How do we hear when there are so many voices?

May 24, 2026, Windsor UCC

Genesis 11:1-9 (from The Message); Acts 2:1-12 (from the NRSV-UE)

Those folks in Babel thought pretty highly of themselves. They wanted to make themselves famous by building a high tower. So God messed with their plans and garbled their speech so they could no longer understand each other.

Those followers of Jesus locked away for their own safety had no pretensions of fame. But then God’s Spirit blew through the room, they went outside, and everyone from many nations speaking many different languages could all understand what Peter was saying.

 

I’d ask you to keep both of those stories in mind as you listen to an experience I had this week.

 

It began last October, when there was a letter to the editor in the Wisconsin State Journal on a Sunday morning. The headline read: “We need conversation and less confrontation.” That caught my attention. The writer was a conservative who lived in my hometown of Fitchburg. He wrote: “Sharing a cup of coffee or raising a pint is preferable to shouting at or ignoring each other.”

I wondered if I could listen to a voice and maybe understand what someone who views the world differently than I was saying. He would identify as a conservative. I tend liberal.  So we met for coffee in February and then again this past Thursday. It went pretty well. Perhaps the Holy Spirit was helping us understand each other even though at times it seemed like we were speaking different languages. 

 

So much of our era – maybe of many eras – is marked by those gaps in understanding. Sometimes we are like the people of Babel, only listening to those who speak just like us, assuming that makes us so good that we can lord it over all as if we were like God. Sometimes we are like those followers of Jesus, afraid of what might happen if we open the doors and face those we don’t think will understand us.

 

And then the Spirit blows in.

 

It’s not that the tensions go away. It’s not that we all see things the same way. It’s that we take the time and the effort to listen to one another. 

 

Think, for a moment, about the tension between the two songs we sang at the beginning of worship today.

 

We started the service today with “God Bless America,” written in its original form by Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, in 1918 while he was in the U.S. Army during World War I. Then he updated it in 1938 in response to Hitler’s rise in Europe – the storm clouds gathering far across the sea – and Kate Smith sang it on radio and it achieved immense popularity.

In some ways, it is a song that has crossed political divisions in our country. Both Republicans and Democrats used it at their 1940 political conventions. It was used early in the Civil Rights movement and in labor rallies. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of members of Congress stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and sang it.

 

Yet some interpreted it as over-the-top. Folksinger Woodie Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” as a counter to it. Antisemitic groups protested it because it was written by a Jewish immigrant. 

 

During the 1960s, more conservative groups adopted it as anthem in response to what they saw as the growth of secular liberalism and in defense of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and liberal groups said that God should bless all nations, not just America. 

 

A pastor at Trinity UCC in Chicago in 2003 famously said that God should not bless America but condemn it for its treatment of Indigenous and Black people. 

 

These things are never simple, are they? Different voices hearing things in different ways.

 

For folks who wanted an alternative, “America the Beautiful” - the other song you heard today - grew in popularity. The words were written in the late 1800s by Katharine Lee Bates while she was in a hotel looking at Pikes Peak in Colorado. It was first published in the Fourth of July 1895 edition of the church periodical, The Congregationalist – a publication put out by our ancestors in faith. There have been efforts starting in the 1930s to have it replace the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem, both because it is more singable and because it is less warlike and does not have verses supporting slavery. 

 

Noel Paul Stookey – the Paul in the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary and the husband of UCC minister Betty Stookey – wrote a couple of new verses to “America the Beautiful” to bring it closer to our time. As he said, the idea that “pilgrims were trodding and alabaster cities were gleaming ….is a little out of our vocabulary in terms of sharing with the people.”  

So he added these words for the second verse:

Oh, nation of the immigrant
The slave and native son
Whose loyal families labor still
That we may live as one
America, America
Renew thy founder's call
Let liberty and justice be
The right of one and all

 

Different voices hearing things in different ways. Some people want us all speaking the same language like those folks in Babel. Others are amazed that we can hear each other across our differences like that crowd at Pentecost and value that diversity of culture.

 

I think that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. Puerto Rican theologian Zaida Maldonado Pérez calls the Holy Spirit “the wild child of the Trinity…full of possibilities and creative potential.” She calls the Spirit “the salsa beat in our daily foxtrot.”

 

It certainly must have felt that way to the followers of Jesus gathered in that room when all heaven broke loose.

