The Politics of Pentecost

If there is one unifying, but overlooked theme running from Genesis to Revelation, it’s this: The people of God almost always find themselves living in, yet being at odds with, the empires of this world. From Egypt to Babylon, Persia to Rome, the clash between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world provides the backdrop to the larger biblical narrative. One could even argue the Scriptural witness is a divine manifesto against empire. 

For our purposes, let’s define an empire as any superpower that believes it has the manifest destiny to conquer, control, and conform the world into its image. Historically speaking, empires determine who belongs and who does not based on the creation of racially motivated social, economic, spiritual, and judicial systems that reward insiders at the expense of the outsider, reinforcing their racial homogeneity. Where God has blessed unity amidst diversity, the empire forces unity at the expense of diversity. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Babylon becomes the prophetic, iconic image of imperial ideology, but we actually find imperial origins all the way back at Babel.

In Genesis 10, we learn Noah’s sons obeyed God’s command “to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (found in Genesis 9). A list of every tribe from the Japhethites, Hamites, and Semites is mentioned, along with their corresponding languages. And yet, in the following chapter we read:

The whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly”...Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” (Genesis 11:1-4)

What happened to the multiplicity of languages and tribal diversity? Why is the “whole world” suddenly speaking one common language? There seems to be more to this short story than meets the eye.

To start, ancient Near East towers, or ziggurats, were generally built by enslaved populations. And much like today, ancient indigenous populations were not allowed to use their native tongue and were instead forced to speak the common language of the conquering empire. Such forced assimilation, whether in ancient Mesopotamia, on the plains of the American West, or on the streets of Minneapolis, seeks the same endgame: the eradication of racial diversity, replacing it with a totalizing imperial identity.

Ethicist and author Ched Myers explains how such forced conformity prevails today, and what the church must do to confront it:

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen. 

That’s why, during this season of Pentecost, we celebrate the gift of diversity, not only within the Church, but also within the global Kingdom of God. In Acts we read that the disciples were huddled together in one place when suddenly the Holy Spirit descended upon them, sending them out to proclaim the Gospel. Miraculously, everyone from Parthia, Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia all “heard in their own language” (Acts 2:6), subverting Rome’s use of Latin as the imperial language of choice. Pentecost unifies people from every tongue, tribe, nation, gender, and nation without forcing anyone to give up their distinctiveness. 

As citizens in God’s global Kingdom, diversity isn’t a problem to overcome, but a beautiful blessing to embrace. The Holy Spirit still unites us amidst our diversity, wedding believers worldwide to share in the one, living Body of Christ. Divisions that once caused fear and prejudice are overcome by love. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas reminds us, “We are new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people.”

But from Brexit to border walls, Ahmaud Arbury to George Floyd, the empire is striking back. Harvard professor Harvey Cox writes, “We don’t just live in the empire, the empire lives in us,” forming domination systems and ways of life that exclude, oppress, and squash any dissenting voice or way of life that falls outside the normative imperial modality. Nationalism and neofascism is on the rise. Racial tensions in partisan America have been stoked at the highest levels of society. Racial violence isn’t so much on the rise, it is rather finally being outed and broadcast by the proliferation of cameras and social media. Fear of the other and prejudice toward the stranger is encouraging otherwise rational individuals to believe race, religion, language, and national distinctions are worth killing for. 

What’s more disturbing is large portions of the Body of Christ have been co-opted by the empire to maintain the status quo, siding with imperial ideology to keep the man in his place. As Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. lamented from his Birmingham Jail cell in 1963, “ I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

As citizens in the Kingdom of God, who just happen to find ourselves living in a global superpower, our task isn’t to make the empire great again, but rather to make the Church countercultural again. In the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, we are called “to articulate the alternative world that God has promised, and that God is birthing before our very eyes”—a world replete with beautiful, life-giving diversity.

Like those first-century Apostles, the Holy Spirit continues to move us onward and outward in open embrace. As Pentecost people living in the empire’s world, may we continue to learn that viable unity must always find a way to include the very people we prefer to exclude. Amen.