Every Language Understood at Last

(Acts 2:5-21)

Do you know what it feels like to be far from home?

To stand in a crowd where everyone is talking, and laughing, and calling to each other in words you cannot understand? Where your own words sound small and strange, and nobody turns to listen?

That morning in Jerusalem, the city was full of people from everywhere. From places near and places far. They had crossed deserts and seas to be there. And though they stood shoulder to shoulder, each one carried his own language inside him, all alone. The man from Egypt could not understand the man from Rome. The woman from Crete could not understand the woman from Persia. So many people, and so many words, and underneath them all the same old ache of loneliness.

Long, long ago, at the tower called Babel, the people had tried to climb up to the sky and make a great name for themselves, without God. And God, who knew that road would only hurt them, gave them many languages and spread them out across the whole wide earth. They could no longer understand each other. They drifted apart, off to the far corners of the world.

But God never, ever forgot a single one of them.

And on this morning, something happened that the world had been aching for since the day that tower stopped rising.

A sound came, like a great rushing wind, filling the whole house where Jesus's friends were waiting. And the Holy Spirit came down and rested on each of them, like little flames of fire. And they began to speak.

The man from Egypt heard them, and he gasped, because they were speaking his language. The woman from Crete heard, and her eyes filled with tears, because the words were her words, the very ones her mother had sung to her. Every person in that great crowd heard the good news of Jesus in the language of home.

After all that scattering, after all those lonely years, to be understood at last.

The people were amazed. "How can this be?" they asked. Some laughed and did not understand. But Peter stood up and told them the truth. God had promised long ago to pour out his Spirit on everyone, on young and old, on every kind of person. And now the promise had come. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

At Babel, the languages were scattered, and the people drifted apart. But Jesus had come, and died, and risen. And now he was pouring out his Spirit to gather his children back. At that tower, people had reached up toward heaven and found only confusion. Here, heaven came down to them, and the good news was spoken in every tongue, so that no one would be left outside, unheard.

This was the scattering coming undone, and the gathering beginning, and it had truly begun that very day, in that loud, glad, weeping crowd. Jesus had started to bring his whole family home, from every corner of the earth. And he will not stop, and he will not rest, until every last language has heard, and every last child is safely gathered in.