The link between the lesson from Genesis (the Tower of Babel) and the lesson from Acts (the first Christian Pentecost) should be obvious. The Acts lesson is a mirror image of the Genesis lesson.
With the old story from the Hebrew Dreaming about the Tower of Babel, we hear that human hubris leads to God confusing the speech of the people, so that people who once could understand each other no longer could.
In the Pentecost account in Acts, the descent of the Holy Spirit led to communication among people who once could not understand each other. This, then, led to sarcastic remarks from bystanders about the disciples being drunk at an inappropriate hour of the morning.
Babel teaches us that an obsession with the divisions between races, nations, tribes, and factions are a result of people being too full of themselves. Pentecost teaches us that being extravagantly God-intoxicated leads us to the awareness that all humanity is (to use Martin Luther King’s phrase) one “Beloved Community”.
Bob Faser
Retired Minister