“‘Other’ No More”
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year C
5 June 2022
Homily
Parish Church of St. Mark, Medford OR
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson
Genesis 11:1-9 ; Psalm 104:25-35, 37 ; Acts 2:1-21 ; John 14:8-17, (25-27)
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
When I last lived in China, British Prime Minister David Cameron made an official visit to Beijing. It was the week of November 11, 2010, Remembrance Day. British custom is to wear small red paper poppies to honor the dead of the First World War, the masses who died in trench warfare and buried “in Flander’s fields, where poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row.” When Cameron and his ministers showed up wearing the small poppies, the Chinese Foreign Ministry lodged a protest asking that they remove them: they were offensive and hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens.
The British were completely “gobsmacked.” Cameron said in reply “You’ve got to be kidding. This is a joke, right?”
Ruins of the Old Summer Palace, Beijing
But it was not a joke. 2010, you see, was the 150th anniversary of second Opium War, in which British forces burned to the ground one of the great cultural treasures of China—indeed, of the whole world—the Old Imperial Summer Palace. The ruins, standing to this day, are a symbol for almost all Chinese people of the humiliation that their nation suffered for a century and a half at the hands of morally inferior Europeans. British-poppies-opium, get it? The Chinese leaders were horrified that the British clearly were clueless: did China count so little that the British had to be reminded of how it had humiliated and used war to foist drugs on its people? The British for their part were shocked that the Chinese did not understand the deep resonances of the paper poppies for the British public and the absolute political impossibility of an elected British leader taking one off on the week of Remembrance Day to “kowtow” to Beijing. “Your protest hurts the feelings of 62 million Britons,” one wag said.
Cameron wore his poppy; Chinese media published only photos and feeds where it was not visible.
The story shows how profoundly differently we can see the world, understand symbols, and assign motives to others depending on our cultural tradition. Different languages only amplify this and make the differences all the sharper and more confusing.
What divides us and separates us? What makes it difficult to understand each other. Cultures and languages are clearly major drivers of division, along with differences in gender, economic class, education, upbringing, religious or philosophical outlook, and sexual orientation.
But it’s not just a question of such externals. Division comes from the very way our brains are hard-wired. Researchers on the development of the brain in early childhood have recognized that a chief element of our becoming able to make distinctions in interpreting faces, their expressions, and the sounds they make (language) is the brain’s tendency early on to block out less-frequently-encountered faces or language as “other,” and not worthy of the same amount of effort. Only thus is the brain able to refine and tune the complicated business of understanding verbal and non-verbal cues in communication. Six-month-old children of whatever culture or race tend to react more attentively and discriminatingly to faces of the colors, shapes, and setting the children are most exposed to, while bracketing out the less familiar, and tending to give them the cold shoulder. When a person of European-extraction says “all Chinese look alike to me,” we might think that this is just an artifact of bigotry. But there is an actual neurological reason behind such statements: our brains tend to process faces of types with which we are unfamiliar or less familiar generically and not individually. Living in China and in Africa, I have heard friends in both places admit with a bit of embarrassment, “All you whites tend to look the same to me.”
Similarly, the sounds, rhythms, and accents of the languages used regularly in the home pique the child’s interest, as shown in elevated brain-wave activity. The sounds and rhythms of other languages increasingly are treated as so much meaningless noise by 3 to 12-month-old brains. Where there is some brain defect that interferes with this normal process and the young brain is unable to filter and block such sounds out as ‘foreign’, the child’s ability to learn its mother language is usually seriously damaged or destroyed.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, on the Tower of Babel, gives an ancient folk story that tries to account for the differences in languages and cultures. But in its telling, the story gives us an example of attitudes and judgments rooted in division and tribalism rather than in its remedy. The story is told from the point of view of a nomadic or agrarian Hebrew living in the land of Canaan. The narrator looks east toward Mesopotamia, that great cradle of early civilization and one of the first city-states to become a transnational empire, Babel, as Babylon was called in Hebrew. He notes the strange practices of that land: where any sensible person uses stone and mortar as building materials, these people use bricks and pitch! And they gather together into a great city rather than staying connected to the land and their flocks! A Babylonian ziggurat, or temple tower, is caricatured and becomes an effort of these arrogant city dwellers to build a tower to heaven to displace God. There is a whole bunch of xenophobia and tribalism buried in this story, as becomes clear with the pun of its good-old-boy humor punch line. God decides to destroy the tower and disperse the urbanites by confusing their language. The Hebrew word for confuse is close to the Hebrew name for the city. Thus the moral of this “Just So” story is this: “That is why they called the City Babylon, because God caused them to babble on to each other!”
Though we may be neurologically and natively inclined to exclude the strange and rule out the “other,” this story itself shows how fear, and a self-seeking desire for the familiar helps turn our hard-wiring into bigotry and chauvinism, which then can be attributed to God himself.
But God has better things in store for us. The Acts story of the coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, is about God’s undoing of the confusion of languages at Babel.
Even though Luke in his Gospel places the Ascension of Jesus on the evening of Easter (Luke 24:50), in his second volume, Acts, Luke retells the story with a new setting 40 days later (Acts 1:3). Today’s story, set ten more days later, is also probably Luke’s effort to put into a narrative scene an early Christian experience that was perhaps something more complicated.
Paul’s letters tell us that early Christians experienced the Spirit in community by some kind of ecstatic utterance that he calls at one point “tongues of angels,” vocalizations that absent someone else to interpret them were meaningless (1 Cor. 13:1; 14:6-19). As Paul tells it, he prevailed upon Peter and the “pillars” of the Church to accept believing Gentiles as full members without requiring them to become Jews because he pointed out that the Jewish Christians themselves weren’t very good Jews (Galatians 2:14). But Luke-Acts puts it more positively: Peter convinces the leaders to include Gentiles because they all saw that Gentile believers equally shared in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 1-15). Luke sums up the process he narrates at length in Acts 1-15 by placing the coming of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost and making it the ultimate undoing of the Confusion of Languages and the scattering of peoples.
For Luke, where Babel divides and separates, Pentecost rejoins and brings together. Where Babel unties, Pentecost unites. Where Babel confuses languages, Pentecost infuses languages previously unknown. Where Babel excludes, Pentecost includes.
Luke recasts the ecstatic speaking in angelic tongues of the early Christians in Paul’s letters into the miraculous speaking of other people’s languages, breaking down the barrier between Jews and Gentiles, the very Gentiles who are to be fully included in the Church.
Living in the Spirit means engaging with the new, the foreign, the strange, the ‘other.’ It means getting to know strange faces and making them familiar enough that they no longer all look alike. It is putting aside the fear that is the foundation of all tribalism, sectarianism, faction, and distaste for the new, the strange. It is the way God leads us to give and affirming and thankful “yes” to life in all its variety and glory, and put away any stingy and defensive “no.”
Tribalism, chauvinism, racism, and jingoism come from fear, self-seeking, and that part of us that resists God. Paul urges us, in contrast, “Live by the Spirit. … [in] love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:16-23). The promise if we do so, is great: God’s power, working in us, will “do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20-21).
This week, I want each of us to reflect on areas where we are saying “no” to the foreign, and “not so fast!” to the other. Let’s ask ourselves seriously whether this is really what God has in mind. Reach out. Build bridges, not walls. Break down barriers, and try to understand people who puzzle us. Let us pray for the Spirit to remove from us undue fear, and to create in us a new heart, and empower us to say “yes,” and “welcome.”
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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