Of course, not everything about culture is worthwhile. A few years ago, we were returning from holiday in France on a cross channel ferry at the same time as hundreds of England football supporters were returning from a big match. A minority of the supporters drunk colossal quantities of beer on board the ferry, became very aggressive and generally made life unpleasant for the rest of the passengers. Football and large quantities of alcohol are a genuine part of English culture – but not a particularly attractive one.

The bottom line is that culture reflects the human beings who create it. We are created in the image of God and capable of amazing beauty and creativity, but we are fallen and capable of amazing depravity – our culture is just the same.

Just as each culture brings something new to humanity, so does every language. Each language is capable of expressing some things better than all other languages. Why else to coffee shops sell cafe latte rather than milky coffee? On a deeper note, each language has the ability to express itself in ways that other languages can’t quite manage. There are subtleties of meaning and inference that just can’t quite be transferred from one language to another without losing something. And this is really important, because that means that each language can say things about God and is capable of praising God in ways that other languages can’t quite reach. When God multiplied the languages at Babel, He also gave us the possibility of understanding Him and praising Him in new ways. Babel was a judgement, but at the same time God blessed humanity immeasurably and revealed even more of us to himself.

Which brings us to Pentecost. Sometimes people say that at Pentecost, God reversed the Tower of Babel, but that is exactly what He didn’t do. At Pentecost, God underlined the linguistic diversity that He introduced at Babel. Everyone in the crowd was able to understand the disciples speaking in his or her own language. The first miracle that the Holy Spirit did was to make it possible for the story of Jesus to be understood in many languages all at once. The Triune relational God did nor force conformity on his followers by making them all hear his message in one language, He encouraged diversity by allowing them to hear in their own language. From even before the Christian church was called Christian, it was multi-cultural and multi-lingual.

This theme of using different languages was later taken up by the Gospel writers, who wrote the stories of Jesus down in Greek. Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic when he taught, but the Gospel writers chose to record his words in Greek so that more people could understand them. Christianity does not have a sacred language, we don’t even have a record of Jesus words in the form in which they were spoken. The implications for this are enormous and reverberate down though history. Just compare Christianity to Islam for a brief moment. Islam has a sacred language, if you want to read the Koran or pray, you have to do so in Arabic. Effectively, all Muslims have to adopt a large slice of Arabic culture from the time of Mohammed. Christianity is simply not like that. You can pray in any language and  the Bible is the most translated book in the world. There is no Christian equivalent of the pilgrimage to Mecca, where thousands upon thousands of devout Muslims all dress the same and go through the same rituals at the same time. The God of Christianity is a God of variety and the Gospel can be lived and experienced in every culture on the earth. If it couldn’t, then I’d be writing in Aramaic, which would be tough as I don’t speak it and most of you won’t read it.

There is one further important aspect to draw from this diversion into languages and cultures. If Christianity can be expressed in all languages and cultures, then it is also true that it doesn’t belong to any particular language or culture. No one can say that they own the Christian faith.