Sheldon Sorge’s Sermon – 5/23/10
Gathering the Scattered
Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-21
“Happy Birthday, Church!” That greeting, or something like it, will be offered in many churches today, as we celebrate Pentecost. John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian movement, would have none of that, however. Oh, he’d celebrate Pentecost all right, but not as the church’s birthday. He’d point out that the word “church” comes from the Greek ecclesia, which literally means “those called forth” by God. Church begins in the Bible with Adam and Eve, called forth from the dust, created in the image of God and ordained to live always to their Creator’s glory. When God calls forth Noah and his family for salvation, we have a church – and that is why the ark is one of the ancient symbols for the church.
When God calls forth Abram and Sarai from Ur, we have a church. And when God calls Israel out of Egypt, we have a church. The critical issue in what makes a church is simply this: It is God-made, not self-made. We don’t decide to be church; the church exists because God calls forth a people, and places a seal of ownership on them. They no longer belong to the world and its Pharaohs; and most significantly, they no longer belong to themselves. Wherever “we are not our own, but we belong to our Lord and Savior,” we have church. Yet even though it is not the beginning of the church, Pentecost marks a crucial point in its life.
Both of our texts – the stories of Babel and Pentecost – have to do with God causing people to speak in new languages. But while both stories share that common trait, their link is mainly one of contrasts. While Pentecost is about God calling forth people from all nations as the Holy Spirit is poured out on “all flesh,” Babel stands as the opposite. At Babel, God scatters the gathered, then at Pentecost God gathers the scattered.
Let’s step back from these two stories for a moment, and consider their place in the wider biblical salvation drama. There are actually two distinct strands to this drama – one personal, and the other corporate. The first, personal strand is the salvation story that evangelical Christians know best: Human beings, who are created good in God’s image, deface that image by defying God’s order for their lives, thus separating themselves from God and incurring the sentence of death – this is the story of Adam and Eve, and of every human being since. Each of us lives it out, and death is the last word – until our Savior dies for us even though he did not earn that judgment, thereby freeing us from our death sentence. Because he rose from death, we too rise with him into new life. This is the blessed hope of every Adam and every Eve who trusts in Jesus as Savior. This salvation story is one we all know and love. Yet it is just one strand of a two-stranded story.
Salvation is also about God’s ways with humanity corporately. This is the second strand of the Bible’s salvation story, in which Babel and Pentecost stand as key pivot points. In this strand of the story, humanity is constituted as a good society from the outset, signified by Noah’s family as a God-obeying first social order, which becomes the source of all nations. And like Adam and Eve in Eden, this society defies God by wanting to be like God. Adam and Eve wanted God’s comprehensive knowledge – omniscience – while Babel sought God’s power – omnipotence. It’s still that way today – as individuals we want to know the secrets that God alone knows, and as societies we try to fortify ourselves to become the greatest and strongest of all, whether as a congregation, class, race, or nation.
The judgment on Babel is that God scatters those who join forces in order to become self-sufficient, secure, and powerful. With Adam and Eve, our judgment is separation from God; with Babel, God’s judgment is to separate us from each other. Nation fights against nation, people against people, political party against political party, even church against church, special interest groups within a church against other special interest groups, and the list goes on. Rupture, hostility, mistrust, failure to understand others, fear of what others will do to us, thinking more highly of ourselves than we do of others – these are the bitter fruit of Babel’s judgment. However, just as our well-earned separation from God is not the final word, so our much-deserved separation from one another is not the final word. God’s intention that all live in harmony, to the glory of God, is made actual by yet another divine incursion into human history. Just as God entered history by sending the eternal Son to heal our separation from God, God pours out the Holy Spirit “on flesh” to heal our separation from one another, beginning with Pentecost. The outpouring of the Spirit is God’s invitation to all nations, in language each can understand as their own, into the one fellowship of those who have been baptized into Christ. Human redemption is completed by the scattered of the earth being gathered together again at Pentecost.
In the corporate strand of the salvation story, God scatters humanity at Babel by splintering their languages; but at Pentecost, God reaches out to people of confused tongues and competing interests with a message that draws them together. At Babel, people join forces out of ambition to manufacture a social order that meets all their needs; at Pentecost, people wait for God to give them what they most need. At Babel, salvation depends on human wit and craft; at Pentecost, all power belongs to God.
