Pentecost; Genesis 11: 7; Acts 2: 1-4

Between Chaos and Holy Order

One of our members who is in a care home said to me that other: ”At first I didn’t think God was in this place, but now I know God is. “  That, friends, at first glance is not a correct statement.  Shouldn’t God be everywhere? But it is a real experience.  There are times when we experience God as being totally absent from our lives and because we believe in God it is harder even than for someone who has written off the idea of God: the silence can be deafening, the darkness overwhelming and the loneliness unbearable.  Perhaps there was something of that in earliest Church before it became the Church.  The absence of Jesus (as God incarnated) is overwhelming.  The loss is paralyzing.  A group of many languages and backgrounds is gathering and they hear the wind and experience tongues of flames and suddenly a holy order is established. There is a feeling of peace and unity and togetherness and hope and they can understand each other.  Pentecost is important, not because we are all going to feel just like that, but because if we are open we can all have some sort experience of the Holy Spirit, like our member in the care home, that somehow, in some way, God is present and at work.

The story of Babel in the Old Testament , on the other hand is the story of utter chaos.  A people work on a tower that will be the tallest of all (ironically the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, now sits in that same region of the world).  But it is a building of pride and arrogance. So they are taught a lesson. They suddenly stop understanding each other and suddenly the commands of one worker to another, from foreman to bricklayer, from architect to construction manager can no longer be understood.  They are stumped.  So the work is halted and the tower falls in ruins.  Of course there are have been long periods of peace and tranquility in the region around Babel, modern-day Iraq, since the time in which the story was set. However, to us it seems the chaos of the story has always been there.  The region always seems to be in turmoil.  We still see daily images of crying men and desperate mothers.  We are more troubled than ever before by this, because we know now that what we did as a country or fail to do as a country is a contributing factor to the misery of the people in that troubled region.  Of course we know that centuries of ethnic and religious differences has made it fertile ground for unrest,  but our greed for oil and power is just fuel on the fire.

Babel and Pentecost as I have told you before are bookends. They are the extremes of chaos and holy order.  You and I live our lives in between these extremes.  We have the experience of Chaos (we discussed some of the examples already) and we have the experience of Pentecost.  We understand that our attitude has a lot to do with which one we are going to be more familiar with.  Pride leads to chaos in ourselves for we set ourselves over against others who also have pride and someone must lose. The Bible seems to teach that humility is most likely to lead to an experience of the Holy Spirit r vice versa.  We acknowledge our flaws and our limitations and recognize the power of God’s acting in our lives.

Friends, on the biggest island of the Hawaiian chain sits a series of eight magnificent deep and emerald green valleys in between the dry Kohala and the lush Hamakua coasts.  The widest one, furthest south, is the famous Waipi’o valley. The one on the north end, the Pololu valley is less well known, but it has a scenic , rocky trail running  from the valley floor, near the violent surf, to the road on top. A local friend of ours whose family has ancestral lands near there told us that every time she hikes up this trail, her breath fails her at exactly the same point.   She thinks it may be one of her long deceased relatives or an ancient enemy.  She says it has happened seven times.  There are other explanations of course: the trail changes contours right at that spot and perhaps it is psychological for her by now.  The concept of her theory intrigues me:  that there are unresolved relationships and events that bind us together but also keep us separated and conflicted, even beyond time.  Perhaps this happens in everyday life: as much as Pentecost wants to flow in, Babel still haunts us.  There seems to be so much chaos, in families, in marriages, in work places, in governments and yes, in churches.  Often these are driven by pride or greed or possessiveness or good old insecurity.  Friends, maybe you and I should be aware of the chaos Babel describes and how it works in our lives. It sometimes stuns me how it creeps into groups of any kind.  We should remember that God as Holy Spirit seeks to fill the vacuum of our lives, as a whiff or breeze of grace and have that which is perplexing, frightening and chaotic make sense and give meaning.  Thanks be to God.