Pentecost, Commonly Called Whitsunday (June 5, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

I’m a big fan of Johnny Cash. I find his story to be super compelling. He reached fame, struggled with drugs and relationships, and ultimately found a deep faith that anchored him. Towards the end of his life, Johnny Cash recorded a number of cover songs. One of the songs he covered was called “Hurt” which was originally performed by a band called Nine Inch Nails. There’s this really hauntingly beautiful line where he says: “What have I become? My sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you could have if all, my empire of dirt.”

In light of all of his successes, he realized that all his achievements paled in comparison to what was truly important. Cash had spend a lot of time building his own empire, an empire of dirt, or what we might call a city of man and it took him a long time to realize that what is truly important is the City of God.

St. Augustine wrote a book called City of God in which he contrasts the City of God over and against the City of man. The city of man finds its start all the way back in Genesis. While God had established a place for humanity to dwell, the Garden of Eden, the city of man represents the efforts of humanity to set themselves up over and against God. The city of man began when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, insisting that they knew a better way than that which God had provided for them. They wanted to be gods, they wanted power. We see this theme continued after Cain committed the sin of fratricide and went and founded his own city. The city of man continues to chapter 11 of Genesis where the people of earth, empowered by the technological advancement of the brick and united in speaking only one language, banded together and decided to build a city with a tower to the heavens. Most likely, this was not a tower literally built so high it reached “to heaven” but a temple dedicated to worshipping the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, and the stars…the very things God had created just 11 chapters earlier. Their purpose, if you look at Genesis 11, was to ensure that they could be centralized and to “make a name” for themselves. That’s important, remember that. God, of course, saw their plans and, as a judgment of their hubris, came down to confuse the language and thereby scattered the people over the face of their earth.

An important thing to point out about this story: it assumes that the unity of humanity is our natural state. It’s what we were made for. We weren’t made to be so separated from each other. We were made to be unified. As St. Paul says to the Athenians in Acts 17, “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” So we should understood division as a form of God’s judgment but, like most judgment, if it doesn’t produce repentance, it can exacerbate the problem. So these divisions which are accidental, language, ethnicity, etc. often become viewed as ultimate barriers between people, allowing us to think in terms of us vs. them. On the one hand this frustrates the project of the city of man, but on the other, it just allows various tribes, people groups, cultures, and nations to try and construct their own versions of the city of man.

But what the story really points out to us is that as humans, we have a tendency to build Babels, which really serves as the archetype of the city of Man. To build these cities, we have to discard the inherent meaning God has placed in our lives. And what do we replace that loss of meaning with? Well, we’re told we need to make our own meaning in the world but, ultimately, in replacing God, we reap only chaos and confusion, just like the builders of Babel discovered.

Ultimately, the sin of Adam and Eve is repeated in Babel, the striving for autonomy, the creature pretending that they are God, the falling prey to Satanic false promises that play on our fleshly desires. Babel reveals the ultimate futility of the human attempt to do it without God, the dire consequences of trying to supplant our Creature by putting ourselves in his place.

But today is Pentecost. What does all this talk about Babel and the city of man have to do with the story we heard from Acts 2? Well, it has everything to do with Pentecost because Pentecost is the undoing of Babel. It is the beginning of the undoing of the City of Man.

In our reading this morning, the disciples were gathered on the day of Pentecost. Pentecost was a Jewish feast that also went by the name The Feast of Weeks which was observed 50 days after Passover (hence the name Pentecost) and celebrated the harvest of wheat and, according to the Orthodox rabbinic tradition, is considered the date that Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai. This was a pilgrimage festival, meaning many Jews travelled to Jerusalem to observe the Feast. This is why, in Acts 2, there are so many people of different nationalities who speak different languages around.

So, Luke tells us that there was a sound from heaven like a rushing wind and cloven tongues like fire came upon the Disciples. This should immediately make us think of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt where God led them out by a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. God is here leading his Church into a new phase of salvation-history. Some have said Pentecost is the birth of the Church; I’m not sure that’s true because I think the Church was birthed on the Cross from the blood and water which flowed from Jesus’ side. But Pentecost does represent a sort of Exodus of the Church that reverses the order of the original Exodus: Instead of leading his people from Egypt through the wilderness into Jerusalem, God leads his faithful people outside of the walls of Jerusalem and out into the world. Pentecost, then, is a New Sinai. We can think of it as the Feast of the New Covenant.

And how does this express itself? How does the Gospel get promulgated to those who aren’t from Jerusalem? The Apostles spoke in tongues. Not so-called “heavenly prayer languages,” but actual human languages so that those who were present could understand them. And what where they saying? The crowds say, at the end of the reading that they are uttering the “wonderful works of God.” In other words, the Apostles are preaching Christ crucified to these crowds so that those present can hear the Gospel in their own languages. This astounds the audience which marvels at how various people can understand. What’s excluding from our reading but is worth pointing out is that there are three reactions: some of the crowd was amazed, which makes sense given that 3,000 people end up being baptized at the preaching of Peter right after this event; but still others doubted that this was actually a sign, and still others mocked the disciples, saying they were drunk with wine. That’s kind of a weird reaction, in my opinion, because I’ve never started randomly speaking Swahili or French or German after a few glasses of wine.

But the point is this: Pentecost is the New Sinai and it’s ground zero for the Church to begin realizing it’s mission which was given to us by our Lord at the Great Commission: that we would go out into all the world to all nations and baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. But on an even deeper level, the Church, in its proclamation of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments, invites the world into something better than the city of man they’re busy constructing. When we do it on our own, we get the same results as Babel: division and confusion. The Church offers us a better way: we don’t have to make up our own meaning as we go; we don’t have to take the position of Creator of the universe and Master of our fate. And notice what happens: when we submit to the Holy Ghost, we are healed of those wounds: where confusion reigned, the Holy Ghost heals by bringing communion; where division and hostility were normal, the Holy Ghost works on bridging the gap not only between heaven and earth but also between peoples.

And so, on this day of Pentecost, where we remember the Holy Ghost coming onto the Church and bestowing it with gifts, we should spend time in prayer asking that he would help us accomplish the mission of the Church, which is to usher people into a city, not the city of man with all of its striving and autonomy and strife, but to the City of God where people experience life in a way that leads to their ultimate flourishing. Because when we understand that our job is not to create meaning, but rather to discover the meaning God has implanted into our lives, then we can understand our ultimate dependence on him. The goal is not to make a name for ourselves which is the purpose of the City of man, but rather, by the empowerment of the Holy Ghost, to take the name of our Lord into all the corners of the earth.

Let us pray:

Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest,

Vouchsafe within our souls to rest;

Come with thy grace and heavenly aid,

And fill the hearts which thou hast made.

To thee, the Comforter, we cry;

TO thee, the gift of God most high;

The Found of life, the Fire of love,

The souls’ Anointing from above.

The sevenfold gifts of grace are thine,

O Finger of the Hand Divine;

True Promise of the Father thou,

Who dost the tongue with speech endow.

Thy light to every sense impart,

And shed thy love in every heart;

Thine own unfailing might supply

To strengthen our infirmity.

Drive far away our ghostly foe,

And thine abiding peace bestow;

If thou be our preventing Guide,

No evil can our steps bedtide.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.