The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

June 5, 2022  •  The Day of Pentecost

Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome

Text: Genesis 11:6: “And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do;
nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

This past week I had a chance to do something for the first time that many of you have done already: I went to the Wednesday Within the Walls gathering here at Saint Paul’s. It was a wonderful gathering; Madeline and Joris prepared an elegant meal, and we had a quiet liturgy together, and then gathered around the table to share a meal and a vigorous conversation.

There were sixteen of us there. We were from eight different countries. We spoke at least four different languages, and almost certainly more. I am a bishop of the Episcopal Church; I was eating a meal in my own church, and as an English-speaker I was in the minority in that room. We were making a community, a small part of the body of Christ, among people who did not even share a single language. It was wonderful. I am so proud to be the bishop of this church. You make me so proud.

The more I have thought about that evening, the more it has stayed with me that what we were doing on Wednesday night, what we do here every Sunday morning, is to undo what was done at the Tower of Babel. 

When those ancient people started building that tower into the heavens, they all spoke just one language. They all understood each other. We imagine that as a kind of perfect world, we who work so hard to understand each other and to make this community of ours work with all our languages. Of course it would be easier for us to do this if we all spoke just one language. It would be so much easier to be the bishop of the Convocation if we all spoke just one language. And of course we all know what that language would be, right? Latin!

But God in his mercy saw that tower being built, and confused the language of those people. We will never know what language they spoke, those people; but we know that from the land of Shinar, where that ruined tower stood, came Hebrew, and Aramaic, and Greek, and Latin, and Armenian, and Turkish, and French, and German, and Dutch, and everything else—even English.

We know that God acts in Pentecost to equip the church with all the gifts it needs for carrying out the mission of the Gospel. We know that the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the gift of languages. We heard it in that reading Chiara gave us, in Italian—one of the hardest readings anyone has to do in the whole church year.

We, right here at Saint Paul’s, we are the church of those apostles. 

We are the ones who speak in all those languages, who make a single community, a single church, out of all those different tongues that could no longer build that Tower of Babel. 

We are the ones God has gifted with the gift of languages, in order to share the good news of the Gospel. We are building up one church out of many languages.

But wait a minute. Is that a good thing? Didn’t God think that those people who built that tower were doing something that needed to be stopped?

What’s different about what happened at Babel, and what happened at Pentecost? What’s the lesson in that difference for us, for the community we make here?

Well, for one thing, at Babel, all of the differences in language were dividing the people, right? But at Pentecost, all of the languages that usually divide people, people in the same city and the same crowd, suddenly they all heard the same message in their own language.

So what’s different? Remember this about those people who built that tower: They wanted to build up. High into the sky. They wanted to build “a tower with its top in the heavens.” 

Those people who built that tower, that very first human community, they were incredibly capable—because they had one language. They were full of themselves. They thought they were equal to God. And so they wanted to build a tower in order to be on God’s level. They wanted to deal with God as equals. 

And that was the problem. 

That was why God confused their language, and made them give up building that tower. It wasn’t that speaking one language was wrong. It was that imagining ourselves to be equal to God was wrong. 

Now, let me say this plainly: That is a thing Americans do sometimes, you know? But not just Americans. That is a thing that all of us do sometimes. All of our nations. All of our cultures. All of us come from places that think they are, well, just a little more special than the rest. 

But we’re not. The power of Pentecost is the realization that God, whose wisdom gave us our different languages and different cultures, still wants us to be one church, one community.

If you were here last week you remember that those disciples who saw Jesus ascend into the clouds of heaven and then had to go back down that mountain walked back into the city with these words ringing in their ears: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” 

All of a sudden they realized: God is giving us the job of bringing all God’s people, all of humanity, into harmony. God is giving us, the apostles, this high and holy task: Recreating the unity of those people who wanted to build the tower.

Except in all of this we are meant to realize, because of the example of Jesus, that we cannot build ourselves into the equal of God. We cannot build any tower that will put us on God’s level.

No, the apostles were called to build a different unity. We are called to build a different unity. We are called to build out, not up. We are called to build a community of all people on the fundamental claim of the Christian faith—that none of us are equal to God, and all of us are equal before God.

Look at us here, Saint Paul’s! We are doing that work. We worship here in English. We hear more and more Italian—like the beautiful reading Chiara gave us. We worship in Spanish. Good grief, the choir this morning is singing in German and Latin. And our Convocation has churches that worship in other languages, too.

It doesn’t matter what language you can speak—or what language you can’t speak. What matters is whether you want to make yourself more important than someone else, or bring people together in God’s love, in whatever language you have to do that in. And if we do that, nothing that we propose to do—nothing—will be impossible for us. Imagine!

That is who we are, Saint Paul’s. That is what God is calling us to do, and as your bishop I am proud to say, by God’s grace, it is what is happening here. Today we get Iyobosa, and Chiara, and Matteo, and Denis, and Madeline to help us do it. We are now the inheritors of the apostles—and now, today, they are inheritors of the apostles—called to make unity out of all this division, harmony out of all this difference, joy out of all this sorrow—for God’s sake. What a privilege! What a joy! Amen.