This sermon was preached on Pentecost 2026, Sunday 24 May 2026, Blackburn Cathedral. Acts 2:1-21 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
Community and Communication at Pentecost
Collect before the sermon
And so, heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on your word, would you send your Holy Spirit, that our eyes would be brightened and our ears unstopped, that we may hear and see your good news for us today. Amen. Please do take a seat.
Arguments at home
When Hannah and I have arguments, one of the ways we defend ourselves, particularly when we’re tired or in a bad mood, is that we stop complaining or talking about the content of the argument and we start arguing about the way the argument has transpired. The way I normally do this in my worst moments is I will say, “You’re not really listening to me,” or “you’re not really hearing what I’ve got to say.” The obvious retort is, “Well, you’re not speaking particularly helpfully.” And so it goes back and forth. You find yourself in the quagmire of those situations. And I know for a fact that Hannah and I are not the only ones who go through that dynamic, friends.
The same pattern at every scale
I want us to reflect on the fact that that pattern happens in all sorts of different places in our culture, in our relationships. We find ourselves saying, “Well, they’re not listening to me,” or the response is, “Well, you’re not communicating in the way that I like.” Underneath the blame is the assumption that my way of communicating is the norm and their deviation is the problem. Of course, everyone else thinks the same about themselves. The way I do things is the right way of doing it.
We see this, do we not, on social media, on Facebook, and in other places, where these technologies of communication that were designed to connect us have resulted in greater and greater isolation and smaller and smaller echo chambers. The result is that my way of doing it, as far as these platforms are concerned, is the right way, and anyone different from me must be other and becomes the problem of all of us — the reasonable ones.
If you will forgive me for a moment to comment on the political and cultural landscape we find ourselves in in the twenty-first century: I grieve the fact that our parties, that were once described as broad churches, have collapsed into single factions. Westminster has become a place of slogans and echo chambers, where no one is even attempting to persuade the sceptic.
So we find, in small, medium, and large contexts, this same pattern emerging. We want the other to be like me. And when they’re not, we treat that as their failure — perhaps even that in some way their otherness is damaging to me.
The theological name for the pattern: Babel
The theological name for this is Babel. And it points to the fact that our experience of communicating, and our experience of developing communities today, is a tale as old as time. Sin enters creation in Genesis chapter 3. And just eight chapters later, we come across the people of Shinar, and they say to themselves, “Come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. We will make a name for ourselves.” Humanity in unity. We are told in Genesis 11 there is one tongue, one name, one city. A vast monoculture doing everything it can to build a tower.
And as the story goes, God comes down and confuses the languages, and the people are scattered. God introduces to that story diversity, and immediately the project is annulled and cannot continue. People disperse across the face of the earth.
Now, it’s described as a punishment. But I wonder if actually the scattering preserves difference — God refusing to allow humanity to collapse into a monoculture. And maybe even the point of the story is to say: these sorts of projects are always doomed to fail. Uniformity cannot carry its own weight. It always collapses and dissolves.
So I’d like to suggest this morning that one of the problems of the human heart since time immemorial has been the desire to build a tower for ourselves. A place where we are right. And the implication of that is monoculture. And that is not a healthy or happy way to live or build community.
What I am trying to do this morning in the first part of this sermon is to articulate a cultural and theological background — the thing that is in the ether behind the event of Pentecost, the thing we are actually here to celebrate today. The desire of Babel, a controlling uniformity in which everyone says you must do it the way I want it done. Which leads to a breakdown in relationship and community. Uniformity leads to division. And that is the backdrop to what God does by sending his Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
Pentecost
Let’s look again at the story from Acts. The disciples are gathered in one place. They are praying and waiting for the sending of the Spirit, as Christ had told them to do at his ascension. And suddenly from heaven there comes a sound like a rushing wind, and divided tongues as of fire appear among them and rest on each one of them. And the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh, just as Joel promised centuries earlier. In that upper room in Jerusalem, something breaks into creation at nine in the morning.
As this rushing wind starts to take place, people gather outside the room they are staying in to find out what all the commotion is about. The crowd that gathers is brought from all corners of the world. And what they hear is not people speaking the same language. The disciples are not given a universal language. The miracle is not the imposition of a single language. The Parthians stay Parthian. The Cretans stay Cretan. The miracle is that each person hears in their own native language.
