The Gift

The Rev. Alissabeth Newton

Pentecost Sunday

text: Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21

It is a sunny, summer afternoon and I am picking up my daughter from the last day of Kindergarten "Jump Start:" a week of half-days where the incoming crop of five-year-olds get to try out going to school before being plunged into the real thing. I walk up to our elementary school and see her, my little big kid, standing in line with the others, waiting. She sees me, too, and tugs on the teacher's arm. "There she is," my daughter says to the teacher, pointing at me. My kid is ready to go home. The teacher puts her arm out, not touching my child but obviously signaling her to stay back. Her eyes scan the parking lot, and slide right over me. "You have to wait for your mommy, honey," I can hear her say. I am sure she is looking for someone who matches my daughter racially – my child is dark-skinned and I am not. I see my girl's nose wrinkle up in frustration. "Right there!" She says again, and I can tell, because I am her mom, that she is about to lose it. Luckily, I'm only about 8 feet away. "Right here!" I echo back, then wave at the adult, catching her eye. "I'm her mom, and I'm right here, " I say firmly. The woman drops her hand and J runs out toward me. "Oh," the teacher is obviously embarrassed. "I didn't know what she was pointing at." I smile at her and do my best to appear understanding. This is a thing that happens to us from time to time. People often do not understand, just by first glance at us, that we belong together. But we do. Our belonging together – my daughter and I – is one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Our scriptures this week, as well as our special activities this morning, are all about the surprising and wonderful ways that, through God's grace, human beings can belong to each other, and about how all of this belonging marks us as God's own. Taken together, these core stories of our faith, especially our texts from Acts and Genesis, show us how to create communities of belonging and how not to – a question that human beings have been trying, and failing, to answer since the Tower of Babel, evidently. This story of the Tower is the story of a people who are afraid to be different from each other. This is a story of a people who believe that in order to belong together everyone must look, and act, and talk the same as each other. And in order to enforce this sameness the people start a big project together. They decide to build a tower. Now, think about that. One big building project to rule them all, a tower that will take this group of same-acting, same-thinking, same-speaking people all the way up to God. It must have felt so safe, and clear, to belong to those people. Unless, of course, you didn't want to make bricks. Or, if you didn't want to stay in that one place on the earth where the big building project was going up. Actually, it doesn't sound very satisfying after all, to spend your whole life building and laying bricks on a tower, does it? Genesis tells us that the Lord came down to see what people were up to, and saw this project. And God shook God's head and said "This is only the beginning." If they get away with this, if they can enslave their whole race to this one, mindless task. Who knows what will be next. So God gave the people a gift – God confused their language, and made them different from each other. And they did scatter, which was probably sad for the people who had thought up the tower. But I bet it was good news for the explorers who were freed from bricklaying, the poets and artists who now had so many languages and ideas and ways of thinking and being to explore, and all of the people who now had something other than making and laying bricks to do with their lives.

This scattering was probably also painful. Figuring out that sameness and belonging-ness are not the same thing can hurt. Misunderstandings can arise, and people who used to feel safe can present as threatening. It is really hard to reach across something as big as language, culture, and diverse ideas to find ways to belong.

Notice, with me, how different the story of languages is in our lesson from Acts, our Pentecost lesson. Now it is later, and now we know some things we didn't know back in Genesis. We know, for example, that God isn't up in the sky, far away. We know this because this story starts out in a small locked room where a group of men and women sit who have walked, and talked, and lived alongside God, in the person of Jesus Christ. So we know, at this point, that God is not far away and distant – that God can be particular and close and near. Like the people so long ago who built the tower, these men and women in the locked room want to move forward together. They want to build something, and like those people so long ago these people also share some sameness: a culture, language, and some powerful common experiences of God. Like the people who built the tower, these disciples also long to be with God. And, like those long ago people, God gives these disciples a gift – the gift of difference, yet again. But this time, the gift is new. This time there is no tower to knock down, and the action is not vertical - God descending and scattering the people. We already know that God is close, so this time God's gift rushes in like a wind, disturbing the disciples sameness and blowing away any ideas they might have had that in order to belong to God you need to speak one particular language, or think in one particular way, or belong to one particular group. This close, busy, wind of God's spirit burns away sameness, and brings the gift of difference instead. This time all the languages are spoken, and everyone hears in their own way. This time the gift of difference is also a gift of belonging, revealing that all of God's creation essentially does belong to each other, and our differences are part of that belonging, part of God's plan, part of the beauty of God's actions in our world. The choice we make, as it turns out, is whether or not we act like this is a gift, and take it.

So, dear church, read together these scriptures tell us a story that is full of good news. You see, the gift of Pentecost is that being different from each other is good, that we need all the languages, all the ways of thinking, all the different cultures and hearts and skin colors, and ways of loving and learning and living in order to fully reside in the fiery heart of our God's love. The message of Pentecost is that differences are gifts, and that by God's grace they can bring us together, help us love better, help us see God more clearly. It turns out, no matter what language you speak, no matter what ideas you have, no matter what life you have lived, it turns out you already belong to God, and so you already belong in God's house, with God's people.

This morning we get to baptize people, to splash them with water and say they are marked as Christ's own, forever. We don't do this to make these children belong to God, we baptize our children because they already belong to God. And we don't baptize in order to make people belong with us. We baptize because they already belong with us. We baptize on Pentecost because whoever you are, God speaks your language. We baptize on Pentecost because Pentecost teaches us that you do not have to change who you are to belong in this place, to belong with us, or to belong to God. We baptize because even when it is hard to tell at first glance just how we all belong to each other, we believe that we do. And we believe that this belonging, in spite of difference, is one of the greatest gifts of human life. We do not know what wonderful differences each of our baptismal candidates will bring into our world, or into our community. This morning, we get to welcome all of who they are, call it good, and share food, drink, and laughter together as God's own people, blessed with God's amazing diversity, and ready to love each other through, and because, of our differences.