No one wants to be confused, and I would certainly not want to create confusing situations. I do mostly think of confusion itself as a bad thing, a problem to resolve or some kind of trouble to fix—but sometimes confusion might show up as a gift that leads us toward new life.
That’s what I started to realize from working with a wonderful doctoral student back in Berkeley. Erika Katske identifies as a “queer Jew, married to a transgender rabbi,” and her work as a community organizer and advocate for economic justice is informed by her religious faith (including but not limited to Judaism). That work framed her longstanding fascination with the ancient and iconic story from Genesis about the Tower of Babel (Gen. 1:1-11).
The lectionary assigns that story as an optional reading for the Day of Pentecost, this coming Sunday, and for an obvious reason: God interrupts the construction of the Tower of Babel by “confusing” the speech of those constructing it. Rather than a single language spoken by all, people could no longer understand what others were saying. Contrast that moment of confusion with the story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21), where the sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables people to comprehend different languages. Pentecost, in other words, “heals” Babel—or that what I used to think until reading Erika’s work.
I certainly won’t try to summarize a whole dissertation on this topic of nearly 300 pages, but here’s what caught my attention about Erika’s re-reading of the Babel story: the “confusion of languages” and the “scattering” of the people throughout the earth was not punishment from an angry God; to the contrary, it was a divine gift offered from love.
I was astonished when Erika and I first met to discuss her project and she pointed out that nothing in the Hebrew text of that ancient story suggests that God was “angry” about the Tower. To the contrary, God seems instead concerned about the singular focus of the people, the devotion of all their time and resources to just one project, and the dense concentration of their dwellings in just one valley. None of this would help those humans thrive—staying on that course would actually prevent their flourishing.
God’s response was the gift of confused languages and the scattering of their habitations in a much wider region. The effort required after that to cooperate generated new forms of community and social bonds, exactly what was needed for their thriving. (The point of Erika’s dissertation was to extend that analysis of the biblical story into the dynamics of global capitalism, which exhibits all of the problems of that ancient story but now on a planetary scale.)
Combining what I learned from Erika about Babel with the work I’ve done for many years on the disparate forms of human sexuality, gender expression, and family configurations inspired me to think in some fresh ways about Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit on that day was not the return to a single language for everyone; the gift of the Holy Spirit was instead the capacity to understand multiple languages and, by extension, all the other kinds of multiplicity that accompany a “language”—various points of view, diverse cultures, different ethnicities, strange customs, odd ways to dress, unusual patterns of affection, and so on.
Clearly, this kind of community-building takes hard work, even though it is prompted by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in the portion from John’s account of the Gospel assigned for Sunday, the Spirit is referred to by a Greek word that resists easy translation (ironically, as Andrew McGowan helpfully points out, for a day devoted to understanding strange languages). That word is “paraclete,” and was often used to describe a lawyer who accompanies someone facing judicial scrutiny (thus the typical English translation as “advocate”). But the more direct meaning of that term is “one-who-stands-with,” especially in the midst of struggle.
Standing with others these days—whether in congregations, cities, or as a nation—certainly involves serious struggle and not a little confusion. I often wish for something “easier” or “simpler,” but both Babel and Pentecost seem to invite us instead to engage the harder and thus more rewarding work of wrestling with our differences for the sake not only of the “common” good but the greater good. As John’s Jesus suggests, we will inevitably struggle with what it means to speak the truth, how to live with love, and ways to celebrate difference rather than merely to cluster in affinity groups for a sense of safety.
Even in the parish I am privileged to serve here in Michigan, we gather as a community of people who are very much alike in many respects yet still find ourselves struggling with speaking truth, living love, and embracing difference. Extending those efforts outward into communities with much greater diversity, the struggle only multiplies. This might well be the point of gathering every week around the Eucharistic Table, a religious sanctuary that offers a “rehearsal space” or “testing ground” for the kind of love God calls us to offer to the wider world.
Thankfully, we don’t even try to do this work alone. God gives the Holy Spirit as divine companion, comforter, counselor, and advocate. The one standing with us in the struggle is God’s gift, and the struggle itself is reason for gratitude.
