Sermon for Pentecost 2007 during the Four Seasons Flower Festival in St.Thomas Church.
Readings: Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17.

Sarah and I weren't in church in Lymington last Sunday morning. We were away in Milford on sea doing some ecclesiastical espionage. We were looking over the parish church there, and especially Satellite which is the informal worship they hold in their church hall. It happens at the same time as their formal Communion service but lasts a little longer at about an hour and a half.

There was a short time of all-age worship, then we all stopped for coffee, biscuits and chat about the theme. The theme was the importance of giving generously of our time and money so it sparked a lot of debate. After coffee the youngsters went into their various groups and the adults came back into small circles of six chairs to look at the bible passage in more depth. We finished by sharing our groups' thoughts, welcoming back the youngsters and singing a really awful, but very happy, action song together. There were about 60 adults and 20 children there.

Hearing one another's questions and answers is a great way to learn. I was in the Infant School last week being questioned about my Christian faith by about 60 year 1 children. What a privilege! The questions were not as easy as you might expect from 6 year olds:
Why are you a Christian?
Who goes to heaven?
How often do you pray?
Why is the bible important?

My answer to the last question was, “Because the Bible tells us what God wants us to do and to be, it tells us about God's character, what God is like.”

And what did we hear about today? We call it the story of The tower of Babel, although of course the city wasn't called Babel until after they'd stopped building the tower. What did we hear about today? We heard about a God who seemed rather worried about the achievements of men, a bit insecure about his place in the cosmos. He seems to resent their capability, Gen 11:6 “There is nothing they won't be able to do.” So God confuses their language and scatters them. There, that'll teach them!

Last Sunday afternoon I took a baptism service in All Saints. We gathered the chairs round the font, making it the focus of our attention. The light was streaming in through the south windows and members of the All Saints congregation welcomed the baptism family to their church. The family were quite typical of baptism families in general. They were all ages from infants up to great grandparents. They were slightly uneasy at being in a church but wanted it done properly. They were mostly completely ignorant of church things or even of Jesus. Yet they were all moved by the simple power of sacrament – the easy-to-grasp outward and visible signs which speak so clearly of the inward and spiritual truths of God.

Of course today is the day for inward and spiritual truths because today is Pentecost, the day that the Spirit came, the birthday of the Church. And that's why we're given the Babel reading. You'll have heard, as have I, many a sermon on the subject of Pentecost, and some of those, no doubt, on the idea that Pentecost reverses Babel. As the disciples are given the miraculous power to communicate directly with people from all over the world, so the divisions of Babel are overcome. And that's why we're given the Babel reading at Pentecost.

But the more we look into that explanation of Babel, the less satisfying it seems. It says that Babel was a bad thing which God did; and now, through the Spirit, God can begin to undo it. Hmmm. I think it was John Major who said, “If the answer is more politicians then we are asking the wrong question.” In this case I'd say, “If the answer is God got it wrong then we're asking the wrong question.” Perhaps a better question is, “What did God hope to achieve?”

In addition to our Sundays and our normal quota of sad farewells to faithful churchgoers, in the past ten days we've had an Infant School Ascension service with 300 people, a funeral and thanksgiving for a 17 year old girl with 430 people and a quiet 25th wedding blessing with 65 people. Each one of these services has been totally different from the others. Each has been put together specifically for the people involved; the choice of building, music, songs, readings, speakers. Tailor made.

And as though that wasn't enough, this restless church has now created an event to eclipse any of those in terms of attendance – this flower festival. Four seasons. A large team under Daphne and Joan's direction: imagining, creating, supporting, or simply spreading the word. Four seasons. A myriad of individual arrangements but one festival. Each arrangement formed to carry a particular message: cold wind in the winter, pleasant summer sun; global warming and eternity.

I've deliberately laced this sermon with numbers, big numbers, of people going to church. Shock horror – People flock to church!! WHEN we go out to meet them, when we tailor the method of gospel transmission to their needs. So maybe now we're getting close to an answer to the question, “What was God hoping to achieve at Babel?”

Sure, the story is a myth, but that's the whole point. If anything it means that we must take it MORE rather than LESS seriously because the writer is making a pure theological point unhampered by history. And the point being made relates to my sermon two weeks ago about Noah and the ark and the covenant. You remember that God's blessing awaited Noah and his family once they left the familiarity of the ark and launched out into the fresh-cleansed world of the rainbow. Go out into all the world; go forth and multiply; be blessed and be a blessing. So, sure enough, the subsequent chapter, Genesis 10, is full of the genealogies of Noah's sons. They are sires of nations, with the refrain “in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.”

That's how it was supposed to be. But just turn the page to chapter 11 and you're building Babel. At some time, we can imagine, people were saying, “All this diversity of land, of language, family and nation – what a waste! Let's get together and just think what we could achieve.” So we have the story of the ones who tried – and the story of what God would think of that empire of uniformity.

It's been rather time consuming for me, but really enlightening and worthwhile to read each and every one of the hundred and fifty or so replies to our 1030 questionnaire to date. I've been praying for each one of you, and I've been extracting and aggregating common themes, noting all the ideas and suggestions ready for the PCC next Saturday. One interesting theme has been that of unification. Some people saying we should stick with our 1030 service because it makes us worship together as one church, some people saying we should close down All Saints and all worship in one building, some people saying we should have only one form of service instead of many, and so on. And the plea for unification is often accompanied by the reasoning of efficiency. Think how much less time and money it would take to put on just one service, maintain just one building, speak just one liturgical style. Wait, doesn't that sound familiar? “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens.” Oops – we know what God thinks of that!

Another thing we've been up to recently is asking questions in the playgrounds of our schools; just a short questionnaire put to a random selection of 40 to 50 people. Would you like to meet up to talk about Christian things and how to bring up your children with Christian values? A few said “Yes,” NONE said “No,” most said “Maybe” – after all, who knows WHAT the church might do? “How about weekends?” we asked. “No,” they replied. “How about mornings?” we asked. “No,” they replied.

So where do we build our tower? Which language, nation, family do we choose to hear the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ? Ours? Theirs? If it seems confusing it's because God decided that was the right way to go about things. Babel means confusion and that's God's method for outreach. He told Noah's boys to get out there and be different. If they tried to come back to form a holy, homogeneous huddle he sent them back out confused. He sent them out, confused, to a confused world, each one to bring God's blessing to others like themselves, in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.

Diversity, says the bible, is God's plan, not a temporary inconvenience to be swept aside by the Spirit. The message of Pentecost is not the denial of Babel, but a new tool for evangelism – the Holy Spirit which unites us across the nations, not annihilating our differences but building them together into one body.
Jesus prayed that we may be one as Jesus and the Father are one. Our Christian unity is in the Spirit of truth whom the world neither sees nor knows. Our unity is in the same Spirit who offers diverse gifts, differing from person to person. The same Spirit who blows where he wills.

Our unity is in the Spirit so that we can go out into a confused world to reach people like ourselves with the glorious mystery of God who made every flower different. And meant it.