Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)
It’s Pentecost Sunday this week – the birthday of the church – and it’s hard to know where to begin. Do we start with the tongues of fire, with the rushing wind, or with the disciples’ speaking in languages they’d never learned? I want to begin at the very beginning – inGenesis – wheree we first see people divided into different tribes and language groups and where we first see the Spirit of God on the move.
The quote I’ve given you is from Genesis 11, verse 4: “They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.””
This is the Tower of Babel story, and it’s the last story in the ‘ancient history’ section of the Hebrew Bible that takes us from the creation of the world (in Genesis 1) up to the birth of Abraham, who appears in Genesis 12, after which the Hebrew Bible follows the lives of Abraham and his descendants – the ‘people of Israel’. Abram, though, makes his appearance in Genesis 12 as the solution to the chaos that the world has fallen into by that stage – a chaos culminating in this story of the tower.
It was the original MBGA movement – ‘Make Babel Great Again’ – and perhaps it would have failed anyway due to the poor acronym, but God knew that it was not going to end well, so God ‘confused their language’ (Genesis 11:6) so that they could no longer understand each other and no longer work together. Instead, they divided into tribes, and soon enough the tribes were at war with one another … and we’re still at war with one another!
I remember when I started as a parish priest in Dulwich Hill in 1990. What was the biggest problem in the community? Ask anyone. It was the Vietnamese!
It was the Vietnamese who were bringing drugs into the area. It was a Vietnamese boy who had been arrested at the school for threatening someone with a machete! He claimed he didn’t know you weren’t allowed to bring a machete to school!
Ten years later we all seemed to be enjoying Vietnamese food, and the Vietnamese didn’t seem to be the problem anymore. It was the Lebanese!
The Lebanese boys had their own gang – ‘the Legends’ – and they didn’t just have knives. They had guns (or so we were told)! They definitely had baseball bats. I remember conferencing with the police about that. Those were the days before mobile phones, yet they all managed to mobilise with their bats very rapidly.
I was in Dulwich Hill for thirty years, and I worked a lot with those Lebanese boys along with my friend, Sheikh Mansour, and by the time I left, the Lebanese weren’t such a big issue. We were more worried about the Tongan boys, who seemed to form something of an alliance with some of the Indigenous kids.
I’ll never forget one particularly notorious girl who sold drugs, would beat up on some of the other kids, and who stole our youth worker’s motorcycle. I remember when the police arrested her once at our youth centre. She raised her fist as she was led away, crying “Stay Black!” (which we felt really missed the point).
Tribalism – it’s as old as Babel, and it makes for easily digestible political fodder.
Pauline Hanson suggests that there are no ‘good Muslims’ and that most of this country’s problems are due to our out-of-control immigration.
Nigel Farage, whom many think could be the next Prime Minister of Britain, speaks of immigration as an ‘invasion’ and says, “You might as well put a sign on the white cliffs of Dover saying, “Everyone welcome.'”‘
And the real irony of this sort of anti-immigration rhetoric is often sold to us as some sort of Christian mission, as if fear of the outsider were a Christian virtue. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, speaks of his policies as his attempt to defend “Christian Europe” against the corrupting forces of multiculturalism!
Now, I don’t want to deny that there are real and significant cultural differences between the different tribes spread across our planet, but God has given us the antidote to Babel, and that antidote is the Spirit of God!
“They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2:4)
Pentecost is the reversal of the curse of Babel.
- At Babel people came together to make a name for themselves and to be great. At Pentecost God brings us together to create something new.
- At Babel, language becomes a barrier. At Pentecost, it becomes a bridge.
- At Babel, confusion leads to division. At Pentecost, confusion leads to the creation of a new community, a new humanity, and a new way of belonging.
This is the birth of the church. This is who we are. We are the multicultural, multilingual, multi-tribal community brought together by the Spirit of God to show the rest of the world that true human community really is possible.
I’ve spent much of my life moving between cultures. When I was a boy, most of my friends were Greek. Then I married into a Chinese family and spent quite a bit of time in Southeast Asia. Over the last twenty years I’ve immersed myself in the Arabic and Persian communities, and I think I’ve learnt what it is that brings us together, and it’s not the boxing (as powerful a tool as that can be). It’s the Spirit of God.
It’s the Spirit of God who breaks down the walls we build. It’s the Spirit of God who speaks every language. It’s the Spirit that gathers what Babel scatters and the Spirit who makes us one — young and old, rich and poor, Jew and Greek, Tongan and Lebanese, black and white.
In the Spirit of God, we are connected. In the Spirit of God, we are one.
Amen.
First published on Father Dave’s blog – May 22nd, 2026
