Babbling At Babel

"Babbling At Babel"

Genesis 11:1-9
May 23, 2010

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated
from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they
said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they
had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build
ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for
ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the
LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is
only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be
impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that
they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad
from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it
was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and
from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

On Thursday, I made a visit to Ellen Braddon—someone many of you know here, and
who was connected to one of our women’s groups many years ago—in Lawton in a
nursing home where she has resided for many years now. When I make my way up to
Kalamazoo or places near Kalamazoo, like Lawton, I often decide to go an extra twelve
miles or so to eat at one of my favorite restaurants, a hole in the wall on W. Main Street
called Rasa Ria. Believe it or not, Kalamazoo has a restaurant that serves Malay and
Indonesian food—Indonesia, of course, being the place I lived up until the age of
eleven or so—and its pretty good food at that, and priced more than fairly. This past
Thursday I was eating one of my favorite Indonesian dishes there, and next to me was
a group of about 6 or 7 seven students or perhaps their spouses, speaking a language
that sounded an awful lot like Indonesian, though it could have been Malay or even
Thai—my ear for the language is not what it once was. The place is often full of
Western Michigan students, especially foreign students, seeking a taste of home at a
reasonable price. When I was listening to that cacophony of voices, I couldn’t help but
think of my childhood, and how familiar the sounds were, the voices and language
were, and it was oddly comforting. And yet, I couldn’t really understand it, but I certainly
wanted to, to hear what they were so freely talking about.

That moment brought back to mind the current debate about immigration in this
country, and whole language issue, of course, how it seems to be a barrier for so
many. Often times, people’s anger or anxiety over immigration, and especially illegal
immigration gets crouched in the arguments over language, that we shouldn’t have
bilingual signs or government forms in any other language than English, or we shouldn’
t have ATM’s that offer us a choice of languages at the beginning of our transaction. “If
you immigrate here, you ought to have to know the language,” is the way it is often
couched in our common speaking of the issue, and yet, the reality of it is that every
generation of Americans, themselves immigrants, of course, since Native Americans
are the only real non-immigrants, the only real natives of this land, every generation of
Americans complain about the next incoming wave of immigrants, that they ought to
learn the language, and though some do actual learn it, it is also pretty likely that is
their children that will be the ones who fully know the English language. It happened
fifty years, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and it will be the same conversation we will
be having 50 years from now, the same frustration that our great, great, great
grandparents had over language will be the same as our great, great, great
grandchildren will have about another new wave of immigrants.

All of that should remind us of the power of language, of how it forms us, shapes us,
even angers us, sometimes, especially when it is not our own and we have no way of
knowing what is being said, feeling somehow left out of the conversation. Interestingly
enough, our understanding of language, and the need for a country to speak one
common language has at its core a fallacy that we see in our text today, and that is the
idea that if we all speak the same language, then there is the possibility that we can be
one, that we can be together, and there can be actual unity amongst us.   Of course, I
don’t doubt that speaking a common language is helpful to any country, and it is
important for newer and older immigrants alike to learn the language, especially in
terms of grafting those folks into that great immigrant tree that forms the real story of
our nation, but it doesn’t automatically make us one, though sometimes we think it
does, or believe it does. What it seems to do, this belief that “one language equals one
country, “is stoke the fire of our hubris, our arrogance, our mistaken belief that the best
kind of world is a world where everyone agrees with one another, or, more frankly, the
best kind of world is one where everyone agrees with us, in particular, right?

Now, that is exactly what is going on here in our text from Genesis 11 today, this familiar
text about a tower and a people, and a plan to build a skyscraper up to the heavens.
Now, clearly this ancient story has a deep pre-history—that is, its roots are found deep
in the ancient world, and is meant to be a crude explanation of why there are different
languages and cultures and races in the world, and you get a sense of how ancient the
story is by the two-tier universe that is assumed here—God in the heavens, God
coming down to check them out, talk of “us” when God speaks, as if God was in a
heavenly court, like God was in the creation stories. And yet, no matter how ancient
the story it is, it contains the fallacy, that falsehood that says that a single language, a
single race, a single outlook, will make us one, and that this oneness is something that
is best for humankind, and most certainly the will of God. In the text itself, the reason
given for building such a tower is so that humans will stay together: let us make a
name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole
earth. If we do this thing, if we create such a monument to human will and ingenuity,
somehow that will unify us, there will some single thing that will always bind us together
as a human race. If we were all one race, and used one language and were all
Republicans or all Democrats, or maybe all independents, or maybe if we were all
Catholics, or all Protestants, or all Jews or Hindus, if people would just believe the one
truth, speak a single language, all share the same skin color, maybe we wouldn’t be so
divided, and that would be end of wars and disagreements, and all of that.

And yet, it is not so, and has never been so, it seems. Last week we heard Jesus’
anguished prayer for us, his followers, a prayer that we might all be one, and, of
course, being me, I noted how that wasn’t the case, almost right from the beginning—
the prayer has not been answered because of people like me and maybe you, who don’
t have the courage to get past the differences that seem to be insurmountable. Today
is Pentecost, the day when the Spirit of God flows into the people of the church, the
Spirit being, quite literally, God in them, God in us, the eternal, the divine in us. And
when the Spirit came, they began to speak in the languages that were not their own
native tongues, and people were amazed at the sight of it all, this seeming reversal of
Babel’s curse, though perhaps it was never a curse to begin with, this difference, this
diversity that flowed out of Babel.

