Creation Undone

Genesis 6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19

For future reference: It's never a good sign when the only other vehicles on the interstate happen to be a convoy of storm chasers. I came to this unwelcome realization just a little too late on my way to Lincoln last night, traveling east on I-80, just as happy as you please. Sure, the clouds in the distance were a foreboding shade of obsidian, with wispy strands of white reaching downward like the boney fingers of some Halloween skeleton, but it was nothing I hadn't seen before. In Nebraska, watching tornadoes is a spectator sport, second only to cheering on the Huskers, in another season, as they romp up and down the college gridiron. When I moved to this state seven years ago, a novice, I used to heed all the warnings of the town sirens whenever the skies turned dark and ominous, but it wasn't long before I was out in my lawn chair with the rest of my neighbors, sipping a cold one and watching a twister skip through some cornfield ten miles away. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a state whose unofficial motto is, "Nebraska: Bring Something to Do!"

It seems appropriate, then, as I sit down to ruminate on this week's lectionary texts, that I recall my experience last night of gale-force winds and blinding rain pelting the side of my truck like so many tiny bullets. I can certainly understand what the Priestly writer had in mind as he described the kind of wrath that descended from above in Noah's day. "Then all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of heaven were open" (7:11b). Creation was coming undone. This is what our author was trying to convey to a post-exilic community intent on the righteous observation of the Torah. In the time of Noah, the very cosmos itself was falling apart at the seams due to the corruption of "all flesh"; it only took God's command to finish it off for good. It did not take much imagination among the Jews who were trying to reconstruct their ruined Temple to conceive of what this must have been like.

As many commentators have noted, this series of passages can best be understood as an appendage – a conclusion, really – to the creation narrative found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a (see my previous blog entry, A Lot Lower Than God). If we were to read the Priestly text as a whole – removing the Yahwist material that features the creation of Adam, the fall, and the murder of Abel, and then picking up with the passages for this week – we would find a number of very striking similarities and parallel references. The author's characteristic penchant for repetition would certainly be evident, as well as the familiar litany of "every kind of living creature – the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground." But more important than this would be an otherwise obscured chiasmic structure that begins with the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the deep, and ends in a return to the very stuff from which the world was formed in the beginning: water – dark and mysterious, the source of both life and death, and utterly at the command of the Creator. We move, in other words, from chaos to order to chaos again, and from creation to destruction. The only difference, of course, is that in the end we arrive not at the Spirit of God hovering over the primal waters, but at Noah and his ark, floating above the depths, the hope of a new creation, the seeds of a new shalom.

It is interesting to note that in this same Priestly account of creation and destruction we can discern a surprising change of attitude in the One who brings all things into existence, and we aren't given much of a clue as to what's behind it all. At the conclusion of each day of creation in Genesis 1, God surveys all that God has made and sees that it is good. On the sixth day, however, God creates humans, male and female, and gives them the commission to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth and have dominion (Gen. 1:27). God then blesses the pair and gives them some important instructions about what has been provided to them for food. The diet appears to be strictly vegetarian. But notice the subtle nuance here: nowhere does it say that God looked upon the primal couple to see that they were good. The lights in the heavens made the cut. The birds and creepy crawlers: check. The living creatures of every kind: ditto. Humans, blessed though they be? No comment. God's pleasure with the man and the woman can only be inferred from the concluding lines of this creation elegy: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).

When we finally get around to scene two of the Priestly text (6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19) – with only a brief genealogy of Adam serving as a bridge – we discover that God is not at all happy. The pleasant cosmic artisan of chapter 1 has now become a grumpy old man harboring a grievance over the work of his own hands. Given the preceding narrative, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the source of the problem lies. But humans are never singled out, never identified precisely as the reason for all the distress. Despite the age-old adage about one bad apple, the "whole bunch" in this case appears to be the cause of God's great disappointment. "The earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence" (6:12a). The damage is so extensive, we are told, that the Creator has no other choice than to do away with the whole ball of wax. Everything. The birds of the air, the beasts of the field, the creepy crawlers – it all stinks. And it is at this point that precocious boys and girls will often confound their Sunday school teachers with the painfully obvious question: "What did all the ponies and puppies do to deserve this kind of treatment?" The easy answer – though it masks a complex theological anthropology – is this: the ponies and puppies didn’t do anything. They were simply guilty by association with the ones who had forsaken their dominion.

