One in the Spirit
Pentecost
June 8, 2025
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
This past week we had a wonderful Vacation Bible School, created and led by Christopher and Tiana Maslanka. The kids followed an undersea exploration that also probed the depths of The Lord’s Prayer, verse by verse. I loved it. Our oceans are so important and they are under a lot of stress. It was great to see the kids learn about that, and the Lord’s Prayer is central to our faith so it was great to see them learn more about that.
It reminded me of another undersea voyager.
A little over 8 years ago, the British National Oceanography Centre launched a new, state of the art, unmanned submarine designed to gather vital data from the deepest polar waters. It was and is very high tech and cost about $270 million, which was a lot of money 8 years ago.
Its first mission in April 2017 took it more than 13,000 feet deep in the Orkney passage between Chile and Antarctica to study the water flowing between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, in a joint project with Princeton University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Later that year it was used to measure gasses along the seabed of the upper reaches of the North Sea, thus exploring oceans around the South and North Poles in its first year. It remains preciously effective.
But that’s not why it’s famous. The National Oceanography Centre wanted to attract public awareness to its important work, so they had a naming contest that invited the collective vision, wisdom and hope of the world to name this amazing submarine.
By now, you may recall the name that won. It was thrown in as a joke by a BBC Radio presenter on the little island of Jersey in the English Channel. Boaty McBoatface.
That was all in good fun, but it was so much fun that while everyone remembers the name, I bet almost no one remembers the important work it is doing, never mind the British National Oceanography Centre. (But now you do!) And now it’s time for me to pull this unmanned submarine to shore.
Remember that when we look at these pre-Abraham stories from Genesis, we have no idea how old they are except that they are very, very old. They are far older than Israel itself, older than the pyramids in Egypt, perhaps older than the oldest known civilization, the Sumerians and their city Ur, which was in modern day Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, near the City of Babel which would later become Babylon.
It’s helpful to regard them as memories too valuable to forget. There are just a few of them, The Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Tower of Babel with some genealogies as well. They are foundationally important because they speak to the fundamental nature of the creation, humanity and the intrinsic struggles of human existence, memories that persist to this day when all others faded.
Two phrases draw our attention this morning. The first is from the people. They are doing what people do. One of the most glorious ways in which we are made in the image of God is our capacity to create, to envision something that has never existed and conjure it into being.
Here, it is the advent of bricks. Bricks are much easier to stack than rocks to make a wall. And they have bitumen, an asphalt-like mortar which binds the bricks and increases their stability and strength. With their new technology, they decide to build a city and a tower, “to make a name for ourselves.” What is wrong with that?
They have forgotten the One who gave them the capacity to create, to imagine, to invent, to design and to build. They didn’t build the tower for a useful purpose, like to see far. They didn’t build it to the glory of God. They didn’t even ask God what they should do with their newly formed bricks.
The second phrase to consider is, “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Isn’t that true? The more we propose, the more we do. The more we do, the greater our need for guidance from God. What shall we do with the printing press, the airplane, the rocket, the Internet, the atom. Bricks can be used to build things. Bricks can be used to break things.
In his wisdom, the Lord scattered them and confused their language. Today, all these years later, we’ve greatly solved that problem. There are numerous devices and apps for our phones that will instantly translate our speech. Apparently understanding each other’s words is only a small step toward understanding each other, never mind persuading each other. And even when we are able to link brilliant minds like the British Oceanographic Centre, Princeton University and Woods Hole (which a world leader in oceanography and is affiliated with MIT), the thing we remember is Boaty McBoatface. It is funny, I like funny, but it also trivializes some amazingly good work.
The internet, translation programs, Artificial Intelligence, space flight, clean energy; none of these can help us progress without the guidance we need every day from God.
On this Day of Pentecost, God fulfilled Jesus’s promise and sent his Holy Spirit to alight on each of his disciples as tongues of flame. Suddenly they could understand each other as they witnessed to God’s deeds of power in Jesus. It didn’t matter where they were from; different countries, different languages, different cultures, different income levels, young, old, male, female, slave or free. No difference mattered.
The scattered are bound together by the Holy Spirit. If we want to transcend human struggles, to move past the trappings of self-interest and ideologies, we must turn again and again to the Holy Spirit to bless and guide us into all truth. It’s not so much a reversal of the Tower of Babel, but its solution.
One of the oldest memories we’ve kept all these millennia, having forgotten so many, is that we must not confide in our own strength, abilities and creativity. Rather, we are to be blessed and led by the Holy Spirit.
AMEN