Babel

Many years ago, I took a trip to Chile with my parents. This was long before the days of smartphones and Google in your pocket. We'd been traveling all night, and we found ourselves downtown in the capital city very early in the morning. We still had our luggage with us. We needed to find a hotel, but we were hungry and cranky, so food and coffee came first. We dragged our bags to an open restaurant that advertised breakfast. But when the time came to order, the only thing the waiter offered was a cheese sandwich. Did I mention that we were hungry and cranky? My father spoke Spanish pretty well, and he went on a rant about how when he heard the word “breakfast” he expected eggs or bacon or oatmeal. This, by the way, is precisely how American tourists get a bad reputation. Showing much more patience than we deserved, the waiter went to the kitchen and came back with scrambled eggs. We ate, we found a hotel, we got some sleep, and then we set out on the rest of our trip in a much better mood. Within a day or two, we realized that the typical breakfast in Chile is—you might have guessed it—a cheese sandwich. We ate many of them in the days to come.

I love travel, but parts of it can be exhausting. It can be hard to be in a place where you don't speak the language, where your assumptions about what normal looks like can lead you astray. It's always a relief to get home, to find yourself again surrounded by people who speak like you, people who share your expectations.

So when I hear the story of the Tower of Babel—the story of a people who sought uniformity and greatness, a people who were afraid of being scattered—I get it. They want predictability. Familiarity. They want to stay put, with people who speak like them and think as they do. They don't want to suddenly wake up in a city where “breakfast” means a cheese sandwich. The physical tower usually gets all the attention in the story of Babel, but it's not actually at the heart of the story. It's a story about people trying to protect themselves from the unknown.

And so God does what God so often does. God disrupts their plans. Confuses their language. Scatters them across the face of the earth. It sounds like a curse. But I wonder if it wasn't also a gift. A gift of humility. Because one of the most dangerous things we can do is to believe that we already understand everything.

And so after Babel the world becomes much like the world we know, with its dizzying variety of languages and cultures and ways of life.

Centuries later, in Jerusalem, Jesus’ disciples gather in one place. Still marveling at the resurrection. Unsure of what comes next. And then the Spirit arrives—not gently, but with wind and flame. They start speaking. And each person in the crowd—no matter where they originally came from—each person hears the language of their childhood, the language of home.

That's the miracle of Pentecost. Not that everyone speaks the same language. Not that everyone becomes alike. Pentecost doesn't undo Babel. Not really. The miracle of Pentecost is that despite their differences, the people understand one another.

These days, it's becoming easier and easier to translate from one language to another. I can point my phone at a menu anywhere in the world and read what it says in English.

But despite all our technology, it feels like we understand each other less every day—even when we speak the same language. We use the same words—freedom, justice, truth—but we mean completely different things.

And that confusion isn’t just frustrating. It’s dangerous.

We live in a time of rising suspicion and shrinking trust.

When we use the same words but trust different truths, it becomes almost impossible to build anything together. To govern. To worship. Even to grieve.

Misunderstanding breeds fear. Fear hardens into contempt.

And before long, we start to believe that the only people worth trusting are the ones who already sound like us.

True understanding requires listening.

It requires patience.

It requires curiosity.

I'm thinking of another trip, this time a pilgrimage in Spain. I was sitting at a dinner table in Northern Spain, surrounded by pilgrims from all over Europe. The waitress came by, speaking Spanish. It turned out that I was the only one at the table who spoke any Spanish, so I stumbled through a conversation with her, and I translated her words into English as best I could. Someone picked up the English and translated it into French. Another into German. Another into Dutch. Another into Italian. It wasn't fast. It wasn't precise. But it worked.

That, to me, is Pentecost. Not a magical moment where everyone becomes fluent in a language they didn’t speak before. But a holy persistence. A willingness to stay at the table long enough for meaning to emerge. Not because everyone gets the grammar perfectly, but because the Spirit is present. Communion comes first, and understanding follows.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus promises his friends that the Holy Spirit will come to them—the Advocate, the Spirit of truth. He doesn’t promise that their lives will be easy. But he promises they won’t be alone.

Maybe the Church isn’t meant to be a tower of certainty, but a table of patience, a place of listening and growing understanding—with, I’ll admit, the occasional rush of wind, tongue of fire, and moment of holy chaos. Maybe the work of the Spirit isn’t about getting all the words right. Maybe it’s about staying in the room long enough to hear what’s actually being said.

And maybe—just maybe—the scattering of Babel was never a punishment.

Maybe it was a gift.

The solution isn’t to build a new Babel.

Not to force our way back into uniformity.

The hope of Pentecost is not sameness.

It’s Spirit-breathed communion across difference.

It’s the miracle of many voices, still somehow one Body.

Because understanding across difference is deeper, richer, and more sacred than any sameness could ever be.

The miracle isn’t when we all speak the same language.

It’s that we’re still speaking at all.

And still—by some grace—being heard and understood.