Loading...While driving the other day, I saw a sign on one of the tires stores that read, “The other guys just don’t get it.”
That’s the truth, isn’t it? So often our communication is stunted when someone doesn’t understand us, or we don’t understand them. It’s not necessarily because we don’t understand the words spoken, we may intellectually comprehend the definition or emotionally connect to the concept of a word. Sometimes, when we just don’t get what the other guy is saying, it’s more likely we don’t understand the way another person understands the words. Our preconceived interpretations can internally silence the life experiences, education, culture, or even the generational impacts of another’s language. It is very possible we just don’t get it. Communication takes work.
Of course, our languages don’t make it easy, either. In our version of the English language there are plenty of words that are spelled the same but aren’t pronounced the same, like read or read; or are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently, like there, their, or they’re. There are regions that use different words for the same thing, like soda, pop, or Coke.
It takes patience to communicate in our own language let alone try to communicate with people who speak a different language. It takes humility to recognize that the language we speak isn’t better than another, it is simply different. It takes perseverance to strive to help the other guy get it.
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We heard two sides of the communicating story today. In the first, from Genesis, we heard the story about a time when all people spoke the same language, using the same words, seemingly able to comprehend meaning with no difficulty.
These people became arrogant and self-reliant, thinking that they had figured it all out. They, and the other guy, apparently, had gotten it.
To prove that they had conquered language barriers, that they were all-knowing because they could easily understand one another, they believed they should build a city with a tower that reached all the way to the heavens. If they could do that, they would have supreme power. They would have no need for God.
God being God, knew the foolishness of self-reliance. God knew this arrogant behavior would make these people think they could rely on themselves. They would think they could do anything. That just would not do.
God put a stop to their folly by confusing their language. God made it so people spoke in a variety of languages, with multiple dialects, with regional differences, so that they would not be able to easily understand one another from one place to the next. God sent them away from one another, scattering them around the globe to start their lives and build new communities.
This story of the Tower of Babel is our biblical explanation of how there are many languages spoken around the world. It is the basis of understanding that the world, the ways of the world, the language of the world, is not the same.
People can live in a variety of climates, under different conditions, and thrive in places others cannot. People, over generations, have learned how to govern, have commerce, share resources, and teach the ways of their society. Over time, they have learned how to build diplomacy from village to village, place to place, learning how to share, or, conversely, battle over, what is valuable, from who could marry whom, to food and water sources, to building materials.
We also know Europeans and others did significant damage when they tried to change the ways, religious practices, and cultures of people in places outside of their own civil, social, topographical, and environmental experience. Believing their ways were better, they forced their own understanding of the world in those places. Colonization included an expectation that people should all look, sound, act, and believe the same. But that would more often than we want to admit, result in genocides, epidemics, pandemics, wars, and famine. All because the other guys just don’t get it.
Healthy cultures and multi-cultural communities depend on the development of relationships. They depend on finding ways to help one another understand.
In the days after Jesus’s death, his followers were going from place to place, trying to tell people about Jesus, about what love, humility, grace, and healed communities could look like. But they encountered other guys who just didn’t get it.
We celebrate the Day of Pentecost today, fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, and just over a week after his Ascension. This is the day when God sent the Holy Spirit to remedy the inability to the “they just don’t get it” situation. This event reversed what happened at the Tower of Babel, by helping the people, on that day, hear in languages they could understand.
What a difference it makes when the barriers to clear communication are destroyed. When we understand one another, we are given the ability to create bridges over chasms of misunderstanding. We are given the ability to hear and see that in our differences we each hold a part of the human story.
That when we recognize the unique gifts found in the God-given humanity of each other, we just might experience the healing of hearts and communities; and the healing within our families and ourselves.
The beauty of the story of Babel is that God shook us up, creating a world redesigned to help us first depend on God’s providence and grace to succeed.
Let me explain what I mean.
To succeed, in this context, means that we will strive to trust that God provides us with the tools to co-create a world that thrives. We thrive when we live lives that focus on loving God first so that we can love one another. That love looks like caring for our neighbors, near, far, desiring for them what we want for ourselves: to be included in the community, no matter their circumstances.
Success, in this case, is not about wealth or status, it is in recognizing that we are not the same, but that we each are part of God’s creation. It is through helping to create that Beloved Community I spoke about last week.
Because I really want you to be the guys who get it, I’m going to tell you again what the Episcopal Church means when they talk about The Beloved Community. They say, “The vision of Beloved Community rises from the Bible’s most important commandments: to love God and love our neighbors, in whom we see the face of God. We understand Beloved Community to be the community that loves as God intends:
where we speak truth and dismantle hierarchies of human value,
where we seek right relationship with one another and creation,
where each person and culture honors and protects others as equally beloved parts of the human family of God,
and where we counter human selfishness … with the selfless love of Jesus.”[1]
The Day of Pentecost is a day of incredible hope for creation. It is a day where God sent the Holy Spirit to breathe on the people the fire of God’s love, enabling each to hear, again – or maybe for the first time, the story of Jesus in ways that could be told and retold in their communities, in their own languages.
That story of Jesus was and will continue to be our guide to what it means to live, honoring our differences, celebrating our unifying humanity, bringing us closer to what God has so desired since the beginning of time.
Our job, I believe, is to continue to tell this love story. Telling it and living it with both words and actions. Because living it, loving others as God has loved us, requires more than words. It becomes a part of who we are, especially when the ways in which we treat one another: with mercy, compassion, grace, humility, forgiveness, and love can lead us to hearing with not only with our ears, but with our hearts.
Let us pray:
God, be in our heads and in our understanding. Help us to not only tell others how your story fills our lives: give us ears to truly hear how others are filled with your story.
God, be in our hands and in our doing. Help our actions to not only speak your love more loudly than any words can clearly express: but teach us to humbly accept your love through the actions of others.
God, be in our hearts and in our loving. Help us to not only know your presence within us, guiding us to be your hands and feet in the world: we pray you, give us grace to seek your presence in the hearts of those we meet, remembering that you love them, as you love us. Amen.
[1] BECOMING BELOVED COMMUNITY WHERE YOU ARE A Resource for Individuals & Ministries Seeking Racial Justice, Healing, Reckoning & Reconciliation. www.episcopalchurch.org/ministries/racial-reconciliation. Updated: June 2024.