The Pentecost story is repeatedly punctuated with signs that this is all God’s work, not that of the apostles. The sound of a rushing wind – they couldn’t make that up. It had to be God. The tongues of fire – they couldn’t make that up. It had to be God. Speaking in languages they’d never learned – they couldn’t make that up. It had to be God.
A Pentecostal church is marked by this radical notion that without God, we couldn’t carry on. But how easily the church slips into patterns that can be carried on and on regardless of whether God is at work among us! Just as we easily stray from our trust in Jesus as Savior by thinking and acting as though our salvation depends on our own works, so we stray from dependence on the Holy Spirit for the church’s power by instituting self-perpetuating ecclesiastical orders that could carry along fine for a long time without any Holy Spirit outpouring.
Pentecost happens to those who wait on God to move. It cannot happen as long as we are trying to make the church in our favored image. Who knows what things God might do through the church if only we’d let go and let God? Our task is not to get the job done, but to get out of God’s way, and trust the Holy Spirit’s outpouring to bring exactly what we need.
When the Holy Spirit is poured out, all kinds of extraordinary things may happen, underscoring that this is God’s doing, not ours. The phenomenon of speaking in other people’s languages occurs only here in the New Testament; there are several other references to speaking in unknown tongues, but no indication that people were speaking other human languages. Paul calls this other, more common use of unknown languages “speaking in tongues of angels” – it is a mode of personal prayer. The coming of the Spirit might be accompanied by miracles, prophecies, healings, and so on. All of these are part of the church, and all are signs of God sovereignly at work. But the greatest, most amazing single sign of Pentecost is that God gathers into one people those who had been scattered.
Peter’s sermon points out that God gathers the scattered by pouring out the Holy Spirit on everyone, old and young, men and women. All human divisions, which arise so often on account of sex or age, between races or political persuasions – all these division lines that are so characteristic of Babel society are obliterated when the Holy Spirit is poured out. It is noteworthy that the gathering together of all races in worship, and the full embrace of women in ministry, emerged first in the 20th century not through mid-century political ideology of equal rights, but in the Pentecostal movement at the beginning of the century. They did so not to be politically correct, but because they believed we have no right to disqualify from membership and ministry people upon whom God has poured out the Spirit.
So if the outpouring of God’s Spirit is meant to gather the scattered, why have charismatic movements so often led to church splits? Why do such movements sometimes tragically bear fruit more like Babel than like Pentecost? The reasons for this are complex and varied, but I invite us to consider just one: Could it be that when we receive a particular manifestation of God’s Spirit at work among us, we all too easily take it is a norm for the whole church’s life, so that an “us and them” divide emerges yet again, between those who embrace this new norm and those who don’t? From Acts 2 forward, the church of Acts was continually forced by the Holy Spirit to broaden further and further its welcome of people whom they’d never imagined to be part of their covenant family. Pentecost invites us to acknowledge that even among those who seem farthest away from our comfort zone, God’s Spirit might be also at work. After all, the “all humanity” on which God’s Spirit is outpoured is a mighty wide spectrum! Our job, like that of the apostles preparing for Pentecost, is not to manage God’s work, but to let go and let God. Stay open. Stay together. Wait prayerfully for whatever God will bring our way, and trust that it will be exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.
I have a dream, that our church, our presbytery, our congregations will live fully into our Pentecostal identity. By that I mean an identity where all who have been alienated from one another will be gathered by the Spirit into one body. It doesn’t mean we will all become alike; quite otherwise, since the Spirit delights to give the church gifts as wonderfully diverse as all the parts of the human body. It is the gathering of “all flesh,” as Peter says, that marks the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In a world that seems hopelessly divided over almost every political, social, and economic issue, imagine the testimony to the Gospel that would be trumpeted by a church where people across all the lines of social division lived together in love. Never has the church had such a golden opportunity to bear powerful witness to the world what a difference the Gospel makes, because never has the world been so bitterly divided. Can we be that people? Absolutely – if we get out of the Spirit’s way by ceasing all our striving to make the church in the way we think it should look. Let go, and let God. Amen.