 

All of a sudden, they found the courage to open the doors. The found the grace to speak of what they knew about Jesus.

But to get to Pentecost, let’s go back to a moment to that story of the people of Babel that comes from early in the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. It says the people went to the land of Shinar – that’s the river valley that is part of Babylon, a land where ultimately the Jewish people were taken in exile. 

 

This story was probably told in that time of exile when the Babylonian rulers, as oppressors do, demanded conformity in language, perhaps demanding work on this tall tower from their captive people with the hope that they could reach the heavens. They – the rulers – would be like gods.

So when God garbled the workers’ speech and scattered the people, one way of reading that is God setting the people free, respecting their differences from the rulers rather than allowing their exploitation and the demand for conformity to continue. 

 

Now we are in that room on Pentecost. There is a crowd outside from many nations, speaking many languages. There is no uniformity here. 

As the Spirit energized the followers of Jesus, they went through the doors and began to speak. As crowds will do, some were amazed and some were snarky. Just after the line Carol concluded with today - “What does this mean?” - some in the crowd say, “They are filled with new wine.” And Peter replies that they are not drunk – it is only 9 in the morning and after all, they are not from Wisconsin. Well, maybe he did not say the part about Wisconsin.

 

But Peter goes on to talk about Jesus, about the difference he made in those who encountered him, about how Jesus is, in Peter’s words, “both Lord and Messiah.” And 3,000 of the people in the crowd were baptized into the way of Jesus.

 

In the public squares of today, in the social media channels, in encounters with friends and family, maybe even in congregations, it often seems hard to understand what people with viewpoints different from ours are saying. 

Yet I think there is a desire for this to get better, for us to be able to live in a world more like that first Pentecost where people could understand each other across the barriers of country and language.

 

A group called the Dignity Index released the results of a survey earlier this year. They found that while only 31 percent of Americans treat each other with dignity, 94 percent said all people deserve to be treated that way. That’s quite a gap between reality and goal. As Paul wrote to the Romans back in the earliest days of Christianity, “For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do.”

 

 But we are not powerless. We can find ways to listen and learn from people we might disagree with. We can treat them with dignity.

 

Jesus said something about that. In that Sermon on the Mount, he tells how to transform the world.  Jesus talked 
about forgiveness, 
about not judging others, 
about not deceiving ourselves, 
about treating others as we would like to be treated, 
even about loving our enemies. 

Those are the values we need to take into the public square and into our relationships with each other. 

 

That does not mean we have nothing to say about the controversial issues of the day. It simply means that even as we carry on the prophetic work of Jesus, we must do that in a way that is true to the spirit of the gospel, that respects the message of the Gospel, that embodies the principle of love.

 

A current writer, Mark Deymaz, offers a few suggestions in his new book, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace, that might be helpful. 
Assume the best of others. 
Pause before you speak. 
Ask good questions. 
Avoid dogmatic statements. 
Acknowledge complexities. 

 

Let me take you back to my cup of coffee last Thursday with my new conservative friend. The topic moved toward crime and punishment. Personal safety is a very high value for him. I think that is a good idea as well. Why, he wondered, do liberals always want to look out for the rights of criminals instead of the rights of victims of crime?

 

We talked a bit about people in prison. I mentioned that most of them eventually will get out and need to move back into society and it is good for all of our safety if the correctional system can make that transition a better one. 

 

He remarked on a story he had just seen on television about a college graduation ceremony last Monday at Oak Hill Correctional Institution in my hometown of Fitchburg. Through a program coordinated by UW-Madison's Prison Education Initiative, 15 men earned bachelor's degrees and 8 earned associates degrees. There are similar programs now at several other prisons. 

 

My friend thought this was a wonderful idea, as did I. We found a piece of common ground.

 

So as we go on with our lives this day, this week, I invite you to think about how we as followers of Jesus can enter today’s debates in a way that the fire of the Spirit, the wind of new ideas can transform a polarized society into one where the search for truth is a shared enterprise, not a game of conquest. 

 

If we can do that, we will be acting as boldly as those apostles did when they were filled by God’s spirit in a small, locked room many years ago. 

 

If we can do that, we will be letting God work through us in our world today.

 

As the Latin words in our next hymn say, Veni Sancte Spiritus – Come, Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit. Amen.