Date: The Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2010

Text: Genesis 11:1-9

Title: Reunited

Anyone who has ever tried to learn a foreign language has experienced one of life’s true conundrums. Learning a foreign language is like trying to eat pizza with chopsticks: you can do it, but there has to be an easier way.

In order to become a pastor, I had to learn the Old Testament language of Hebrew, and the New Testament language of Greek. How well did I do? Pass the chopsticks.

When Adam and Eve fell into sin, the whole world wasn’t corrupted all at one time. God told Adam and Eve that they would surely die, but they didn’t physically die that very day. They lived many years before they died. It took centuries before the world got so defiled, depraved, and damaged by man that God was compelled to clear the deck with the great flood.

Then it was still after the flood that God became compelled to mix up the language of the people, as we heard in the familiar story of the Tower of Babel. As God said, He mixed up their language so that the people could not understand one another. It was God’s curse to force the various people groups to move away from each other, to settle in their own areas, to become at odds with one another, as they now could not understand what each other was saying.

You know how frustrated you get when you are not understood. When you try talking with a person who understands little, or none of your language, you will  s-p-e-a-k  r-e-a-l  s-l-o-w  a-n-d  a  l-i-t-t-l-e  l-o-u-d-e-r, hoping against hope that will make you understood.

It’s hard not to be understood. It is frustrating. It is counter-productive. Our feelings get hurt. We think that folks don’t care about us when they don’t understand the point we are trying to make. Language is our prime tool for getting our point across.

When people don’t have a common tongue, they won’t live with each other. The settling of the United States is as clear a picture of this, as we Americans need look no further than what happened when Germans emigrated to the States, and Irish, and Poles, and Italians, and on and on.

They all settled where their own people were, who spoke the same language. In the big cities, they formed their own neighborhoods—these used to be called ghettos, having received that name from when the Jews, in Europe, were forced to live in certain areas of the cities.

Well, in the American big-city ghettos, where the common tongue ended, the neighborhood ended. The Germans bought their groceries from the Germans, and the Irish traded goods with the Irish, and the Italians ate with the Italians. Even more, if someone spoke a different language, you looked down upon him. If his language weren’t the same as yours, it wasn’t good enough, and if his language weren’t good enough, then his culture wasn’t good enough, and then he wasn’t good enough. This is what people have been doing to each other, ever since the Tower of Babel.

Now, put yourself into God’s shoes. What had God been trying to do ever since He created Adam and Eve? He had been trying to get His point across, talking with His creation. And, to His utter frustration, mankind never understood Him . . . and mankind gave up trying to understand God.

Adam and Eve’s sin was listening to Satan rather than listening to God. Cain’s sin—the reason he killed his brother, Abel—was jealousy, which led to anger. The sins of the whole world, in the day of Noah, was that everyone except Noah and his family had turned from God and were living the eat-drink-and-be-merry life. And, the sin which occurred when the people built the Tower of Babel was that they wanted to make a name for themselves.

Hmm, sounds just like us, doesn’t it?

Make no mistake, for the same reason God kicked Adam and Eve out of Eden, and for the same reason He sent the flood upon the earth, God confused the tongues of man as a curse against us because we think we are such hot stuff. God speaks a pure, holy language—and we can’t understand Him because we speak Pig Latin.

We deserve it, you know. We deserve the problems that we have because we can’t understand other people’s language. We don’t like the way others talk, just like we don’t like the color of their skin, or the slantiness of their eyes, or the way they dress, or the customs of their culture. They are different from us, and that is all the reason we need to think we are better—that’s all the reason we need to hate them, and to go to war with them, and to just plain not want anything to do with them—to live in our own little ghettos.

Today is the Day of Pentecost. This is the day—fifty days after the resurrection of our Lord, and ten days after His ascension into heaven—that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to earth to provide wisdom and power to His people so that they could spread to all people the Good News of salvation in Christ—to people of every place—people of every culture—people of every tongue.

One of the great spectacles of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was that the apostles spoke in these different tongues. Well, it wasn’t so much that they spoke in different tongues, but that all the people, who had gathered in Israel for this religious festival, from faraway parts—people who spoke the different languages, which caused them to go and live their separate ways—well, lo and behold, they could hear the apostles speaking as if they were talking their own language.

The neat point, folks, is that the same God, who confused the tongues of the people at the Tower of Babel because He was downright furious with them over their sin, now unites the people of the world in a common tongue. The common tongue isn’t a language, per se—we still speak plenty of different languages in this world. No, the common tongue is the language of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In our Lord’s work on the cross, He was uniting all of the people of the world in His body and blood, and the forgiveness and eternal life provided by Him. It is only in Christ that we people have salvation—blacks and whites and reds and olive-skinned—Egyptians and Americans and Germans and Filipinos—French speaking and Russian speaking and Norwegian speaking and English speaking.

It is the one Baptism of Jesus Christ that unites you, and every baptized person, with God, forgiving sins in the one Jesus Christ. It is the one meal of Jesus, in His one body and blood, which unites you, and all Christians, in the one eternal life of the resurrection from the dead.

No matter who you are, or how you speak, the language of the Gospel unites you with Christ and with one another. All believers truly are brothers and sisters in Christ—even though we will continue to struggle with our feelings for those who are different from us. All believers truly speak the same language—even though we can’t talk with many people, because of our language barriers.

The language that conquers all barriers is this: all praise to God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.