While I cannot admit being entirely comfortable with what the Priestly author had to say about the seemingly capricious character of God, I can feel a sense of satisfaction when I reflect on what all of this implies about human beings and our relationship with the "the birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Throughout the history of the church, theologians have gone to great lengths to demonstrate the unique character of the ones who were fashioned in the image and likeness of God (imago dei). Augustine and Aquinas both believed that our capacity for reason sets us apart from the rest of creation, giving us the status of aspiring angels, as opposed to highly developed animals. We have souls, they argued; the puppies and ponies do not. Thus a theological gulf of separation was created between humans and the rest of the world. In the end, our true home would await us in heaven, or so the reasoning went. So long all you birds and animals, and especially you creepy things that crawl on the ground. We're outta here.

How reassuring, then – at least to those of us who now recognize the dire ecological consequences of such an anthropocentric theology – to read one of the oldest stories of human history (whether its form be that of the Gilgamesh epic or the Priestly narrative) and realize that, despite our hopes for some heavenly glory far removed from nature, we are in fact all in the same boat – two-legged, four-legged, winged, finned, green, mineral… all of us. In this story, God does not make any qualitative distinction between humans – created "a little lower than God," as the Psalmist tells us – and the rest of the world. In the Creator's eyes, they are of a piece. "The earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence" (6:12a). We can fool ourselves all we want, that somehow we are the ones who matter most in God's eyes, but we can't get around the fact that when it came time to till the soil and start all over again, God chose not to distinguish humanity from the rest of creation. It all had to go. But like a wise gardener, God saved the good seeds of diversity to be planted anew. It was a righteous man, Noah – one who knew the true meaning of dominion as resting first in God's command – his family, and a pair of every living creature who were set apart, sanctified, for God's new creation.

And so we are left with an oft-overlooked affirmation of our peculiar destiny: as human beings and all other living creatures are destroyed together, so also are we saved together. This being the case, then perhaps we should begin to think more inclusively about what it means to be a "new creation" (II Cor. 5:17). Is this simply a metaphor for an internal change of heart, a personal metanoia, as Paul seems to imply, and as the history of the church has attested? Or should we begin to broaden our ego boundaries to include, not just the human members of the body of Christ, but also the nonhuman others who have been sharing our ecological boat all along?

In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul states that the earth itself groans in travail, like a woman in labor, awaiting the revelation of the children of God (Romans 8:19). I can imagine that this anticipation was not unlike the anxiety that Noah felt, brooding in his ark over the face of the deep, wondering if the dark waters would ever subside, or if the undone creation could ever be put back together again. All he could do was to watch and wait and to continue on the path of righteousness, of dominion as servitude toward those who had been entrusted to his care.

Today, the ark of a new creation has become our spaceship earth, but unlike Noah we have been unsuccessful in building the bridge between what we believe and what we know we must do as ecologically responsible stewards of the planet. As in those diluvial days of old, however, the winds are blowing and the waters are swelling – creation is coming undone. The question that now presents itself is this: if God were to look to the church to build an ark, would God find those whose faith and fortitude are equal to the challenge, or is the body of Christ simply being swept away in the rising tide of consumerism and ecological destruction? On what side of the boat do we find ourselves in the present undoing of creation? Can we join with Rabbi Arthur Waskow in rekindling God's promise of old, in affirming the convictions of a new Rainbow Covenant?

Those of us who, like Noah, are no experts
must begin the building of the Earth as Ark.
We must turn away from metaphors of military and economic warfare.
We must consciously permeate every aspect of our lives
with the effort to preserve life on this planet.
All this so that we can fulfill the promise of the Rainbow Covenant.


Questions for Further Discussion

1. When you read the flood narrative as an appendage to the Priestly account of creation (i.e., moving directly from Genesis 1:1-2:4a to 6:9-22 and 8:14-19), are there any new insights that you gain that were not evident to you before?

2. What are your earliest memories of the flood narrative? Why is this one of the first stories we teach our children in Sunday school?

3. What would it mean if the church were to begin thinking about the body of Christ in a new way, as consisting not only of human beings but also of the nonhuman creatures who share our biotic communities? Would the church then be a new kind of ark?

4. What are our moral responsibilities toward animals?

A Lot Lower Than God

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

It's not difficult during these early days of May to imagine what the Psalmist had in mind when referring to the majesty of God's name in all the earth. I have spent the last few mornings in my back yard just taking in the sights and sounds of the emerging season, making note of all the feathered migrants who are now just finding their way back to the central plains. I'm particularly fond of the Yellow Warblers and the Orchard and Baltimore Orioles. In a landscape slowly pulling itself out of the dull brown coma of winter it's always an exhilarating joy to catch out of the corner of my eye a streak of orange skipping through the air like some fiery pebble across a pond. Then I too have to wonder, what are humans – earth-bound, self-absorbed, and prone to calamity at every turn – that God would be mindful of us? Yet we were made a "little lower than God," we are told, and we have been given dominion over all these remarkable creatures who inhabit our world, "all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea" (Ps. 8:8).

