Listening for God When Life Is Noisy (Pentecost)

Genesis 11:1-9

Romans 8:14-17

 Today is Pentecost Sunday.  And on Pentecost we celebrate the birthday of the Church.  Today we welcome afresh the news that God has pours the Spirit upon us.   When God poured out the Spirit on Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, it looked like tongues of fire dancing above their heads.  There was a noisy rush of wind.  And the result was loud, with all of them praising God in different languages.

 

The Tower of Babel story is also noisy story.  And our lives can be noisy places.  As we move through life, we have to deal with all the different voices that call to us and want our attention.  We might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of different voices.  Parents, spouses, children, friends and neighbors, and employers; the co-worker who annoys you and the cousin you don’t like. 

Every advertisement is a different voice, calling us to bend our lives this way and that.  Every interaction with others on social media.  The music, the blogs and podcasts we listen to; the movies and TV shows and Youtube videos we watch; the news sources we read – all this noise wanting our attention.  Is it even possible to listen for the gracious, loving, energizing voice of God in the midst of all that noise?

We Presbyterians are taught to listen for the voice of God speaking to us in Scripture.  As we listen to the way Scripture witnesses to our new lives in Jesus Christ, God speaks to us.  But Scripture is not the only place where God speaks to us.  God also speak to us in our own lives.  God speaks in our memories, our desires, our loving and suffering and dreaming.  And so we thank God for the gift of Scripture.  But God isn’t trapped within Scripture.  God is wild and free, roaming through the world and through our lives, flowing through our relationships and our daily rhythms.  And if we do not learn to listen for God’s voice in our lives, we will be missing out on the blessings of being Pentecost people – people of the Spirit.

When we flew to London a couple of years ago, the first leg of our flight was from KC to New York.  On that flight we were seated next to a family from central England who were vacationing in the US.  I say they were vacationing, but I should say they were “on holiday.”  James, around ten years old, talked excitedly to his father as we descended into LaGuardia. 

“Dad, will we be seeing a baseball game?”

“No, James.”

“Will we go swimming?”

“No, James”

“Oh look, the tall lady with the firestick!” (he had spotted the statue of liberty). 

While we waited to deplane, James’ father jokingly told him to “give his mum a kiss.”  I turned to James and said, “Come on, James, give your mum a kiss.”  “Ahhh!” he exclaimed laughing.  “I won’t!  I won’t do it!  I won’t give my mum a kiss . . . she’s dirty!”  This whole interchange had our kids laughing.  And we impersonated James in our best British accents for the rest of our trip.

When we were in London we came across a sign that read, “Britain and America: two great countries separated by a shared language.”  And it’s true, we all speak English.  But in different accents.  And the British rely on different words to refer to things familiar to us.  James’ father told him to put on his rucksack, not backpack.  They asked if we were “on holiday,” not “on vacation.”  Brechon asked Remy to go to the park to play football, not soccer.  A bathroom is a room for a bath.  If you need to pee, you need to be more direct, asking for the toilet. 

Things that are impressive are brilliant.  Half-eight means 8:30am (and not, as I assumed, half til eight).  Cookies are biscuits.  Fries are chips.  And chips are crisps.  (One of Brian and Kim’s favorite stories was when Brechon’s friend Ralph stayed for dinner.  They were having tacos.  Apparently Ralph had never had tacos.  And when Kim put a hard taco shell on Ralph’s plate, Ralph said: “A giant crisp!  And this is my dinner?”). 

It is rather mysterious how a group of people who share a language can use that language so differently, can speak it with such distinctive accents.  And those of us who speak English are just a small part of the wider world.  There are approximately 6,900 different languages spoken in the world.  There are 230 different languages spoken in Europe.  Over 2,000 different languages spoken in Asia.  In tiny Papua, New Guinea, population 3.9 million, there are 832 different languages spoken.

This question perplexed the ancient Israelites.  They spoke Hebrew but the Ethiopians, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Babylonians – all geographic regions - had their own languages.  When others speak a different language and dress differently and live with different customs and observe different holidays, they appear strange to us.  The Tower of Babel story is an attempt to come to grips with how complex the world is; how many different ways of speaking and living there are.

