one story has to do with the other, or why God would do one thing and then the opposite. To answer that question, it might help to know a bit of context.

The Babel story comes from the 11^th chapter of the book of Genesis. Genesis contains several stories that probably have been handed down through oral tradition for many generations before being written down around the 6^th century BCE. One of the reasons the stories were written down is that, in the 6^th century BCE, Judah was in exile in Babylon. “Babel” is a nice English onomatopoeia that sounds like gibberish, a nod to the confusion of languages from the story, but it is also the Hebrew word for Babylon—the empire that had conquered Judah, along with many other tiny nations, bringing them together under one government and one language.

I have to wonder, then, if the Babel story is a political satire, a story told indirectly against Judah’s oppressors. But more than that, I wonder if it is a story of resistance, a story of trust that God is greater than human attempts to rule the world and command its peoples. This makes me think that the scattering of people and the confusion of languages might be, in the Babel story, an act of liberation. If so, what does that make the Acts story?

Here’s another thing I notice: in the Babel story, God creates a diversity of languages and ethnicities. Although the Acts story reverses the confusion and scattering, it does not reverse God’s action of creating diversity. In the Babel story, people try to create unity through preventing diversity and fail; while in the Acts story, God succeeds in creating unity by embracing diversity, rather than eliminating it. I wonder if these two stories together challenge what we think of as unity; how God’s work is different from ours.

If we read the Babel story as a human attempt to create unity, I think it looks very familiar. Like the people in the story, we attempt to create unity by building. Rather than towers, we build institutions; things like nations, laws and moralities, religions, organizations and ideologies. Like the people in the story, we believe these things have the power to save us from poverty, war, crime, or other dangers that frighten us. But these institutions will always disappoint us because they don’t actually create unity. Instead, they create uniformity, which is not the same thing. Human institutions inherently see anyone or anything outside themselves as inferior, less than, worse; the end goal, like that of Babel, is to bring everyone and everything else inside, to make the “others” like us.

We have a name for that. We call that supremacy. White Supremacy holds that White, Anglo, European culture is superior, and others are inferior. Christian Supremacy believes that Christianity is the only way to God, and God’s only way of approaching us, and the only path to salvation is conversion. Ableism privileges able-bodied experience over the experience of folks with disabilities. Heteronormativity privileges straight, cis-gendered experience over queer experience. We privilege neurotypical experience over the experience of folks on the autism spectrum. What other kinds of supremacy can you identify in our world? In what ways do we determine what is “normal” and expect others to assimilate to it?

The Acts story shows us God working in a different way. I notice that the miracle isn’t that everyone in the crowd is suddenly able to understand Aramaic, but that the disciples are able to speak in different languages. God embraces and accepts and validates all the differences of the people gathered and invites them all into the good news that Jesus comes to bring; or as Peter quotes, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

St. Paul goes on to offer a way of understanding what God does differently from us. Instead of trying to make everyone the same—like all Jewish, or all Christian—Paul invites us to consider how our differences actually work together for God’s greater purpose, like the different parts of a body. Eyes and hands and feet and ears all need one another; without any of these, the body doesn’t work as it was intended.

Whereas our “Babelonian” perspective might try to get the “less honorable parts” to assimilate to the “more honorable,” Paul says that, in God’s way, we “clothe [those parts] with greater honor.” Instead of ignoring or trying to erase the perspectives of others, we lift them up, privilege them, celebrate them, in much the same way we protect most vigorously the parts of our body that we hide under the most layers of clothing.

Our way of creating unity is too often really about creating uniformity, about our worship of our own towers that we have built, our own supremacy. That’s what I hear in the Babel story. Uniformity may bring unity, but only at the cost of narrowing and limiting God’s good creation—and that narrows and limits our view of God. Uniformity fails to recognize the dignity of others in their different-ness, and it fails to see how the Spirit of God is active in those people.

I wonder if the good news in these stories is that the Fire of God comes to burn down those towers, to scatter and confuse us, so that we might find, as St. Paul says, a “still more excellent way:” We read today from 1 Corinthians chapter 12; what follows, of course, is chapter 13, the chapter you’ve heard read at every wedding you’ve ever been to: “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious or arrogant or boastful or rude.” To love another is to love what makes them different from ourselves; to love the very things that make them hard to love. This is the love that God shows in these stories, and it is the love that God hopes we will find for one another.

I think this love is the challenge of these stories today. What does it look like to love people who are different from us—so different, even, that they may cause us harm? What does it look like to love those against whom we would otherwise lock our doors out of fear?

But more than this, the story of Pentecost challenges us more deeply. It challenges us not only to love those who are different from us, but to see God in them. If we really believe that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, if we really believe that God’s Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, then what does that mean for us? Can we hear God’s voice in the message of the televangelist? Can we see God at work in our Muslim neighbors? Can we proclaim repentance and offer forgiveness to the children of God who do terrible things to harm others? Can we invite others who are different from us into our communities, our congregations, our families, not only knowing that we will be changed by that experience, but expecting—even hoping—to be changed? Can we see God at work in the wind blowing us around, confusing us, scattering us? That’s the question I hear in these stories: do we really believe that the Spirit of God has been poured out on all flesh? And if so, can we see it?