I am trying to get better at Spanish these days because I’m hoping to go to South America this summer, to Ecuador and maybe Colombia also. Where I’m going, there is no English spoken, so it’s going to be a total immersion. It would be a lot easier if we all spoke the same tongue.
The story of how we all got to having different languages? Well, people spoke the same language at one time, and then they got afraid of being divided and decided to build a big tower to keep themselves united, and then God saw it and decided that it’s better that they start to speak different languages so that they wouldn’t try to make unity without Him. So, God confused the people when they tried to build unity without Him. That still happens today, doesn’t it? Confusion in the United States, in the European Union, the United Nations … remember the Soviet Union? When we try to do it without God, we end up more scattered than when we started.
But here’s the thing. When God comes to fix things, He doesn’t do it the way we would expect. You might think He would come and lay out a single tongue for everyone and get rid of the old ones. Then we could start talking about peace and forgiveness. But He doesn’t do any of that. He doesn’t come to wipe out the effects of our mistakes and failures and sins. He does something even better.
He makes them His.
That’s His Tongue.
On Pentecost, a bunch of ragtag different personalities from Galilee are speaking with power and conviction about what they’ve experienced with God – in every different tongue. It’s going to unify people of all different tongues. What’s God doing? He’s making them His.
That’s His Tongue.
We all make mistakes, we all sin and fail in different ways. There’s no way to get rid of the consequences, we are stuck with them. God comes to our rescue, He comes to redeem us and our situation, but He does not eliminate the consequences of these things. He does even better.
He makes them His.
That’s His Tongue.
Happy Birthday to each of you, and to the Church!
ALM 