So we see here that God’s Spirit, in pouring himself out onto all flesh, is preserving the difference God had introduced into creation at Babel. The miracle is understanding across the divides of difference.
Speaking or hearing?
This was a moment of real learning for me this week as I was reading this passage in Acts afresh. Let me read you two lines. “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” And later: “In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”
My question is: was the miracle in the speaking, or was the miracle in the hearing? The passage is not clear. These Galileans are speaking, and we are hearing. Both are happening at the same time. Let me say it more scientifically: the sound waves that came out of the disciples’ mouths — were those the bits that were changed by the Spirit of God? Or was it the sound waves as they were heard by the crowd? Where did the miracle actually take place? In the speaking, or in the hearing?
I certainly for years have come to this passage assuming it was the speaking — because I come from a part of the church that thinks speaking is very important. I personally like speaking. If you have ever met me, you will know that to be the case. And I have always assumed the miracle of Pentecost is that the disciples were enabled to speak in fresh languages. But that is not what the text says.
Could it be that the miracle is not in the speaking but in the hearing? And would it not be ironic that for years we have had this miracle back to front? That actually the gift of Pentecost is being able to hear afresh, being able to hear and understand across difference.
Of course I think the speaking is important. But it was really shocking to me this week as I reflected on this passage and went: maybe at Pentecost God changes the way I listen. God changes who I listen to. God changes my capacity to understand the other.
Or as Paul Tillich puts it, the liberal theologian from the last century: the first duty of love is to listen.
The first duty of love is to listen.
Why Pentecost has this shape: the eternal life of God
Why is it that Pentecost takes this shape? Why is it that the Spirit’s gift of unity preserved across difference is something natural to the nature of God and who we know God to be?
Give me a few minutes on this, because this is what God is like eternally.
Before creation was made, the life of God was an eternal communion of the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Three persons, one God, in perfect unity and perfectly different, held together in a communion of love. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. The three are one God, eternally giving of themselves to one another and receiving one another in love.
And so at the heart of the universe is this truth: that the ground of everything is communion. Difference held together in love. Unity that does not erase distinction.
And so at the moment of Pentecost, at the giving of the Spirit, this is not a new thing that God is doing, but an old thing that God is redoing, as he gathers a diverse crowd into one body across differences. This is the eternal life of God breaking into history. As he pours out his Spirit, we are gathered into that Trinitarian community of love.
Now, of course, the church is not the Trinity, and we will never be able simply to mirror who God is and what God does. The church is, I hope, being drawn by the Spirit into a communion that God already is. And that is the redemption of the Tower of Babel.
The will to controlling uniformity is healed by the gift of participation in the eternal communion of difference held in love. At the Tower of Babel, humanity said: we must be one by being the same. And the gospel today says: you are made one, and you can stay different, because the One who is Three has gathered you into themselves.
The choir
Perhaps the best example of this that I can think of is a choir. In a choir we see a diverse group of people coming together to proclaim the glory of God, so that out of their diversity their voices form a unity. A good choir, as you will know if you have ever been in one, is not so much about the singing as it is about the listening — listening to the person on your left and your right, so that you might blend with them and form an actual choir, as opposed to a group of soloists who happen to be singing at the same time.
But the individual is not dissolved into a single collective. It is the diversity of each choir that makes the choir so wonderful.
I do pray that each one of us has, at some point — and perhaps if you are not in a choir, then singing in a congregation — had that Pentecostal experience of having your voice join the voices of those around you to form a united sound, to be brought up into a unity that is bigger than yourselves.
Prayer
And so I believe that is the gift God is giving us this Pentecost. The gift of being set free from the temptation of building a tower of Babel in your own life, in your own community — a place of us with no room for the other. I pray that this Pentecost, Christ would set us free from that and heal us from the desire to do it. That we might refuse to demand that the other be like us. That we might be drawn into this communion of difference held in the love that has characterised the Godhead since all eternity.
Amen.
#pentecost #holy-spirit #babel #trinity #listening #community #difference #as-preached
Theology Considering Culture 