The Power to Pull Us Together
Richmond’s First Baptist Church, May 15, 2016
The Day of Pentecost
Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21
There’s a wonderful old story from the Book of Genesis that we rarely get to hear,
but it is one of the suggested readings for Pentecost and so I’m going to take it down
from the shelf, blow the dust off the cover, turn to chapter 11, and see what we can learn
from these few verses subtitled, “The Tower of Babel.” The Hebrew scholars pronounce
it “Ba-BELL,” and I’m sure they’re right, but I’m going to stick with “Babble,” because
that’s what this story is about: Babble, babble, babble!
It comes after the Great Flood in chapters 6-9, when Noah and his family have
stepped off the ark and begun to repopulate the earth. In chapter 10 we read the names of
their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who began to spread out over
the face of the freshly washed world. Chapter 11 begins with the announcement that “the
whole earth had one language and the same words,” which makes sense, if all its
inhabitants have come from the same family. But can you imagine how convenient that
would be? To travel to France, for example, and ask for a little extra butter for your
baguette and have someone bring it to you? To spend the night in a yurt in Mongolia,
and ask your host for an extra blanket, and get one? To walk through a busy market in
Argentina, inquire about the local customs, and have someone explain them to you? One
world, one language, one vocabulary: that’s how it was for the descendants of Noah after
the Flood.
But then they moved west, and settled in the Plain of Shinar, and began to make
bricks. “Come,” they said, “let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the
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heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad
upon the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4). “Come, let us build ourselves a city,” they
said, and if you have ears to hear it you can hear the echo of Genesis 1:26, where God
says, “Come, let us make humankind in our image.” These humans say, “Come, let us
build ourselves a city.” Can you hear the spirit in those words: the self-serving, selfseeking spirit? They began to make bricks out of clay, and fire them in their kilns, and
slap them together with mortar. All that activity got the Lord’s attention. He said (to the
heavenly host, presumably), “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.” And that’s what happened.
Suddenly everyone was babbling in other languages so that they couldn’t understand each
other, and couldn’t accomplish what they had set out to do. In the end their worst fears
were realized: they were “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” because they
couldn’t talk to each other.
Which makes me think of us.
I read an article in Christian Century last week. It’s a magazine by Christians for
Christians, and one of those Christians was writing about how the church could appeal to
Millennials—young people between the ages of 18 and 35. I read the article and
appreciated it and wanted to share it with the members of the 2020 Vision Facilitation
Team. So I went online, found the article, and clicked the “share” button. I was able to
enter the group email address of the team and send it, but after I did I began to look at the
comments others had made about the article. The first wrote: “Excellent piece—it made
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me think of Jesus and his approach to people.” The next person wrote: “I agree, although
the marketing language is off-putting.” The next person wrote: “But the end of that
marketing paragraph is good.” The next person wrote: “The concepts of ‘product’ and
‘market’ are incompatible with the vision of church and gospel.” And then he quoted a
line from the article: “In the end, churches will need to be both market- and productdriven.” He wrote: “I want you to close your eyes, repeat that phrase back to yourself
slowly, then let me know what you did with the sticky-gross feelings inside.”
In the space of four comments the conversation had gone from “Excellent piece—
it made me think of Jesus,” to “sticky-gross feelings inside.” And again, that’s in an
article from a magazine by Christians, for Christians. You don’t even want to know how
the non-Christians are commenting on articles and blog posts and Facebook updates. It is
babble, is what it is, but it is angry, hateful, hurtful babble, in which people fire off salvos
from their smartphones to prove how much smarter and better they are than everyone
else. And, of course, what is being said on television and on the radio is just as bad. It
divides us as a nation. It divides us as a world. In an age when technology has made it
possible for us to communicate with people on the other side of the globe instantaneously
we are not necessarily coming closer together. Some unseen force seems determined to
drive us as far apart as possible.
And that reminds me of the merry-go-round I used to ride in the sixth grade.
I was a student at Comfort Elementary School, and on the playground we had one
of those old, iron merry-go-rounds. They don’t put them on school playgrounds anymore
because they are so dangerous, and I can attest to that. I used to climb onto that merrygo-round during recess along with all the other kids who didn’t have any sense, and when
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we couldn’t squeeze one more kindergartner onto it some big, eighth grade boys would
come galloping across the playground to push us. They would plant their feet and start
turning that thing with their hairy, apelike arms until it was whirling around at about 160
RPM’s and little children were screaming bloody murder. The more they screamed the
more those big boys loved it. They would push faster and faster and although it was rare
that anyone actually flew off the merry-go-round there was always the possibility that it
could happen, and that kept us holding on to those iron bars until our knuckles turned
white, until the eighth-grade boys were exhausted and let it slow to a stop, and we
climbed off—dizzy—and wobbled over to lie beneath a shade tree.
