Richard Davenport

June 8, 2025 – Day of Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9

                It’s hard to put yourself back into the shoes of the people living in the days of Babel.  It’s hard to say exactly how many people there were back then.  These are the days after the flood.  That means Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives had to basically start over.  We’re told Noah lived another 350 years after the flood and Genesis 10 details how his sons had children and how they all started to repopulate the world, but it doesn’t give us an idea of how much time passes, nor how many people there are at this point.

                Still, the number must be fairly substantial.  They were big enough to look around and consider themselves strong, perhaps invincible.  I don’t know if they truly had an idea what it would take to build a tower to the sky.  Not even modern skyscrapers that are over 100 stories tall reach the clouds.  I’ve seen artists try and depict what a tower like that might look like. 

Whether they actually thought it would reach that high or just meant to build a really tall tower, we can’t say for sure.  That isn’t really the point behind it anyway.  It wasn’t the height of the tower that condemns them.  It was the pride that made them think this was a good idea to begin with.

It’s interesting how God deals with this problem.  Whether the majority of the people are believers or unbelievers at this point, we don’t know.  The text doesn’t really tell us.  It’s just that sinful pride is driving them, making them think they are the ones who have made themselves strong. 

He doesn’t just wipe them out again.  He doesn’t really hurt them at all.  Instead he confuses them.  They took pride in their unity, so God takes that unity away.  They can no longer work together toward their sinful goal.

That’s the part that’s hard to imagine.  Just suddenly not being able to talk to other people, people that you’ve probably known your whole life.  There are sounds coming out of their mouths, but you can’t make sense of them.  No one gets the idea that maybe they can patiently work out the different words and learn each other’s language.  After all, this was caused by God and they weren’t supposed to stick around here to sort things out.

From there, time passes, centuries, millennia, until we get to today.  Now you can look over history and see hundreds, if not thousands of languages listed.  Some languages spanned empires and some only appeared on tiny islands. Some, though changed greatly over time, are still in use.  Many languages are no longer spoken anywhere.  Some are so old or so remote that we don’t even know how to translate them.

The Missouri Synod takes the study of Scripture vary seriously and demands that its pastors be educated enough that they don’t have to blindly accept what others say about the Bible.  Each graduate from the Masters of Divinity program should be able to open the Bible and read the original Hebrew and Greek text for ourselves.  I would say very few graduates end up with anything approaching fluency, but we can use our grammar books and lexicons to translate the text for ourselves and draw our own conclusions.  It may take a while, but we should be able to work our way through a chunk of text and not have to be completely dependent on the work of other translators.

It's definitely a useful skill.  I wasn’t thrilled to fight through the process of learning the languages, but I’m glad I can make use of them when I need to.  If you continue on to doctoral work at the seminary, you have to show proficiency in three more languages.  Needless to say, it’s also a huge pain.  It takes a lot of work to learn a language and, for as much time as I’ve spent studying languages, I wouldn’t consider myself fluent in any of the ones I’ve worked with. 

In our own community, there isn’t a whole lot of need to learn another language. There are a fair number of folks around here for whom Spanish is their native language, but by and large you can manage just fine with English.  So really what value is the story of Babel to us today?  It’s God’s judgment against pride!  What more is there to say about it? 

Yes, God’s judgment came down on a prideful people.  At the same time, God’s work here was an act of mercy.  Had he not confused their languages and allowed them to continue, who knows how much worse they would have made things?  The people building the tower probably didn’t realize it, but they have much to be thankful for.  God kept them from hurting themselves further.

Still, that’s all done and over with.  The language thing happened and there isn’t anything that will change that. We live in a world where people speak thousands of languages and that’s just how it is.  We just have to deal with it.

Living on the other side of God’s judgment, his discipline, can be just as tricky.  The people of Babel did a lot that warranted God’s action, there’s no question about that. God made a monumental change in how the world works.  That danger and temptation would continue to be a temptation for all of the world’s history. If languages suddenly all merged into one, there’s no telling what we could accomplish, for good or for ill. That was the promise of the internet, and we’ve seen the same thing hold true there.  The internet allows us to do some very good things, but it also facilitates some very bad behavior.

Aside from learning different languages and trying to work to bring people and cultures together, there’s only so much we can do about the language problem.  Looking at it, the temptation isn’t to do something about it, but rather to look at the problem as completely beyond fixing and give up.  The temptation is to look at it and do nothing at all.  If the problem can’t be permanently solved, then why bother doing anything about it at all?

Pride drives us to act in the wrong ways, bringing God’s judgment down on us. Laziness and apathy drives us to not act at all.  We look at crime problems in our neighborhoods and figure there’s no way to rid the world of crime, so why waste the effort?  We look at divisiveness and hatred, whether it arises between geographic regions, ideologies, ethnicities, languages, or any other group, and think to ourselves that those people aren’t really worth the effort to try and reach, so there’s not much point in trying.

The story of Pentecost has many different parts, many things worthy of consideration all on their own.  Among them is the thread that began long ago on the plains of Mesopotamia.  People, in their pride, sought to build a tower to keep them unified.  God confused their languages and the people spread all over the globe.  Now, on the day of Pentecost, people from all over the globe come to Jerusalem and find the barriers gone.  They are no longer confused.  They hear the Gospel, no matter where they came from and no matter what language they speak, they hear the Gospel, that Jesus came into the world to save them and give them life.  They hear the Gospel made plain and many believe and receive the grace that God alone can give.  The damage caused by pride is, for a time, undone.  God repairs what sin had broken.

All sin breaks and destroys.  God’s work heals and restores.  Where sin breaks our lives, bringing death in, God restores and brings life.  Where sin breaks our families and communities, bringing selfishness and hatred, God restores and brings humility and harmony.

This is what God has done for you.  He has restored you, giving you forgiveness and life through baptism.  He has restored us as a people, healing our divisions and bringing us together through communion.  He has brought the gift of grace won by his son to us.  We are forgiven by the humble Jesus hanging on the cross and we are given life by the glorified Jesus who stands outside the open tomb.

Though the work is done by Christ, he sends his people out to bring that work to the rest of the world.  During his time on earth, he had been demonstrating to his disciples what a life lived in service to God and to neighbor looked like.  Now he has given that duty to them, to live that life, to share the message, and to bring others into the Kingdom through God’s promise of grace.

We share in this responsibility.  As God’s people, forgiven and restored through his grace, we are in the same role as the disciples before us.  Together we follow in the footsteps of Christ, learning what sin does and how God undoes its damage.  Then we are sent into the world to share that same message. 

The damage done by sin can be undone, for God is already at work making that happen.  He is doing it for us in our individual lives and together as his people.  We don’t have the power to fix these problems. We’re sinners too, and we cause plenty of our own problems through our sinfulness.  But, we don’t do this alone.  God works through his people, just as he did on Pentecost.  By giving up, we deny the power of God.  By giving up, we deny others of his love and grace. 

Pentecost continues the story of God’s salvation.  Christ dies so that sins may be forgiven.  He rises so that death may give way to life.  He doesn’t just forgive sins, he wipes away all trace that they were there to begin with.  He will bring that to completion at his return, but he is already at work to restore what was lost to sin now and he uses us to bring that restoration to those who have no hope in the world.

God has made you an apostle.  He has sent you into the world to share the Gospel and his love.  Rejoice that you are an apostle, because that means you are already saved and already looking forward to eternal life.  Share that joy with the world, for the work begun on Pentecost continues right up until the day of our Lord’s glorious return.