Pentecost

Babeling

June 8, 2025 | by The Rev. Gregory L. Millikin

Pentecost: Whitsunday, Year C | June 8, 2025 | “Babeling”

Babeling

From 2016’s ABC News article (Click on the Image for more): Krystal Payne (Left) and Ibby Piracha (right) from Northern Virginia, at the center of Fr. Greg’s sermon below.

In the name of the Triune God. Amen.

I will never forget a fellow classmate of mine in the fifth grade back in Richmond, a hilarious kid named Kevin. One day in our grammar portion of the day, we were beleaguered by the task of conjugating verbs and participles, and the teacher was explaining something about how hard English is to master compared to say, Spanish, or another Romance language. At this mention of Spanish, I remember Kevin excitedly raising his hand with a cryptic grin on his face, a bit like the Joker - you never know what is going to come next. “Mrs. Smith,” Kevin said, interrupting the grammar lesson. “I have something important to tell you and the class about translations.” Perhaps intrigued, or exhausted herself, Mrs. Smith said, “Fine, Kevin, what is it?” To which Kevin stood up from his front right corner of the class and pronounced to all of us, as if he were standing and shouting it to the hills in Dead Poets Society or something: “Did you know, if you translate the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan ‘Finger-Licking Good’ into Spanish, and then translate it back into English, it comes out “So Good, You Suck Your Fingers.”

We all, even the teacher, had a good laugh that day, I can tell you. And apparently, not only is it true, but it happens in other languages too. In the ‘60s, the Pepsi company introduced its new slogan and campaign that said, “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation.” That Pepsi Generation thing really caught on in the English-speaking world, but when the marketing reached China, the slogan was translated into as close to a comparable Chinese as possible, but which, when re-translated back into in English, went “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”

And so we return to this Upper Room, this scene in Jerusalem today, to commemorate an event that was so consequential it became perhaps the third most important major feast days of the church, after Easter and Christmas, respectively. In this sequence in chapter 2 of Acts, we have caught the newly-assembled 12 disciples 2.0, with Matthias being chosen from the roll of dice to become the replacement for Judas Iscariot. Jesus has ascended, prior to that. And now ten days later, what to do, what to do. Jesus promised he would send an advocate, that is, the Spirit. But when? And how? And in what form?

Gathered together as they so frequently are, in that upper room, the stage is set for God to transform their lives once again by the power of the Holy Spirit. But this transformation, this inspiration of the Spirit of God, happens in the most peculiar of ways – it happens through tongues of fire. The breath of God, in Hebrew, the ruach that in Genesis 1 breathed life across the waters, doesn’t breathe wisdom or knowledge, but instead breathes the sudden ability to speak in other languages. The languages are so foreign, the speaking so breathlessly nonsensical and excitable, that the bystanders can only draw the simplest conclusion – they are drunk.

And that, my friends, is the birth of the church. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the babbling of the disciples with tongues of fire. Is this babbling a curse, an affliction? Of course not, because God is involved. This is not a punishment, any more than the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel is a story of punishment. In that fable, following the great Flood and Noah’s Ark narrative, the people have been tasked with building a city. Their city though is fortified with a very large real estate project, let us say. They wish to build a tower, a monument, an obelisk with stairs, to the heavens. Is it to reach God and to know God, perhaps to some extent? But it has more consequences than that.

The tower of Babel becomes a kind of low-ropes course gone sideways where instead of having different afflictions with which we must learn to work together, like in a trust fall, instead we all get the same one – no, not quite an inability to communicate — although that is the immediate consequence. The fable seems to say we were punished at Babel and the Pentecost event in many ways a counterpoint to the Babel story, a reaction or a restoration or correction. But that’s a surface reading of these two stories together; communication with God, communication with each other, that may be the real issue at heart. Intertwined in here too is a compelling reflection on diversity. A complication of language belies a mosaic that God ordained where once the people of Babel abandoned their big, beautiful Tower due to inability to understand each other. Thus, their unity was seemingly broken forever at Babel, and they spread out, they moved far out into the world and communicated differently in their own tribes. Perhaps this scramble or scattering of peoples was the purpose all along, perhaps these are all the voices or languages of God, or perhaps the language of God is something entirely different.

It was Rumi, the great 13th century Ottoman Era mystic and peace-loving Muslim poet, wrote in the 13th century, “silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” I think Rumi was on to something – and maybe the Pentecost event, the work of the Holy Spirit, is to attempt to put those tongues to rest. Let God be God, on our hearts, and in our actions. Maybe that is the intent of the Church, maybe that is its mission – to forget about translation, and instead, communicate.

A couple of years ago there was a story about a Starbucks in northern Virginia not too far from where I used to live. A new barista named Krystal Payne, noticed after a few consecutive days on the job, that every morning at about the same time, a deaf man came into the Starbucks, and would try to order his latte. She found out from co-workers that the man, 23-year-old Ibby Piracha, was a well-loved regular, but that it was always a bit confusing for the staff to try to figure out his order without him having to type it out on his iPhone to show them. Krystal was moved by his situation and decided to meet Mr. Piracha where he was. She decided to take up ASL, American Sign Language. Through a series of online books and videos, she picked up just enough ASL to be able to both understand Mr. Piracha – and to respond to him; to communicate with him in his own native “tongue.”

On a fateful certain day, Mr. Piracha came into the Starbucks in Leesburg, Virginia, preparing to order his drink with the usual difficulty, and he encountered Krystal , who signed to him: “The usual? Do you want milk with that?”

Mr. Piracha was floored. He was able to – for the first time in his life – sign his order and be understood in his own language. He took to social media to post a photo of Krystal’s handwritten note to him. It read: “I’ve been learning ASL just so you can have the same experience as everyone else.”

Ibby Piracha’s actual photo of the note Krystal Payne wrote to him as his new barista in Starbucks, Leesburg, VA, 2016.

On this glorious day, where we are infused with the Holy Spirit once again through our baptismal vows and through the breaking of bread, and where we remember that silence as well as the many tongues of the world are all God’s languages, we also are reminded that it is not just language that fuels the mission of God’s church. It is communion, it is comingling, it is communication. It is meeting people where they are. We are sent out at the end of this service like the disciples in that upper room, tongues-aflame, dismissed to be Christ in the world – you have received the spirit, and no matter how we translate it, we embrace in the language of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit, which enflames us and empowers us to go and communicate as to your fellow neighbor in the language of God’s love. †