The traditional reading of this story is that it’s about prideful, over-reaching humans who are then punished by God.  But the text really doesn’t support that reading.  Instead, the story appears to be Israel’s way of wrestling with how to make sense of the world’s sheer diversity – the diversity of peoples, cultures, languages, and traditions.  How did this messy world come to be?  And what are we to make of its sheer vastness and uniqueness? 

The Tower of Babel is basically a story about the temptation to stop moving, stop growing.  It’s about the temptation to stay put, to stick with what’s familiar and safe to us.  This temptation might come to us as a fear of other people and other places, a fear of traveling in strange territory.  But it also might come to us as a fear of moving forward in life, a fear of welcoming all the changes that happen as we grow and develop through the different stages of life.

And the story suggests that the sheer variety of the world is not punishment from God.  Rather, it is a form of God’s blessing.  What God wants is a world of breath-taking complexity and staggering diversity.  God never wanted a world where everything stays the same and every one is always protected from anxiety and confusion and fear.  God designed and blesses a world full of different cultures and languages and customs and calls us to a life of trust, courage, and compassion in the midst of all that.

What if we really believed that God loves all the different parts of the world and all the different parts of our lives?  What would it be like to live without the fear of what is new and strange and unfamiliar?  Well, for one thing, it would mean that getting stuck, or lost, or confused, or baffled is just part of life.  And it would mean that God can and does meet us in these places where we are not sure how to react or what to do.  In fact, facing what’s new and what’s strange can become opportunities to remember that we are people of the Spirit. 

Our reading from Romans 8 teaches us that God’s Spirit casts out fear.  Life lived as a dance to the Spirit’s music need not be a fearful life.  In fact, it will be a life of courageous experimentation and playful exploration.

Life in the Spirit is nothing like being a slave or an employee.  Those relationships can’t capture who you are now and who you can become.  Only the image of beloved children, chosen and adopted into a new family, can begin to convey the richness of who we are.  God’s Spirit “testifies with our spirit” that we are God’s children.  This is an invitation to a fresh picture of who we are and what’s possible for us.

According to the Apostle Paul, we are “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.”  All God has to give is ours.  We are already named as the beneficiaries of God’s blessings.  Nothing has been or will be withheld from us.  So there is no need to live with anxious effort to secure the future or nail it down with certainty. 

As “co-heirs” with Christ, Christ models for us what a Spirit-led life looks like.  And here’s the key: a life energized by God’s Spirit is a life open to suffering.  Here we come up against one of the hardest things for us to learn: that our suffering is not a sign that God is aloof or distant, nor a sign that God is withholding love, nor a sign that God’s Spirit does not dwell with us. 

Of course, we do not seek out difficulty and pain. But when it comes, we welcome it as part of life.  And we welcome it as an opportunity to deepen our sense of belovedness, connection, meaning, and purpose.  This is good news: no longer do we need to strive to avoid hardship and disappointment and suffering; and no longer do we need to wilt and despair or revolt in anger when life brings us difficulty.  Stumbling and falling are part of the journey.

This summer we’ll be exploring how to face our challenges and move forward in life.  We’ll be learning how to listen for the voice of God in our own experience.  And so I invite you to make an investment in the summer time as a time for experimentation and growth.

I’ll close by directing your attention to the artwork on the front of your bulletin.  It’s a painting by Hyatt Moore, entitled “Pentecost.”  What do you notice?  What captures your attention?  Where do you eyes go as you linger over the image?  There are no clear outlines or boundaries.  It’s not even clear what it is.  It looks messy and undefined and beautiful and full of energy.  There might be people, it’s hard to tell.  There might be fire above them, we can’t be sure.  But it’s hard to pick out where the fire begins and how it moves.  But there is some kind of aliveness, some kind of energy descending, hovering, entering, flickering, flowing, glowing.  This image does not propose any answers.  It witnesses to a mystery and it raises a question: what would life feel like if we were fully alive to the fire within us and in between us?  I’d like to find out.  Wouldn’t you?