Dominion. The Priestly authors of Genesis 1:1-2:4a certainly chose their words carefully when composing their elegy to God's wondrous acts of creation, and it no doubt suited their purposes at the time. But would that history had been a little more prudent in its subsequent interpretations of this term – what a mess it could have averted. There are many these days who still like the sound of "dominion theology" with its emphasis on returning the care of creation to the faithful whose calling as God's image on earth best suits them for the task of making all the tough decisions about fair use and distribution of resources, but their arguments to this end haven't exactly won me over. As Lynn White, Jr., suggested over forty years ago, "dominion," even in the hands of the most committed Christians, has too often been mistaken for "domination." Add to this the injunction to "subdue the earth," and then toss in a good dose of human greed, and you've got a ready prescription for ecological disaster. Anyone living on the Great Plains, with the Dust Bowl an ever present memory, knows where an avaricious reading of the creation narrative can lead.

Dominion works well as a hoped-for dream, but as our science and technology have succeeded in effectively putting all things under our feet, we need now to ask what the value of this theological concept is for the future of creation itself. Hope and faith were all that were left to the remnant of the Jewish community for whom Genesis 1:1-2:4a was composed, men and women struggling to sing a song of praise to God in a foreign land. By the waters of Babylon they lay down and wept, and for good reason. Their Temple, once the outward sign of God's surest favor toward the people of Israel, had by 587 BCE been completely destroyed by the invading Babylonian army, and now they had to endure the constant doubt and humiliation of being reminded in all things that it was the great god Marduk, not Yahweh, who had finally won the day.

As a new generation of Hebrew children began to grow quite nicely into their adopted culture, parents began to wonder if their traditional customs and beliefs were doomed to fade into obscurity. With Aramaic becoming the language of choice, an entirely new metaphysic of creation began also to enter into Israelite consciousness. How long could God's remnant persist among a people who declared that the moon and the stars were worthy of their praise as celestial deities? Something was needed – in addition to Ezekiel's theatrics, that is – to remind the faithful few that their homeland had not been utterly lost, that the Temple would one day be rebuilt, and most importantly, that Yahweh, who had called Abraham and had brought their ancestors out of bondage in Egypt, was still in control. And as God's name was still majestic in all the earth, so were God's people to remember their original calling as God's image in creation. No doubt they were offered hope in the words that Micah had spoken just two centuries earlier: "And you, O tower of the flock, hill of daughter Zion, to you it shall come, the former dominion shall come…." (Micah 4:8).

When I think of the ludicrous arguments that have been proffered by those who, on the one hand, proclaim their deep reverence and respect for scripture, yet on the other hand insist on reading it through an anachronistic lens, as if it were a science book, I have to wonder just how much time they have devoted to the original context of these words of hope that were sung by God's people in captivity. These verses were originally intended as a statement of faith, a poetic bulwark against the cultural impositions of the Babylonians, and a reminder to all Hebrew children that God's name, and not that of Marduk, was to be praised to the exclusion of all others. The heavens continually proclaim God's glory. Yes, these people along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, our captors, may believe that those bright lights twinkling in the skies at night are immortal souls, but guess what? Our God created them.

Least of all on the minds of the Priestly authors who wrote this text was the question of how, exactly, God pulled this off. Was it six twenty-four-hour days? Was there a Big Bang? Is that what happened when God said 'Let there be light'?" Ludicrous. And I am not too timid to suggest that such questions really come close to blasphemy. Reading the faith-poem of Genesis 1:1-2:4a as a proto-scientific text is like appealing to Robert Frost's "Birches" as a reliable technical manual on the biology of trees.

Interpreting this hymn to God's majesty in its Babylonian context also helps us get a handle on the admittedly aggressive command to "subdue the earth and have dominion," not to mention the injunction to "be fruitful and multiply." A powerless people can hope to be drawn out of their helplessness not only in an earthly way – by somehow getting the upper hand on their enemies, for example – but also in a cosmically significant manner. The latter was in fact the more important of the two. Their dominion over the earth, when it eventually came, would be a final declaration of Yahweh's sovereignty, which was certainly a little worse for the wear after forty years in captivity. So the pertinent question here is, does the dominion referred to in this text really have to do with a human calling to bring all things under our power and command, or is it simply a symbolic affirmation, sung in Sabbath worship, that God's name would once again be praised from Jerusalem and throughout all the earth? What has so often been regarded as history -- that is, an account of what happened "in the beginning" -- may in fact be cosmological prophecy. The former dominion will come.

