Pentecost Against Babel

A while back, Germany held an election, and a hard-right nationalist party took roughly a fifth of the vote, second place in the country and the strongest result for a far-right party since the republic was founded. Its message is the message that never really goes away in any country: our people, our blood, our language, our land, and everyone else to the border and beyond. Christian leaders there warned against it, publicly and at some cost, and the votes came anyway.

I’m not preaching about Germany this morning. I’m preaching about the dream, because it never stays in one country, and we don’t need a passport to meet it. It’s old, and the Bible tells us how old at the very beginning of the nations: Babel.

One Language, One Name

The Babel story is short and strange. After the flood, the whole earth had one language and the same words. They migrated from the east, found a plain, and settled, and said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).

Notice what the project is. In those days a tower like that was a temple tower, a sanctuary, so let’s be fair: it may well have worn worship’s clothes. That’s what makes it worse, not better. It’s a sanctuary turned into a fortress against scattering. God had told Noah’s family to fill the earth, and humanity looked at that command and said no, we’ll stay here, all of us, one people, one project, one name. The tower was glue. Keep the whole human family in one place, under one language, one name, and nothing can ever be lost or divided or different again.

It sounds like unity. It’s actually the opposite. Babel’s oneness is the oneness of a brick. “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly… brick for stone” (Genesis 11:3). Every person in the project is interchangeable material. Now, the text doesn’t say the word empire, so mark this as the preacher carrying the text a step: that is what empires always do, they flatten. One tongue, one story, one loyalty, one name, stamped on every forehead. The nations under empire are not neighbors. They’re inventory. And the fear driving the whole project is the fear at the bottom of every empire, old and new: if the world becomes many, we lose control of it.

And God comes down, and the text is almost funny, he has to come down to see a tower the builders bragged reached heaven, and he does the strangest thing in judgment. He doesn’t destroy the tower. He divides the language. He scatters them. And we read that as punishment, and it is, but it’s also the strangest mercy in the Old Testament. God breaks the one people to save the peoples. Diversity of tongues is God’s inoculation against empire. If humanity cannot be homogenized, it cannot be enslaved as one brick. The scattering was God refusing to let the whole race belong to one name.

Tongues, Not Towers

Then the day of Pentecost, and here is where the Bible turns the whole thing inside out. The Spirit falls on the church, and what happens? Not one new language for everybody. The opposite. Pilgrims from every nation under heaven hear the gospel “in his own language” (Acts 2:6). Parthians and Medes, Elamites, Cappadocians, Egyptians, the list rolls on, and each one hears the mighty works of God in the tongue his mother sang to him in.

Do you see what the Spirit did? He could have given the church one holy language. He didn’t. He preached the one gospel in every language and blessed every one of them. Babel said, one name, one tongue, or nothing holds. Some Bible readers hear Pentecost as Babel’s reversal, understanding restored where understanding broke, and there’s real warrant for that (Zephaniah 3:9 dreams of a pure tongue for calling on the name of the Lord). I’d say it stronger: not just healed. Answered. Pentecost says the name of Jesus is big enough to hold every tongue, and none of them gets to be the official one. The church of Pentecost is the anti-Babel. It is the scattering gathered, not erased. Every nation kept, every nation redeemed, every knee bowing to one name, and no other language required.

That is why the gospel can never be a nationalist project, not in Germany, not here, not anywhere. Paul said it straight: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Notice the verse doesn’t say there is no Jew and no Greek. It says the wall between them came down, in the household of faith. The nations go on being nations; God himself divided them and fixed their borders (Deuteronomy 32:8), and when John sees the end, the nations are still there, gathered, not erased. So let me be plain about what this sermon is not saying. Loving your country is not Babel. Wanting secure borders and a lawful, orderly way for people to come is not Babel; those are judgments God leaves to nations, and Romans 13 gives nations the job. What is Babel is the other thing, the older thing: blood-and-soil worship, the creed that says our kind of people is what the country is for, and everybody else is a stain on it. A Christian can love his flag and refuse that creed in the same breath. The gospel can serve the first and never the second. Peter stood in Caesarea and said the sentence the church spent years learning to absorb: “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35). And John saw the end of it: “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne” (Revelation 7:9). Every. Not assimilated. Gathered. The kingdom of God is not a bigger Babel. It’s Babel healed, the nations brought home with their names and their songs intact, one people made of every people.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now the mirror, because it’s easy to preach against Germany and never look in the glass.

Nationalism lives in churches that fly one flag and mean it theologically. The moment a congregation’s loyalty gets sorted by blood or soil or party before it gets sorted by the blood of Jesus, that church is stacking bricks. When we hear the gospel and immediately ask what it means for our side, we are doing exactly what Babel did with the tower: making the name of God serve the name of us. And our enemy is not the other country. Jesus said love your enemies, and it didn’t come with a border exception. The stranger is not our enemy. The nations are our parish. That’s the Great Commission, all nations, baptizing them, and there’s no clause where the nations we don’t like get left off the list.

And the mirror turns on us harder than we like. How many languages have been spoken in this sanctuary in its whole history? We are an outpost of the global people of God, and you’d never know it from a week in our calendar. The Pentecost church heard every tongue in its own tongue. We mostly expect the whole world to learn ours before we’ll call them neighbors. That’s Babel with a steeple.

And here is the grace, and it’s the deepest thing I know. Every one of us was a stranger in the household of God, “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall” (Ephesians 2:12-14). The wall came down over his broken body. Nobody in this church earned the language. We were adopted into a people not our own, and there is no other way in. Which means a Christian who makes blood and soil his creed is arguing against his own adoption papers, and I say that as a warning to myself before anybody else: the kingdom I once had no right to is the one I’m in only because they let the stranger in. And I know loving across the border you fear is not easy. I feel the fear too. The Lord never once pretended it was easy. He just never called fear a license.

So What Do We Do?

Put the blood of Jesus above every bloodline you have. Say it out loud if you have to. The church has one name on it, and it isn’t the name of any country. And I’ll say it about myself first: if I ever stand here and make the name of God serve the name of a nation, pull me aside, because I’ll be stacking bricks with the rest of them.

Cross a language line on purpose. Learn the name of the man at the meat counter who came from somewhere else. Sit with the family at the assembly who hears English as their second, third, fourth language. Pentecost was a miracle of listening, and listening is the one part we can do without a miracle.

Pray for the nations instead of fearing them. Here’s one way, named: take the church in Germany that has to figure out how to be the church under a government it distrusts, and pray for it by name this week. Take the congregation in this county that worships in Spanish on a Sunday afternoon, and pray for it too. And I won’t pretend it’s easy to love across a border you’re afraid of; some of you have real reasons for that fear, and the Lord knows them. Fear and obedience can sit in the same pew. The obedience just gets the last word.

And keep the end in sight. John didn’t see one nation under God. He saw every nation under the throne. That’s the country we belong to, and it’s the only flag the church has ever carried that didn’t end up in a museum.