When I was seven years old we moved into a house my grandfather had built at No. 6 Dale Road in our little village of Elloughton. As the name suggests Dale Road was a bit of a backwater, leading away from the village up into the Yorkshire Wolds behind. After we had been there for a few years the authorities decided to build a bypass. It was much needed. The main road into Hull and the docks ran right through the middle of the village. My other grandfather, the Congregational Minister, had almost been killed outside his own church by a lorry going too fast round a curve and shedding a load of tyres. So the bypass was very welcome. But it would go right past our house, within yards, even taking some of the land that was part of our property. The bypass cut through the middle of Dale Road, cutting off our bit of the road and making it into a cul-de-sac that went nowhere. As a result the local authority and the Post Office in their wisdom decided to rename our little bit of road. It was now part of Main Street. We now lived at No. 88 Main Street. The road to nowhere became part of Main Street.
Unfortunately we human beings have a propensity to do this all the time – to mistake the road to nowhere for the Main Street. Today is Pentecost, the birthday of the church, associated in the minds of many Christians with wind and fire and speaking in strange tongues. Rightly so, you might think, because that is what the Bible tells us about that first Pentecost. And superficially you would be correct. In Acts 2 that is indeed what Luke tells us. There was the sound of a violent wind from heaven. There were what looked like tongues of flame coming to rest on each of the disciples. Then they began to speak in other tongues. And each person, people from all over the Roman world, Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, heard them speaking in their own language. That is what Luke tells us. And the people ask “What does this mean?” Indeed. Good question. What does it mean?
Does it mean that to be a “proper Christian”, to be fully initiated into this sect, you have to have the ability to speak in strange languages? Does it mean that to truly belong to the church you must not only have been “born again” but also experienced a “second blessing” that will or should involve “speaking in tongues”? Some Christians would have us believe so. When did this road to nowhere become part of Main Street? Well quite recently actually. Only in the 19th century did this become part of Christian teaching in some denominations. To my mind you might as well demand that people exhibit loud wind from heaven, or have tongues of flame resting on their heads before they are truly accepted. This just becomes another way of excluding people. And it misses the point.
“What does this mean?” people asked. What it means is that they heard the message, the good news of Jesus, each in their own language. It means that the disciples communicated across the barriers of race and language. It meant, as Peter was to discover later in his vision of eating “unclean” food, that the message of Jesus overcame barriers of religion as well – it was for gentiles as well as Jews. It means that the salvation Jesus brings is for everyone, and that it makes us one – it overcomes all those barriers.
As Luke would have been well aware when he was writing, and as the Jewish hearers of the disciples would have been aware on that first Pentecost, a Babel of languages is a sign of humanity’s fall from grace. In Chapter 11 of Genesis, the first book of Jewish scriptures, the whole world has one language and common speech. And humans decide to build a city, Babel, with a tower that reaches to the heavens. They decide to become like gods. God comes down from heaven, sees what they are doing, and decides to scatter them to the corners of the earth and confuse their language so they all speak different tongues, “a Babel of languages.”
When Jesus comes he restores broken, scattered, divided humanity to its rightful place, able to communicate with one another across divides of language and culture and religion. The disciples speak and everyone hears, each in their own language. Jesus brings us back together and reunites us. That’s Main Street. He doesn’t create more dividing lines so we can decide who’s in and who is out. That’s a cul-de-sac.