But it has not come yet. There is no question that "subjugation and domination" of the earth have now won the day, due in part to a none-to-faithful reading of this single text, and helped along in no small measure by the Psalmist's affirmation that we have been made "a little lower than God." It is in a situation like this that I can be thankful for my Reformed roots – extending all the way back to Augustine, and finally to Paul – reminding me that, when I look at the heavens and the work of God's fingers, and then consider what human beings have done to it all, I cannot help but disagree with the Psalmist's hopeful anthropology: we are, in fact, a lot lower than God. We're not even close to how we were originally created. This being the case, I am then led to ask, and with some trepidation, why God would even want to be mindful of us.

I have to wonder how long the earth will continue to sing God's praises – how long it will be before the songbirds stop coming to my back yard due to loss of their winter habitat in South America; how long before the water we all take for granted dries up beneath our feet; how long before the species whose diversity offers the greatest proclamation of God's handiwork become eliminated through genetic modification or sheer extinction. And the question that most haunts me at the present time: how long will we continue to funnel our grain into our suburban assault vehicles at the expense of billions of hungry stomachs around the world? Strange dominion indeed.

Dominion – and the theology that accompanies it, I would add – is really not all it's cracked up to be. What was intended to be an affirmation of the Lord's sovereignty over all creation has become, and will probably continue to be, a theological means for allowing humans to lord it over creation, and with apparent impunity. This was by no means the original intent of this paean to God's faithful work in the world, Genesis 1:1-2:4a. But in our inimitable fallen fashion we have been able to do what would otherwise seem impossible. We have turned a love poem into a science book, and a hymn of faith into a mandate for our own destruction.

Questions for Further Discussion

1. In Lynn White's now-famous essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (1967) he argues quite persuasively that Christianity bears a "huge burden of guilt" for the environmental problems that now face us. His reasons for this claim rest on the "dominion theology" referred to above. Do you think that White has overstated his thesis? What evidence do you have that Christianity is actually an eco-friendly religious tradition?

2. If Christianity is as eco-friendly as some claim, then why do we see the worst environmental problems caused by those countries that are predominantly Christian? Is religion irrelevant here, despite White's claim? What role does capitalism play in this? Are capitalism and Christianity at odds with each other, or in agreement on humanity's right to utilize the earth's resources to maximize profits?

3. Reread the Genesis passage, but this time imagine yourself in the Babylonian context, praising the creative work of a God who seems to have abandoned God's chosen people in a strange land, a sovereign who appears to have been defeated by the Babylonian God Marduk. What insights do you gain from this exercise?

Of Fools and Idiots

Acts 2:1-21

I Corinthians 12:3-13

I have to admit that I have never had much enthusiasm for the observance of Pentecost. Perhaps my ambivalence stems from my earliest childhood memories of worshiping at Mifflin Presbyterian Church and being petrified at even the thought of finding myself alone in the sanctuary. It gave me the chills. I didn't want to run up against that "Holy Ghost" in whom we so dutifully professed our belief every Sunday morning. I was fine with the Father and had no problem with the Son, but a ghost? There was nothing in my admittedly limited experience to suggest that anything good could come of a meeting with this… this thing.

In the Reformed tradition we really don’t know what to do with the Holy Spirit (whom I have often referred to as the red-headed step-child of the Trinity).This is no fault of Calvin and Knox, of course, but mostly a tendency on the part of their successors, especially during the Enlightenment, to steer clear of anything – or, in this case, anyone – whose contours and character could not fit easily into some systematic equation. The spartan sanctity of Puritan sacred space, with its straight-backed pews and abundant right angles, is certainly an unlikely place to encounter the presence of God who, in this hypostasis at least, is so often spoken of through the metaphors of wind and flame. Whereas the Puritans may have been comfortable with the spiritual canvas of a Rembrandt or a Vermeer (and even this is a stretch), Pentecost seemed to throw them a Kandinsky-esque curve: too much color, too much movement, and not enough in the way of familiar form.

