Acts 2:1-21
This past week those of us of a certain age and a certain mindset marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—arguably the most important rock and roll album ever made. Fifty years later I still remember putting the LP on my family’s big home stereo console, expecting one thing and hearing something completely different, completely new, completely unexpected. I expected guitars and drums. Instead I heard sitar, clarinet, and calliope. I was young enough—and the music world was changing rapidly enough—that I thought: “OK, so this is what music sounds like now.”
Do you remember what you thought, how you felt when you first heard that album?
It seemed to both require and create new ways of listening.
Last week John Pareles wrote in The New York Times: “We simply can’t hear “Sgt. Pepper” now the way it affected listeners on arrival in 1967. Its innovations and quirks have been too widely emulated, its oddities long since absorbed. Sounds that were initially startling…have taken on a patina of nostalgia.”[1]
Time changes how we hear.
Time changes what we hear.
There are times when we are open to hearing new things.
And there are times—such as these current days—when our hearing seems to shut down.
One of the great and growing problems besetting our polarized nation is our seeming inability to hear one another.
I know what I know.
I hear what I want to hear.
You know what that’s like, don’t you.
I get my news from NPR, PBS, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
For me, those who get their news from FOX and The Wall Street Journal, and The National Review, seem to live in some distant and unknown world.
And, of course the reverse is also true—those watching FOX and reading The National Review find the museum quality liberals listening to NPR as equally distant and strange.
Sure, to show my openness I’ll visit The National Review’s website—but only briefly. And I know that the Times offers something called “Left, Right, and Center: Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss”—but I usually do miss what I don’t want to hear or read.
We don’t know what our neighbors sound like now. We don’t know what people in other churches sound like. Maybe we don’t want to know.
New ways of listening are required—but are we up to creating them?
This morning we heard a story about the origin of different languages—or perhaps we could describe it even better as a story about the origin of our inability to hear and understand other people.
This is not a historical report. It is myth in the best sense of the word—telling a story and by doing that attempting to better understand the ways of God and the ways of human beings. And it is such a good story that we’ve been telling it for thousands of years.
As is often the case in Genesis, God seems to act in very human ways when dealing with humans, walking in the garden in the cool of the evening and, here, coming down to check out how things are going on this blue and green planet. How are these human beings getting along? What are they up to?
Looking at a city and a tower which mortals had built, God considers the work done by one common people with one common language. Using words that suggest almost fear or jealousy says: “This is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
So God confuses their language and scatters the people over the face of the earth.
And now it often seems that anything we propose to do—create peace, save this planet from our destruction, provide for the general welfare—anything and everything seems to be impossible. We are scattered.
The story of the Tower of Babel is a story told by people who encountered other peoples, other tribes, other nations each with their own different customs, different words, and even their own different gods. Yet for all their differences there were those human constants and similarities: hunger and thirst, music and dance, a desire to thrive and prosper, a love of their land, and the hope for the well-being of their children and their children’s children in that land—all human goods, and yet the source of so much pain and conflict.
So this becomes not only a story about the origin of language but also a story about the scattering of people. “Babel,” a word that means “the gate of God,” is here connected to the Hebrew word that we translate as “confuse.” God’s judgment confuses the people and sends them out over the face of the earth. This is a story about the separation of one nation from another. This is a story about our inability to understand one another—even within the same nation, let along between nations.
It is a story about the alienation of people who, while of one divine origin, became many. It is a story of about the separation from one another that we all know, about the alienation from the best in ourselves, and our alienation from God.
That is to say, this is a story about sin. And it continues to be our story as scattered, separated, and alienated people.
Still, those who told this story, those who kept it in their sacred scriptures, those who knew the devastation and destruction caused by this separation, this sin, always held to the hope that this would change. They looked toward the time when the people of the world would find some common ground, some unity. They hoped that all of us might know once more our common status as those created in the very image of God, as the children of the living God and the sisters and brothers of one another.
Understanding one another is a difficult task.
Mutual understanding takes energy.
Mutual understanding requires time.
Nearly two thousand years ago Jewish people from all the nations of the world gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost. This celebration occurred seven weeks after Passover and marked the giving of the Law, the Torah, the Way of God to Moses and the Hebrew people. There were “Parthians and Medes and Elamites” among others. They all spoke different languages.
Suddenly, however, with the rush of a mighty wind, they began to hear the followers of the risen Christ speaking in their various languages, telling of God’s mighty acts. This story, too, is myth in the best sense of the word. It expresses the hope that the alienation of Babel might end.
The miracle of Pentecost is a miracle of understanding. It crosses gender and generations. Men and women might talk with each other. Young and old have things to say to one another. Pentecost gives us the hope that we might yet hear one another.
The poet, W.H. Auden, says of this event: “The gift of the Holy Spirit on that occasion is generally called the gift of tongues, but it might easily as well be called the gift of ears…As writers, readers, human beings, we cannot speak to or understand each other unless we are first prepared to listen. Of all the gifts that the Holy Spirit is able to bestow, the one for which we should first and most earnestly pray is humility of ear.”
Reflecting on the stories of Babel and Pentecost, Auden concludes: “The curse of Babel…was redeemed, because for the first time, people were willing in absolute fullness of heart to speak and to listen, not merely to their sort of person but to total strangers.”
Time changes how we hear.
Time changes what we hear.
As was the case fifty years ago, these times require a new way of listening. And I pray that they will create among us a new way of listening.
If the miracle of Pentecost is the miracle of hearing as well as speaking, the gift of ears as well as tongues, then we are called to a new Pentecost in these days.
We are called to open our ears to the stranger—to hear the words of those whom we don’t know, those whom we don’t see, those with whom we don’t agree in order to create a common future of shared good.
We are called to open our ears to the cries of those who are hurting, to the refugees and immigrants who do speak in different languages that we might know their lives and be their allies in creating a new world out of the violence and destruction they have experienced.
And we are called to open our ears to the lies that are spoken each day—the lies that tell us we can continue to pour out carbon into our atmosphere without disastrous and permanent damage to the planet entrusted to our care; the lies that tell us that one race, one religion are to be preferred over all others; the lies that tell us that great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few is good for all—to name just a few—so that we might hear and then speak the truth.
Once we were invited to picture ourselves on a boat in a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. If we could do that, what else might we yet imagine with fresh ears. May the Spirit of God come upon us—even now—opening our ears, our hearts, and our lives to the new possibilities of Pentecost.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/arts/music/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-anniversary.html?&hpw&rref=arts&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0.