Tim Kumfer
Watch Zoom Video: 

Tests: Genesis 11.1-9;
Acts 2.1-21

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today, and to offer the teaching on Pentecost Sunday.  To witness this time of re-commitment and communal dedication is a real gift, one that calls each of us to bring our fullest selves forward, leaning in to listen for our how own desires might align, or perhaps be re-aligned, with the Spirit’s work in the world.  While The Potter’s House has commanded my fullest attention over this past year, Eighth Day remains a home community and space of belonging for me.  Words cannot express my gratitude for your ongoing accompaniment and encouragement of us at The Potter’s House, and all the ways that you share in our mission and make it possible.

*****

I was a tough kid to have in Sunday school.  I would talk back to my teachers, question their felt-board characters, and offer rival exegesis based on my seven-year-old interpretations of the Scriptures.  One story I really didn’t ‘get’ was the Tower of Babel.  Like many kids I loved building things, and could often be seen carting around a big bucket of Legos.  Why would God punish people for building something really cool?  And did the people really think their tower would actually reach heaven?  Come on, I thought, there has to be something else going on.

That something else, I would learn many years later, was the ever-present lure of empire.  It is the desire for cultural consolidation through enforced conformity and economic centralization, the monumentalization of our self-serving stories through state power and the cementing of oppression.  And to be scattered from this imperial reality, sent off by God into unknown earth speaking unknown tongues, was not punishment but provision.

As Ched Myers describes in his book Our God is Undocumented, the Tower of Babel was a thinly-veiled reference to the grand ziggurats of Babylon.  These pyramids were man-made mountains, replacing “the peak that traditional peoples looked up at reverently as the source of life and power” with “a dominating tower from which the ruler and his gods looked down on their subjects in surveillance and control.” These towers served as the focal point for great storehouse cities, which were both military installations and collection points for agricultural tribute.  The emergence of these city-states in the Fertile Crescent around 6-8,000 BCE led to the vanquishing of hunter-gatherer lifeways, the increasing domestication of nature, and practices of colonization and domination that last to this day.  This tower and all that it represents is really the culmination of the Fall narrative begun in Genesis’ earlier chapters - it is what a broken world looks like.

And YHWH enters this tower-building scene intent on an act of deconstruction.  As Myers writes, “The divine antidote to the centripetal, homogenizing project of empire is a redispersion of peoples, symbolized here by both linguistic/ cultural variety and geographic diffusion.  This ‘scattering’ is portrayed in Genesis not as the tragic result of God’s judgment, as is usually preached in our churches, but rather as an act of centrifugal liberation from urban monoculture and concentration.  The people are sent out into the wilderness, forming new tribes and new tongues, and thereby sharing in and helping to shape the divine vision of cultural and ecological diversity.  Communal and close to the earth, God predisposes these peoples to be resistant to empire and open towards what Wes Howard-Brook calls ‘the religion of creation.’

These new tongues would appear again at the Day of Pentecost, as the disciples are empowered by the Spirit to speak in languages not their own.  Leaving the house where they were gathered--presumably in fear and flight from the authorities--they become bold public witnesses to Jesus and the Way he proclaims.  And those in the square are astonished to hear rural and uneducated Galileans speaking this message of the crucified and risen Lord in their languages.  And what’s particularly astonishing is that they didn’t need to--the disciples could have simply spoken Greek, the common trading language.  Yet their words meet the people just as they are, affirming their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness.  What we see at work here on Pentecost is not ‘the reversal of Babel’s curse,’ but the Spirit’s renewal and reaffirmation of God’s diasporic vision of humanity.  As Myers writes - and it’s so good it’s worth quoting in length:

The gift of tongues communicates across differences without suppressing or eradicating those differences.  That is what distinguishes true gospel mission from cross-and-sword conquest in the service of empire...Unity through the Spirit does not mean monoculture, but the celebration of human variety…

The Acts narrative of Pentecost is a challenge to the entire order of things, personal and political.  The Holy Spirit transforms human life inwardly and outwardly.  She empowers the gathered church to dance across entrenched (and legally enforced) boundaries of gender, race, and class in order to animate a movement that embraces ‘every tribe and language and people and nation.’ Whenever this Spirit is poured out, our traditions and institutions will be disrupted and disturbed, not to mention our proprietary definitions of who belongs and who doesn’t.o say it plain in my own tongue: whenever people who are different from one another are truly and equitably together - not in spite of but in celebration of their differences - the Spirit is in it.  And it is good.

<Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell, Our God is Undocumented. Orbis: 2012, pgs 34-35.>

*****

Forty years ago, the same Spirit present at Pentecost led members of The Church of the Saviour to form the Eighth Day Faith Community.  As Elizabeth O’Connor described the church at its founding, it

will focus its talents and energy on being truly polycultural.  The group believes that the capturing of the Christian church in the United States by American culture should be one of the most serious concerns of Christendom, and that a new faith community truly open to the insight and inherited wisdom of all the world’s cultures constitutes an authentic new vision.

Elizabeth O'Connor, The New Community. The Potter's House: 2015, pg. 98.

The original call put out by the church, the whole of which you can read on our story wall at The Potter’s House, lays out its desire “to eliminate the divisions among socio-economic classes, age groups, and races, and to create solidarity between people of different national, ethnic, religious, and cultural traditions.”

I think it safe to say that the fourteen members who shared this call to commitment in 1976 did not know the trouble they were getting themselves and subsequent members into.  Nor did they know the bold actions the Spirit would soon lead them to embody.  I assume that’s right and David?

Inviting refugees to share their homes, adopting children, founding communities for people with intellectual disabilities, establishing schools for adult learners, housing homeless families, nurturing immigrant children and their mothers, helping children struck by landmines regain their mobility, accompanying those dying of AIDS, being repeatedly arrested for peace, supporting the peace process in El Salvador ...  in these and so many other ways Eighth Day has practiced a truly Pentecostal vision of the faith.  And as you ask how to go deeper in this commitment, whether through building relationships with Muslim communities, sharing more personally across economic divides, or reckoning faithfully with the realities of anti-black racism, the Spirit will embolden and empower you just as She did the first disciples.

It is within these ‘polycultural’ resonances of the Spirit, expressed so beautifully by the shared life and story of Eighth Day, that we seek to ‘live and move and have our being’ up the street at The Potter’s House.  Central to our vision of renewal has been a commitment to what Catherine Keller calls “the practice of nonseparable difference.” Perhaps another way to put it would be we want to be ‘postmodernly pentecostal.’

A week earlier this spring at The Potter’s House serves as an example here.  On a Wednesday, people across the intellectual ability and mental health spectrums came together for intimate and evangelical community as Jubilee Church.  On Friday, we welcomed Art Between Us, an intentionally interfaith open mic for women.  On Saturday, two transgender South Asian poets delivered an avant-garde performance deconstructing gender as a western colonial imposition.  On Sunday, we welcomed the Muslim Writer’s Collective, where young and progressive Muslims spoke back to media characterizations and shared their stories of hope.  For some, bringing all these different perspectives together would be crazy making; for us celebrating this kind of radical diversity is at the core of Christian faith.

We want, too, to be a space that encourages and empowers people towards bold public witness.  Over the past year The Potter’s House has really grown again as a grassroots gathering place to raise consciousness and share visions of a radically transformed world.  We have re-centered racial justice work, becoming a hub for the Black-Lives-Matter movement locally and hosting nearly a dozen authors of color exploring issues of structural racism and how it might be dismantled.  We have lifted up local earthkeepers working to end extreme energy extraction and explored the radical societal changes needed to become more ecologically sustainable.  The housing crisis in DC, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods like the one we are in now, has been a central topic of education and organizing. 

It has been exciting, and a bit unexpected, to find so much openness to our spiritual roots and faith convictions amongst the progressive and seemingly skeptical crowd that often occupies the coffeehouse these days.  Something new is emerging, and some of the old divides we have inherited are breaking down.  People are hungry for something to give their whole lives to, for a durability of purpose that extends beyond the protest action.  Together with many of you, we’ve experimented with new tongues for reaching the ‘nones,’ those who identify with no particular religious tradition but are still seeking spiritual meaning.  The Wisdom Circle, Sacred Space, and On Being discussion are all efforts to meet people right where they are--sharing their languages so that we might together find meaning and create new community.

We don’t yet know where all this will go, and I know we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way.  In the months and years ahead I want to find more ways for us to resist the tide of gentrification, digital isolation, and generational segregation within The Potter’s House doors.  In the bigger picture, I can’t help but think that we together, Eighth Day and Potter’s House, are being prepared for some greater work and shared struggle in the days ahead.  What this election cycle is helping to unearth is that many in our country, and in particular white Christians, are driven by fear and eager to double down on the pyramid scheme that is white supremacy.  Perhaps the Spirit is yet preparing the ground for another multilingual Pentecostal insurrection against empire.  May we be emboldened to stand up and speak should that day arise.