I think my interest in Pentecost was at its peak when I was in college, a time when questions of faith yearned for the kind of "gee whiz" answers that rushing winds and fire from heaven appeared to provide. I remember being especially enamored for a time with speaking in tongues. I had heard about it, but had never witnessed it, and with fears of damnation and eternal retribution swirling around in my head, I thought that if there were any fool-proof way to count myself among the chosen, glossolalia was it. I needed this Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to set my mind at ease. It as my ticket into heaven, so I was going to speak in tongues come hell or high water.

But it was not to be. I tried. I really tried. Even with no less a paragon than David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade fame praying over me – heavenly verbiage spewing forth from his lips like water over a dam – it just didn't take. I couldn't utter a word; struck dumb by tonguestipation. All of my friends who had braved the inevitable altar call seemed to pick right up on the gift and were chatting away gleefully in their own celestial idiom. But not me. There was nothing. Not a word. It was shortly after this all-too-apparent confirmation of my complete failure as a grace-filled child of God that I began seeking out the more proletarian spirits available to me through the cult of Bacchus, of which my college had several chapters. Thankfully, that didn't take either.

And so it is with a twinge of pain, not to mention some regret over my naïve spiritual exuberance, that I read our lectionary passages for this week. Over the last twenty years I've carried these texts around with me like a teenager with a condom tucked safely away in his wallet, because you just never know. It's always good to be prepared. Just in case those whose enthusiasm for their singular charism descend upon me once again like some unspeakable affliction. I Corinthians 12 has been my spiritual prophylactic.

OK, so I'm still a little bitter. But exclusion from the body of Christ and being shown the gates of hell, especially by those who possess such an obvious sign of God's favor, tend to have this effect on a person. I can certainly empathize with those in Corinth who experienced a similar kind of one-upmanship, and I can also imagine their relief upon reading Paul's first epistle to their struggling congregation. More than this, I can identify with the Apostle's frustration at even having to write his letter in the first place. Corinth must have been for him – in the beginning at least – the crown jewel of his missionary activity. What better place to demonstrate the reconciling work of the Spirit than among those who were drawn from the city's incredibly complex social strata? Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, rich and poor – everyone would finally be able to put aside their differences and make manifest the new egalitarian ethic of the Kingdom, all through the grace of God and the inspiring work of the Holy Spirit.

But division quickly ensued after Paul's departure from the fledgling congregation. Some were taken by the eloquent preaching of a man named Apollos and began to distinguish themselves from those who wanted to remain committed to the Apostle's example. Sexual immorality was a persistent problem, as one might expect in a port city like Corinth. The wealthy soon fell into their old habits of separating themselves from the baser elements of the church, refusing to share the Lord's Supper with the undesirables. Christians were suing each other in Roman courts. What a mess. And to top it all off, some in the community were becoming a little too impressed with their peculiar ability to bring down the house with their commanding capacity for tongues, the language of the Spirit.

It is not surprising that this problem was especially acute in Corinth given its Hellenic context. Mystery religions were abundant in this part of the Mediterranean world and there is little doubt that many of Paul's converts were intimately familiar with the cultic rituals of these groups, many of which involved possession by spirits and captivating ecstatic utterances on the part of the initiates. The worship of Cybele-Attis, for example, had been prolific in Greek culture from about 200 BCE. The rites of this cult were often extreme and included priests who could be aroused only by the cacophony of clashing cymbals and loud drums. Once stirred, they would dance in a frenzy of excitement that often included speaking in tongues. (Montanus, a second-century heretic who was no stranger to glossolalia, was at one time a priest of Cybele.) It is not difficult to see, then, how this peculiar gift of the spirit could become unruly among the members of the Corinthian church. Old habits die hard, especially with no one like Paul there to shepherd them through the transition.

To Paul's great credit, he does not dismiss the phenomenon that was causing such division among the faithful. He begins by affirming that all spiritual gifts have their origin in God, and he acknowledges their great variety (12:4-11). Exercising these charismata, however, must have one goal in mind: the benefit of the entire community (12:12-27). According to Paul, ecstatic utterances cannot of themselves achieve this purpose since they are addressed exclusively to God (14:2, 6, 9), and are spoken in such a way that human beings cannot understand them without an interpreter (14:27). The whole point of his argument is to emphasize a "still more perfect way," one that stands in contrast to the kinds of theatrics and acrobatics that the Corinthians had come to expect from their former cults: "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (13:1).

Paul's message is clear. Unlike pagan ecstatic utterances, whose sole end is individual transcendence, glossolalia in the Corinthian church should have as its fundamental objective the edification of the body, koinonia. Anything short of this is just a lot of noise, a nuisance.

