Are You Taking to Me?

Text: Genesis 11:1-9
Other texts: Acts 2:1-21

It appears that many people like to talk about God. What God has done for them and the world. About their relationship and history with God. On the whole, that seems like a positive thing. If God is good and good for you, then telling other folks can be inspiring and helpful to them. Even life-giving. The Bible is the story of God. It tells God’s story to anyone who wishes to find out about it.

The Bible tells us that among other things, God intends us to tell people about God. God tells Israel to be a light to the nations. Jesus tells the disciples to go out and proclaim the good news and baptize people.

But the two commands are not the same thing. And the difference between the two is a conflict—let’s be polite and call it a tension—that runs through the Bible and people’s practices of faith.

The “light to the nations” camp thinks that the best way to tell people about God is to act good. If we act according to our faith and in alignment with God’s wishes, people will see how that makes our lives and the world better. They will wish to get what we have. They will see that what motivates us is God. And they will then want to know—and to know about—God, too. You might call this the “health club” theory of evangelism. You work out. Your friends all notice how buff you are, and how energetic and happy you seem. They ask why. You tell them you owe it all the your great health club. They rush to join the club, too.

The “go and baptize” camp thinks the best way to tell people about God is to talk good. To tell the story to all who will listen. If we tell the story of the Bible and what it promises, people will see the truth in that and respond. What we say will strike a chord in them, and they will want to be part of the story. This is like the health club doing some advertising, plus the surgeon general telling everyone that if they don’t get 30 minutes of rigorous exercise every day, their life will be short and unhappy. Your friends take note. They rush to join the club, too.

The difference between these camps is like the difference between listening and speaking, which I’ll talk more about in a minute. It also is related to another issue in the Bible: is God for us or for everybody? If for us, who is “us” and can other people become “us” at all? And if so, how? The question is central to the book of Acts, which is the story of the beginning of the church. (Some call the events of Pentecost the birthday of the church.) The early followers of Jesus debated whether people who were not Jews could become Christian. Or did they have to convert to Judaism first? Become us? Did the men have to be circumcised? Did the people have to follow the laws given at Sinai? All of them? Some of them? None at all? Was Jesus even here for the gentiles? He came, he said, to fulfill the law and the promise. Were the gentiles excluded by definition, or by indifference?

If Jesus came for everybody, what does that mean about the boundary between Christians and non-Christians? Maybe “all” means all who become Christian, but not those who do not. That has been the consensus interpretation throughout much of Christianity. Conversion first, then salvation. Not the other way around. But it does make the theology of grace, by which God loves us not on account of something we do, a little more complicated. Can you have grace for some, but not others?

If people who are not Christian become Christian, that will possibly change Christianity. Is that OK? One example: right now in our times the most energetic growth in Christianity is in Africa. The new African churches are bringing something new to Christian faith. Some people think this is great, and some think it is horrible. Another example: some of our sister Lutheran denominations are unhappy at the way the ELCA is fraternizing with other denominations. They feel that such goings-on pollutes pure Lutheranism. Does diversity joined make a better product or a weaker one?

The question is: how does God work? Does God make new things by combining lots of other things? This is the way evolution goes. Diverse organisms combine to yield surprising, and sometimes more sturdy, ones. Sometimes diverse organisms just live together in symbiotic harmony, creating a more sturdy society. Lichen is a common example. Also some kinds of jelly fish. Also: nations. Also: churches.

In the story of Pentecost that we just spoke and heard, there are two miracles. One is a miracle of speaking. The gathered followers of Jesus spoke “in other languages,” it says. Meaning, we guess, other than their own. It was a miracle of tongues. But then “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each,” it also says. So it is also a miracle of ears. A miracle of speaking and a miracle of hearing.

How does this story, the birthday of the church, guide us about how Christians should discuss our faith? Discuss both with others who share a little of our faith and with those who share none.

One way is to use the words that the others use. The poster downstairs says “how did Jesus speak to them? In their own words.” It is our job, according to this way, to translate our ideas and convictions into words that make sense to the person to whom we are talking. No jargon allowed, and no specialty language and no doctrinally difficult phrases. Speak in the language of the listener. We do the hard work. We think of new words to explain difficult concepts. This way honors diversity.

The other way is to use the words that you’ve always used. The words are fine-tuned and honed so that they mean something particular and are not easily translated. It is our job, according to this way, to teach others to speak our language. To define for them the meaning of the words we use. We do some hard work, but they do the harder work of learning a new language. Then we all can speak it together. This way honors unity.

[I should say there is a third way: don’t learn their language at all and don’t teach them yours. Just say the same thing over and over again in your own language. Only louder. This is an unfortunately common perversion. ]

At issue is how the church and the world relate. Is it in the world, of the world, against the world, alongside the world, or some other preposition? We might be monasteries, preserving the one truth. Or we might be missionaries. How does the church relate to people not of the church? Are we called to go out into the world, and to speak about our faith and trust in God? Or are we called to sit faithfully at home and invite others to come inside?

The story in Genesis that we heard is usually called the story of the Tower of Babel. There is a tower in it, but that is not really the main point. It is only mentioned at the beginning. What the people in the story want is to have one language and one name and to live in one big city. They honor unity. It makes them strong and excited. But it seems that that is not what God wants. God mixes their language. God stops them from building the city (not the tower, notice). And later in Genesis God names them “God’s people.” The people want to be exclusive, isolated, withdrawn, and pure. They want, I’m guessing here, they want everyone to be just like them. Just like us. God wants them to be fruitful and multiply. God scatters them all over the earth. Go and be different from one another.

The Pentecost story has been called the undoing of the Babel story, but it is not. If it were, all those different languages that people spoke and all the ones in which they listened would be one language. But that’s not what happened. Pentecost does not refute Babel, it confirms it. The people live not in a gray amalgam but in crazy diversity, joined to one another by the Holy Spirit.

People worry, rightly, I’d say, about whether the world is losing cultures as fast as species. The web and English and commerce combine to make the surfaces of people more alike. Is that good? It is not good if in the process we—whoever we are—begin to hope that—and worse, to expect—that others are like us. If we begin to long for Babel in the time before the scattering and mixing. If we only speak and do not do the listening. If we make the others do the work.

Both Genesis and Acts teach us the same thing. Our difference are not a result of God’s punishment, but of God’s design. For that, we give thanks to God.