Up the Down Staircase

Pentecost 5/23/10

Genesis 11:1-9   Acts 2:1-21

Karis oomin kai irenay apo Theos Patros aymown kai Kuriou Yesu Christo.

What?

If that was Greek to you, you’re right! It was Greek. Koine Greek—also known as Biblical Greek. It was the commercial language of the Roman Empire in New Testament times. Used in commerce and in conversations amongst parties who didn’t share a native tongue. Jesus spoke mostly in Aramaic and Hebrew, but his story was told through out the known world, and was eventually written down in, Koine Greek.

I share this fun and fascinating fact with you, not for you to wow your friends with at summer barbeques, and not to give you a leg up in the biblical languages category if someday you were to appear on Jeopardy—but rather to illustrate the notion that commonality in language makes communication easier. Even the authors of the New Testament realized that.  In this scenario, diversity is a hindrance.

Which, from the story of Babel that was read this morning, doesn’t seem to be a problem for God. God looked at those people he created –descendants of the ones he told to be fruitful and multiply and inhabit the earth—after kicking them out of the garden—God looked at what they were up to and said, “Uh-oh. These people aren’t spreading out like I told them to. They’re sticking together in one place, and they’re building a city! With a tower that reaches up to my doorstep. They don’t understand that you can’t build your way to God. They just don’t understand that you can’t make a name for yourself climbing the stairway to heaven. They don’t understand that they shouldn’t try to be like God. Don’t they remember the snake and the fruit and the eating and the fig leaves? They just don’t understand—they don’t understand…hey, maybe that’ll settle this!”

And so God, in the story, scrambles their languages, so they can’t understand one another. Stopped construction right in its tracks. The city was soon forgotten, the tower abandoned, as the people scattered over the face of the earth. Disaster averted. People saved.

People saved? Saved how? Doesn’t God’s action represent a punishment of sorts? Isn’t it preferable for them to all be speaking the same language? Doesn’t that bring them closer to God’s intentions of peace and well-being for all? Aren’t the people cooperating with each other like good people should? Yes…and no.

Yes, they are playing nicely with others. And in some ways their behavior is laudable. God wants us to communicate well and cooperate to achieve a better life for all. Modern day examples include Israelis and Palestinians coming together to envision what peace between them might look like, and cost each. Scientists working jointly or sharing research as they strive to alleviate the suffering of disease. Disparate people coming together to work at feeding the world, assist in rebuilding flood or earthquake ravaged neighborhoods, or champion the cause of human rights. God wants those things too, and one could easily say that projects such as these demands our working together with God to reach those new heights. Which, however, is just about the polar opposite of what the people of Babel set out to do.

Their mission was to celebrate their new technology—bricks and bitumen (or mortar) by building a monolith that would breach the very gates of heaven. Heaven crashing. Metaphorically speaking this is a story of people over-riding the ground rules God had made with their forebears and replacing them with their own. Reaching up into the heavens, they did what God frowns most upon. They put their faith and trust in their tower and city, instead of in the God who made them. And they sought to be God by “making a name for themselves” instead of working in God’s name. In other words, they tried to go up the down staircase.

Well, what do I mean by that? Think about it this way. I remember in my high school there were wide staircases, divided in two by a handrail. Facing up the stairs, the side to your right would be the “up” staircase, and to your left, the down staircase. This was to keep an orderly flow of traffic between floors during what was called “passing time.” Well it may have been orderly, but the flow was also unrelenting. At the bell it was like a dam had broken, gushing out a wave of pent up teenaged bodies, funneling them into the staircase, creating a mighty, densely packed river of people. And woe to you if you somehow got your right and left mixed up and entered the down staircase going up at the exact moment that bell rang! It was like being caught in a raging river!

Now, you could try your darnedest to swim against the tide, trying to reach the top. But inevitably you would lose momentum and the will to resist and you’d be swept down to the bottom, where you’d try again or give up.

The citizens of Babel, with their city and their tower, were trying to run up the down staircase. They made the mistake of thinking that the way to God was “up.” That they had to scramble up a slippery staircase of achievement and good deeds and righteous living in an attempt to circumvent the need for God.

People still do that. But it is an exercise in futility, because we know from the biblical witness that God’s forgiveness, and love, and salvation, come down to us—not the other way around.  So you can see how God’s intervention in the language department was God doing those babbling fools a favor. Saving them from the futility of trying to be God, and throwing them into a situation in which they are forced to rely totally on him. Cause that’s the way God planned it.

God comes down to us. We confess it every time we use the Nicene Creed in worship: “I believe in Jesus Christ, who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven…” Came down. Jesus came down—the disciples gathered in Jerusalem knew that, because they had seen him ascend back up to the Father. Jesus came down, and dwelt among them, and taught them, and preached, and healed and worked miracles. They had shared food, living quarters, and spent the better part of three years in his wake.

But now he was gone—although he had promised to send the Holy Spirit down to guide them through the next phase of the mission. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of it. Not yet. Must have been stressful, waiting. A few had most likely fallen away from the group. True enough, the gospel of Matthew reports that, at the ascension, watching Jesus borne up into heaven, some believed. But some doubted. Their trust in Jesus was already fading, being overshadowed by their impatience and their need to be in control of their own destiny. So the disciples sat there…and waited…and worried.

Then the dam burst! God was coming down again!

The Holy Spirit blew open the windows and doors and scattered the papers from the table, much as it had scattered the people of Babel. It rushed down from the heavens like a raging torrent, enveloping everything and everyone in its path. Breathing God’s spirit once again into those disciples—giving them its gifts. Then when the room was so full of Spirit you couldn’t have fit even one puff more, the Spirit exploded into flames.

When the smoke cleared, a tongue of that spiritual fire lay upon each of those disciples, and their own tongues burned with the gospel message. With one more mighty swoosh the Spirit introduced them to the mission field by pushing them out the door. Out in the city they soon found that the Holy Spirit had reversed the language mix up of Babel—people of all languages heard and understood what they witnessed to. And the rest is “his story,” the story of the spread of the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ to all the far corners of the earth. The miracle of Pentecost is a symbolic microcosm of the way the good news exploded upon a waiting world, beating back the boundaries of communication with the efforts of gospel writers, translators, storytellers, and preachers.

So…grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (That’s what I said in Greek at the beginning of this sermon.) The message that Pentecost leaves with us is one of the importance of, and danger in, good communication.  It can be either boon or bane of our relationship with God.

But the deeper truth gleaned from these two obviously related stories is this: no matter what kinds of tower we build to reach heaven on our own, in the end, we will fail. But that’s not a problem. The flood of grace coming from God will overcome even the most stalwart barriers you have erected against it. God will have you. Because we have a God who comes down. Comes down to comfort. Comes down to heal. Comes down to renew our lives and redeem us from our selfish ways. Comes down to save.

Our God comes down. To you. To me. To everyone. Thanks be to God. AMEN