Given this situation, I have to wonder if Paul's traveling companion, Luke, may have tried to address the potentially divisive nature of glossolalia in his own way when writing the introductory chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. What at first glance appears to be a phenomenon quite similar to what had happened at Corinth nearly three decades earlier (assuming that Luke wrote his "history" of the early church around 85 CE) is upon closer inspection an alternative perspective on how the Spirit is made manifest in speech. In Acts 2:4 we are told that when the tongues of fire rested upon each individual, "they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues (heterais glossais) as the Spirit gave them utterance." What may seem like an insignificant adjective (heterais) is in fact very important for a proper understanding of Luke's intent. In all other New Testament texts where reference is made to the gift of ecstatic speech the noun "tongues" (glossais) is simply used with no qualifier. Here, however, Luke makes a distinction: "other tongues."

To clarify his intent, Luke is also careful to mention the various Jews in Jerusalem who are witnesses to the events of Pentecost. The list (Acts 2:9-11) is quite extensive and is thought to represent the nations comprising the known world. What is important is the way that these global citizens, if you will, respond to the tongues they hear coming from the mouths of Galilean peasants: "How is it we hear, each of us in his own native language?" (Acts 2:8). The word that Luke uses in this instance, as well as in 2:6, gets to the very crux of what he is trying to say about the phenomenon that nearly rent asunder the Corinthian church a few decades prior to his writing. The Jews in Jerusalem on this day are hearing dialectos, a noun whose meaning is entirely distinct from "tongues" (glossais). A dialect is a language that facilitates communication, and this is what Luke takes great pains to emphasize; the tongues heard in Corinth, by contrast, are idiolects, peculiar to one person, and therefore incapable of fostering understanding.

Over the past several years I have become more convinced that what separates Americans from the rest of the world is the consumer lens through which we have come to interpret every transaction, every experience, as either valuable or unworthy of our time. Connected with this is our unrealistic desire – and perhaps it is more appropriate to call it a need – for the acquisition of goods and services at minimal expense (that's just good capitalism), and for these same goods and services to afford us an immediate gratification. Add to this a culture in which individual rights have all but eclipsed community responsibilities and you've got the perfect scenario for a contemporary version of what was happening in Corinth in the first century, only on a national scale. From this perspective, glossolalia is the perfect business transaction: there is an immediate eternal return on a relatively meager investment, and after all, isn't that what grace is all about?

But Paul knew well that what makes grace so amazing is the fact that the return actually precedes the investment – justification comes before sanctification. The work follows the pay-off, and the focus is less on the individual than it is on the community. This is the foolishness of the kingdom he preached. Luke only accentuates this alternative reality by introducing a subtle nuance to his text, suggesting that the miracle of tongues (glossais) can best be understood only when the "other" (heterais) is added to it. It is "the other" who affords us the opportunity for the reconciling work of Christ, and so it is to "the other" that our words must be addressed. This is especially urgent in the global context in which we now find ourselves. Division and strife – the perennial marks of the church – will persist as we keep falling back on business as usual, expecting those on the outside to do our bidding and to speak our language, whether literally or figuratively. This was not the practice of Paul, nor was it the orientation of the early church. Much less was it the perspective of Jesus himself.

We have become a culture, and a church, full of idiots, and our gospel – in the eyes of many at least – is increasingly perceived as so much sound and fury signifying nothing. The question we need to be asking at Pentecost this year, and every year hereafter, is whether our "tongue-speaking," our means of communicating the grace of God through Christ, is going to be a vehicle by which we as a church can move into the world with an attitude of liberation and reconciliation, or will it remain a symbol of exclusion and division, a sign distinguishing the insiders from the outsiders and the haves from the have-nots. Only one of these is truly worthy of a fool for Christ. The latter is just the folly of an idiot.


Questions for Further Discussion

1. What are some of your earliest memories and experiences of Pentecost? Were you raised in a tradition that paid particular attention to its observance? What are some of the sights, sounds, colors, and smells that you associate with this liturgical season?

2. What has been your experience of glossolalia in the church? As you consider the role that your congregation currently plays in your community and in the world, do you see a way in which speaking in tongues serves or might serve the common good, as Paul suggests in I Corinthians 12:7? What form does this or might this take?

3. In I Corinthians 12 Paul discusses a number of gifts inlcuding prophecy, wisdom knowledge, and healing. What special gifts do members of your church community possess? What gifts does your church make manifest in the larger community of which you are a part?