From Babel to Pentecost

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Feast of Pentecost on May 24, 2026.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Well, Church, happy birthday to you! This is the celebration of the birthday of the church. Traditionally we talk about the church being born at Pentecost, which is a strange thing to say, but it is quite true and pretty profound. The reason is because the church, prior to being formed at Pentecost, had Jesus himself on earth gathering his apostles and disciples, people following him and directly being taught by the Lord.

Then Jesus dies on the cross. He is buried. He is in the grave three days. On the third day he rises again. He spends the next forty days appearing to his disciples in and around Jerusalem and Galilee. Then he ascends into heaven. But before he ascends into heaven, he has a message for them. We will get to that in a moment.

Until the Spirit comes, it is really just the apostles holding on to the hope that God will fulfill his promises in Jesus, that the Spirit will come that has been promised to them. And then He does.

The Spirit and the Holy Trinity

But this is not the birthday of the Spirit. It is important for us to get that right because the Spirit is part of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity, which pre-exists creation itself—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which are eternal and have always been and always will be—has been active throughout history. We find the work of the Spirit all over the Old Testament, all over the Hebrew Bible, from the very moment of creation.

Imagine in Genesis 1: In the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth. The universe is formless and void. Darkness is upon the face of the deep. Then the Spirit of God is hovering over the face of the waters, over the face of chaos, over the undifferentiated chaos before creation. The Spirit is there. God the Father speaks. The Spirit, Father, and then his Word: “Let there be light.” The Word of God, Jesus Christ. The Trinity is present from the very first page of the Bible and acts in the world throughout the Old Testament.

• He equips Israel’s judges and kings to lead, to win victories, and ensure faithfulness.
• It was the Spirit of God who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land, manifesting himself as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
• He is the one who then in the latter days sends the prophets to proclaim both the judgment of God and the salvation of God, or as we Lutherans like to call it: the Law and the Gospel.

The Spirit at Jesus’ Baptism and Promise

When Jesus is baptized, the Spirit is present. The Spirit comes upon him descending like a dove from on high. In fact, a lot of times in Christian imagery nowadays we represent the Holy Spirit as a dove because this is the form the Spirit was seen in as he descended upon Jesus, as that voice spoke from the heavens saying, “This is my Son, my beloved one, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”

At the Last Supper, Jesus himself promises that the Spirit of Truth would come upon them and that that Spirit of Truth would guide them to know the truth, that they would understand the truth and the truth would set them free. Before his ascension into heaven, Jesus tells his disciples that soon they will be baptized in the Holy Spirit, which will then make them witnesses, that this Spirit will give them power to become witnesses to his Word.

The Great Commission

As he begins his Ascension, Jesus makes the final and most important command for us. In Matthew 28:18 he says,

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. Behold, I am with you even unto the ends of the earth.”

Expecting that this baptism of the Spirit would come, trusting the promise of God, knowing the work of God and the work of the Spirit throughout all of the history of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the disciples, listening to Jesus’ promises, gather in Jerusalem to wait and pray.

The Ragtag Group Gathered

Consider who it is who is gathered there expecting this promise to be fulfilled. They were not the most desirable, special, most winsome, amazing looking, amazing speaking people you could possibly imagine. They were ordinary people, people like you and me. They were led by washed-up fishermen and had several other washed-up fishermen among their ranks. They included such undesirables as Matthew, the hated tax collector, who was a traitor to his people by collecting taxes from the Jews on behalf of the hated Romans. In the same cadre of people, not only do you have Matthew the tax collector, but you have Simon the Zealot, from whom we get the word zealot today, who is so zealous for the Jewish people that he hates and wants to kill people like Matthew. You have the sons of Zebedee, or sometimes they are nicknamed the "sons of thunder," James and John, who want to call down fire from heaven to consume all opponents of Jesus and his Word. You have this ragtag group of strange bedfellows.

But then the Holy Spirit comes. The Holy Spirit descends that day in a way that is difficult even for Luke himself to describe in the book of Acts. He says it is like divided tongues, like fire. He is grasping for words, but he is trying to describe it as best he can, that fire comes from heaven and descends upon all the people who are gathered. It is the Festival of Booths, which is another word for Pentecost. On this Festival of Booths you have people who have come to believe in God, faithful Jews from all over the known world gathered together in one place.

The Spirit Reverses Babel

Peter begins to preach. He witnesses to what God has been doing throughout history and then says that all of this is fulfilled and culminated in Jesus Christ himself. Three thousand people heard the message preached by St. Peter that day and were converted and became believers in Jesus Christ by this power of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes people imagine that the Holy Spirit is given to the Church so we can do strange things like speak in unintelligible heavenly languages. But that is not what the Spirit was doing there. That is not what the Spirit did that day. In fact, it was the work of the Spirit that day to make the preaching of St. Peter and the apostles intelligible to everyone who was there.

The reason he has done this is because of something else that God does in the Old Testament. Back in the book of Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel: All the people of earth are united. They have one language and one culture. They decide that they will get together in one city and they will begin building a tower so as to reach the heavens. They imagine that if they build a tower that tall, they will be able to relate to God "man to man," on even footing. They imagine that by their unity of culture, purpose, and language, that they will be able to ascend a literal tower to God and to be able to put themselves on equal footing with God.

What does God do? He intervenes and judges their effort as being blasphemous. He scatters them, not by destroying the beginnings of that tower, but by simply destroying their language, by causing them to become unintelligible to each other. Without the ability to communicate with each other, we lack the ability to coordinate with each other. Communication breakdown leads to coordination breakdown. The people of earth are scattered to all the nations.

But here on the day of Pentecost God is doing the opposite. Whereas once this tower created by man is being thwarted and the people are given different languages in order to be scattered over the earth, now God has gathered together people from all corners of the earth who are faithful followers of God, gathering them together in Jerusalem and then taking their many different languages and cultures and making them mutually intelligible to each other so that they can speak and be understood by everybody who is there. Not just so St. Peter can preach to them, but so that they can be one people in Christ.

The Mission Given by the Spirit

This is the gift of Pentecost: a gift of unity, a gift of coordination! Not to build a physical tower now to reach the heavens, but to ascend the completed work of Jesus Christ who has died for you so that you might have relationship once again with God. Now the Spirit is working to gather the people and not scatter them. Now the Spirit is here to give us faith in Christ, and not just that, but so much more. Because then He gives us a purpose. He gives this church a purpose. He points us outward into the world. He tells us that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey Jesus Christ.

It is easy for us Christians to be consumed by our own personal preferences, by our own needs and even wants. But the Spirit desires that we be transformed so that we think of the world differently. We see the world instead not as enemies or outsiders, but as beloved people for whom Jesus Christ died on the cross. We consider them to be of such value and worth that our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to give his own life upon the cross to save you and them. Therefore we have a mission in the world: to make sure that they get to hear the Good News, that we might all gather, be fed, and then be sent out.

As we celebrate the gift of God’s Holy Spirit on Pentecost, let us listen for the call of God to go beyond ourselves to love and serve our neighbors, our community, yes, even our enemies. Let us hear God’s love for the whole world. Let us carry the message of Christ and salvation to those who most need to hear it. May you do so in the peace and confidence that the Lord is sending you and walks with you.

And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.