Sharing in God's Glory

Birthday or power

We pentecostal churches don't celebrate Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. Perhaps, like a middle age woman, we don't want to acknowledge another year has passed. We are acutely aware that every year older we are removed from our roots, the more institutional we become. At the same time another year passes with out Jesus coming back. We thought that a fresh outpouring of the Spirit meant the return of Christ was very close. Every year we have to reexamine the meaning of our Spirit Baptism.

Or perhaps the biggest reason we don't bother with birthday celebrations is that the empowerment of the Spirit filled life trumps cake and candles. O God help me to inspire people to seek fullness in the Spirit this week!

Genesis 11: 1-9; Scattered!

Genesis 11: 1-9; Scattered!: "Finally, in Gen. 11, God also decides to punish humans, though it isn't as clear what the offense of Gen. 11 is (the building itself? the arrogance of humans? the unwillingness to 'fill the earth' according to the command in Gen. 1? the use of poor materials to build a monumental structure?)."

In any one of these, are we less guilty today? Why hasn't God come down and intervened? If a clay tower could upset him, how about an atomic bomb?

The Very Tall Tale of Babel | The Shalom Center

The Very Tall Tale of Babel | The Shalom Center: "The tale is an ironic parody, a joke at Babylon's expense. 'Bav-El' meant the 'gate of God' in the Babylonians' own language, but the Israelite legend parodied it as 'Baffle/Babble Town.' As the Israelites told the story, the arrogant Sumerians built an imperious tower for an empire whose power they intended to rule the earth so that everyone would have to speak the same language.

Their rigid tower challenged 'YHWH,' the breezy, whirly, swirly Breath of Life.

But the Breathing-spirit of the Universe, the Wind of the World, (Ruach ha'Olam) baffled them by turning their world-language into babbling. They became Babylonians, 'Babble-onians.'

This diversity was not so much a punishment as a consequence of and a cure for their disease: Try to unify all humankind into a single empire, talking the same language so as to storm Heaven -- and the almost inevitable consequence, as well as the cure for this disease of arrogance, is that the top-heavy empire will dissolve into many many peoples, grass-roots communities of many tongues and cultures."