But at some point I learned that the closer you got to the center of that merry-goround the less danger there was of flying off. In fact, right at the center you could stand
up and take your hands off the bars, no matter how fast it was going. It was like the eye
of the hurricane, that place where the violent, outward-flinging forces paused to catch
their breath. Years later, in a physics class, I learned that the force that tries to throw you
off a merry-go-round is called centrifugal force, or, as some people pronounce it, “centriFYOO-gal,” reminding us that it is related to the word centrifuge. It is also related to the
word fugitive, because in Latin it means “to flee from the center.” Centrifugal force is
“center-fleeing” force. But in that physics class I learned it’s not a real force at all. It’s
simply inertia—the tendency of objects in motion to continue moving in a straight line.
When those eighth-grade boys began to push that merry-go-round, the kindergartners
tended to move in a straight line, and unless they held on tight they would—right off the
merry-go-round and into the dirt! So they held on tight, and that force—the one that kept
them on the merry-go-round—is called centripetal force. Some people pronounce it
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“centri-PETAL,” like the petals of a flower bowing toward the stem. It is “centerseeking.”
You can think about it like this: If you tie a rock onto a piece of string and whirl
it around your head the rock tries to go off in a straight line from every point on that
circle, but the string keeps it from doing that, it keeps pulling the rock toward the center,
keeps it going around and around. That’s what gravity does for our planet: it keeps it
going around and around the sun. But if something happened to the force of gravity (God
forbid!) it would be like cutting the string, and the earth would go flying off into deep
space, and we would all freeze to death in a matter of minutes. So, yes, we complain
about gravity from time to time. It makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning. But on
a day like today we can say, “Thank God for gravity!” It’s that center-seeking force that
keeps us from flying off the merry-go-round.
And that reminds me of Pentecost.
Luke tells us that at that time there were devout Jews from every nation under
heaven living in Jerusalem: 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. They all spoke different languages, and it kept them separated from each
other; there was a language barrier. But on the day of Pentecost all the believers were
gathered together in one place and they weren’t talking, they were waiting, waiting for
that promised power from on high. And all at once it came with a sound like a hurricane,
like the swirling rush of a violent wind, and the next thing you know these simple
Galileans were speaking in languages they had never learned. They rushed out onto the
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street, praising God in these “unknown tongues.” But instead of dividing them, in the
way they had at the Tower of Babel, these other languages brought people together,
brought those foreigners running to see what all the ruckus was about, and there they
heard the believers proclaiming the mighty acts of God in their native tongues.
They were amazed.
But others sneered and said, “These men are filled with new wine!” And Peter
stood up and said, “No, they’re not! It’s only nine o’clock in the morning! No, this is
what the prophet Joel was talking about, that time when God would pour out his Spirit on
all flesh, and your sons and your daughters would prophesy, and your young men would
see visions, and your old men would dream dreams. That’s what’s going on here!” Peter
went on to preach a powerful sermon, and at the end of it those people who had been
brought together from every part of the earth said, “What must we do to be saved?” And
Peter said, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ so that
your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
And that’s just what they did. That day some 3,000 people were added to the church.
We live in a time when words divide us, when the more we talk the more we seem
to drive others away. There seems to be a force in the world—a centrifugal force—that
threatens to throw us off the merry-go-round. But maybe, like centrifugal force, it’s not
real. Maybe it is simply inertia: our tendency to go the way we have always gone, to do
the things we have always done, to continue in a straight line without any kind of course
correction, to flee from the Center. But there is this other force, this centripetal force, and
it’s real. It pulls us toward the center, it holds us, it keeps us from flying off into
oblivion. Luke says it was the Holy Spirit—the power from on high that Jesus promised
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his disciples—and when it came on the Day of Pentecost it pulled the whole world
together. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia ended up in the
same church, sitting on the same pew.
It was a miracle.
But it wasn’t something that happened only once, a long time ago. It is something
that happens again and again. I’ve seen it happen here. The Holy Spirit is a centerseeking force, and when we live by that Spirit it moves us closer and closer to the true
Center—to God. And the closer we come to God the closer we come to each other.
And—miracle of miracles—we may find ourselves speaking the same language, talking
more about him than about us, proclaiming his mighty acts in a way that everyone can
understand. This is a lesson learned from the playground. It’s a simple one, but
profound. Test that spirit inside you and see: is it “center-seeking” or “center-fleeing”?
Is it moving you closer to God and others or further away?
If you sense that it’s moving you further away you might ask as those people
asked on the Day of Pentecost, “What must I do to be saved?” And I might say to you, as
Peter said to them, “Repent.” Which means, “turn around.” It means start moving in the
other direction, not away from the center but toward it. Grab those iron bars and pull
yourself, through prayer, toward that place. How will you know when you get there?
The same way I did on that merry-go-round: you will get to a place where you can stand
up, and take your hands off the bars, no matter how fast the world is spinning. That’s
when you know you are at the exact center, being held in the grip of the power that can
pull us all together.
—Jim Somerville © 2016
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