By Tommy Airey

And at this sound the crowd gathered and was confused… – Acts 2:6a

Last weekend, I preached a Pentecost sermon at a church down in Kentucky. The text brought me back to my roots. When I was ten, I transferred to the Christian school where my mom got hired to teach 5^th grade. Every single morning, we pledged allegiance to the American flag, to the Christian flag and to the bible. We would pray together. We would read something from the scriptures – and then my teacher, Mr. Cavallaro, who I absolutely loved, would proclaim, “God said it. I believe it. And that settles it.” His triumphalism is all it took to hook me.

I was ten – and I was being scripted into Christian Supremacy. My pastors and teachers propagated a world that was black and white, saved and damned. They taught me that we get to heaven by believing what God said, but also that some people are just better than others. Some people earned their wealth, their power, their sun-splashed perch overlooking the Pacific. Other people made bad decisions. They live in ghettos, reservations, barrios, slums, cells and socialist countries because they swerved from God’s Holy Word. Game Over.  

Twenty years ago, I followed Jesus into the wilderness. I started to second-guess Christian Supremacy and the human hierarchies of value that it sanctified. The more I met people outside the fold, the more I became unsettled by certain expectations – destructive expectations rarely second-guessed by oppressors – curated by country, class, gender, race and religion. When I started to question the validity of these supremacy stories, friends and family members quoted the bible to block further conversation. Many consistently queried, “Why would God make it so confusing?”

In the midst of similar “unsettling” conundrums, many of my friends and family members deconstructed the bible and then bailed. But I just couldn’t. Deep down, I sensed that these ancient words contained the power to ward off the strong post-evangelical temptation to distance from Christian Supremacy – but still settle for other supremacy stories like capitalism, nationalism, whiteness and hetero-patriarchy. Despite all the drama and the trauma, I doubled down on the scriptures. My daily bible study eventually unearthed Something Else – which consistently liberates by making life confusing for people of faith and conscience.

In the Pentecost story, the text says that God’s spirit comes in surround sound like a violent wind and the low-income leaders from Galilee start to speak languages they never learned. Everyone else becomes bewildered, confused, amazed, astonished, perplexed. Pentecost is an obvious echo of the Babel story in Genesis, where the people come together to build a tower to the top of the heavens to make a name for themselves. Before they get too far in their legacy project, Something Else confuses their languages and scatters them all over the face of the earth.

The Babel and Pentecost stories use the same Greek word: sugcheó. It literally means “pouring out together.” There is supremacy. There is Something Else. Whenever these two powerful forces are poured out in the same place, it gets rather confusing. If you strive for what is certain and settled, then supremacy is a great story. But Babel and Pentecost (and many episodes in between) aim for Something Else that expands the trajectory of love. These stories suggest that there is a divine Power who delights in diversity, pursuing collective liberation by confusing hierarchies built on homogeneity.

The Pentecost God who confuses the people in Acts 2 is consistent with what the same author does throughout the Gospel of Luke. When Mary the pregnant teen virgin is visited by the angel Gabriel, the text says that she was totally perplexed by his words. When John the Baptist sits in a jail cell, he is uncertain whether Jesus is actually the one they’ve been waiting for. He is. Because he rocks with the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the dead and the poor. Jesus confused his audiences by making a Samaritan the hero of one story. In another, he scripts a compassionate father who runs and hugs and kisses his dipshit prodigal son! This is not how any dignified man would act in the ancient world. After he’s crucified, the risen Jesus shows up incognito on the road to Emmaus with two disciples who tell him that the women astounded them with a story about a vision of angels saying that Jesus was alive. And the women – whose testimony in court, in that context, was not considered “legal” – were telling the truth! What a confusing tale.

Over the past two decades, many of the bogus supremacy stories I was scripted into at an early age have been called into question by this same biblical God who has confused my conventional wisdom. At a slum in Kenya on a short-term mission trip with a Southern Baptist organization. In my classroom where I documented stories of undocumented students like Aida, Dennis, Ana Karen, Carlos, Jorge and so many others. At seminary, when I learned the interpretive complexity of Hebrew and Greek words. With gay and lesbian and trans friends, on the job, at happy hours and in bible studies. On Indian reservations, far from my suburban roots. All around Detroit, where the perspective of Black people constantly turns the myth of a post-racial America into mud.

In the bible, and in our culture, there is a god of supremacy that scripts a world where everything is settled and certain. These supremacy stories atrophy the soul. The good news – the gospel truth – is that there is Something Else. It seeks to set us free from Babel’s big phallic tower, built on the foundation of sameness. Something Else often starts the process of recovery by confusing us. It feels like death. Fortunately, this state does not last forever. Like Lazarus, we “come out” of the grave. We unbind ourselves from bullshit pyramids of value based on bank accounts, waist sizes, citizenship, skin color, status updates, job titles and anything “traditional,” including marriages and masculinities. We walk in newness of life.

On my adventure of repentance, I have not abandoned the ancient text. Because the scriptures are not the problem. The bible has been blasphemed, hijacked, ventriloquized, cherrypicked and counterfeited – generation after generation – by people who use it to sanctify American supremacy stories signed off by conservatives and liberals. Dig below the surface of the “culture war” and we discover a secret sameness, a predominantly white coalition more devoted to order than justice, a manufactured American innocence built on bloated police, prison and military budgets, on the primacy of corporate profit, on a sugar-coated history of the country and on a personal responsibility narrative that negates the humanity of our poor and needy neighbors. The value, worth and identity of this significant portion of the population are bound to the belief that they must, somehow someway, be better than others. Their religion is supremacy – and they bend the bible conform to it. It’s an easy game.

The harder healing path seeks to recover the bible from the supremacists and redeem it by reading it through the lens of Something Else. Not supremacy, but mutuality, humility and open-heartedness. This biblical spiritual journey unsettles what God supposedly said. And what we are supposed to believe. I worship Something Else that says that everyone is a beloved child of the divine, nothing more, nothing less, no matter what. We are not better than. We belong.

This higher Power is a convictional God on the move, determined to make life messy for folks addicted to certainty – and others who seek safety and security in neutrality. This is the kind of God I find in the bible. It is also the kind of God I’ve encountered for the past four decades. When God confuses, it often feels like failure, like the world is falling apart. This is a great place to be. Because it probably means that we are in a process of being composted into Something Else.

Tommy Airey is a post-Evangelical pastor and the author of Descending Like a Dove: Adventures in Decolonizing Evangelical Christianity (2018).