You see, scholars have been re-thinking this story lately, challenging the idea that the
confusion of language that happens at Babel was a curse somehow, despite what many
of us learned in Sunday School. The standard explanation of the story is that our
difference, as symbolized by the many languages now spoken, was a curse sent by
God for human arrogance, for the belief that humans could be like God, build their way
up into the heavens. But the story doesn’t actually say anything about that, about
human arrogance or willfulness—no, it just seems to speak of a deep human desire to
be one, to all be of one accord, to not have division between us and others, and it tells
the story of the misguided means towards that goal, which was to build something that
would unify the world, like the Statue of Liberty, some unifying symbol that says we are
all the same, like Lady Liberty says to us that we are all Americans.

And so maybe the sin here is not human arrogance as much as it is that deep desire to
lower the anxiety in the room, in the world, by building fences, by trying to make
everyone look and sound and believe the same, in order for us to not feel
uncomfortable, ill at ease, because of the obvious differences that mark real life in the
real world, even in the ancient world, even when a people speak one single language.
But the problem is that sameness wasn’t God’s design for this world; God didn’t want
everyone to look the same and sound the same and believe the same, and so God just
shatters that human desire for sameness by inserting difference into the world at Babel,
of scattering us out into the world, and saying in no uncertain terms: “you have the
same Creator, but I did not create you to be all the same, and that is a good thing.”

So, if this babbling at Babel isn’t a curse but a hidden blessing, why did Jesus’ pray that
prayer in John 17, that we should be one, as he was and is one with his Parent, his
Father? Well, I’m not really sure, except that I think that when Jesus prayed that
prayer, what he seemed to have wanted was a unity of Spirit, of connection to each
other, like Jesus had with his Father. And it’s important to remember that even if one is
a strict Trinitarian; remember, Jesus and God are one, but not the same—a different
way of expressing the many faces of God: the God within us, which is the Spirit we
greet on this day; the God above us, not literally, but figuratively, Creator, the Parent,
the Mother and Father; and God the Christ, God beside us, friend, fellow traveler,
brother. They are different faces of God, all different, but still true faces of God, each
and every one of them. What Jesus seems to have wanted in that prayer thousands of
years ago was not sameness but unity in our differences, something he obviously
wanted for his disciples, amidst their obvious diversity. He didn’t need them to be all
fishermen, or tax collectors, or housewives, like Martha—he just needed them to know
that what connected them to him and to each other was the God who had created them.

And maybe that was what was happening on Pentecost those many years ago. Think
about it for a moment: the Spirit comes into the church, this common Spirit, this same
God within their very bones now, and yet, in that Pentecost moment, they don’t speak
the same language, they don’t utter only Aramaic, or Hebrew, or Greek or whatever—
they speak languages they do not know, as if God was trying to say something to them
even in this beginning moment for the church. I think maybe one of the things that God
was trying to say to them in that moment, to us, was that even in our diversity, in our
differences, we are still so connected to each other, that your language is my
language, your Spanish is still my language, and my English is your language, simply
because it is a human language, given to us at Babel so that we wouldn’t make the
mistake of thinking that we could reach God by all being the same and thinking the
same, and speaking the same.

Author and church development consultant, Kelly Fryer, tells of a time in seminary when
she was listening to an uninteresting lecture on a beautiful day when everyone would
rather be outside. Apparently the professor sensed that nobody was being attentive
because suddenly he closed his notebook and stopped talking. “He wasn’t going to
waste one more breath on us,” she writes. But, before leaving the lecture hall, he
picked up a piece of chalk and going to the blackboard he drew a huge arrow pointing
straight down. He stood back and told the class, “If you understand that, you
understand everything you need to know about what it means to be a Christian …” and
with that he left the room.

Everyone remained for a time staring at the arrow pointing downward. Fryer admits that
the most logical thing she could think was, “He thinks we’re all going to hell.”

But the next time the class met the professor began his lecture by drawing that same
arrow on the board. This time he had everyone’s complete attention. “Here’s what this
means,” he told them. “God always comes down. God always comes down. There is
never anything that we can do to turn that arrow around and make our way UP to God.
God came down in Jesus. And God still comes down, in the bread and in the wine, in
the water and in the fellowship of believers. God ALWAYS comes down.”

—Kelly A. Fryer, Reclaiming the “L” Word: Renewing the Church from Its Lutheran
Core (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 25-26. (Homiletics Online)

That’s the mistake we often make in this instance, as well, don’t we? We think like the
people of Babel did, that if we get closer to God, then we’ll all eventually look the same,
if we get closer to heaven, up there, so to speak, then we’ll be more and more alike—
we’ll look alike and think alike and talk alike and believe alike. And yet, instead, God
comes down, and points to the messiness of the world, with its diversity and, sadly
sometimes, its division, and says to us, “I am right here, in the disarray and complexity
of all these different culture and stories.” God isn’t found in the sameness of this world,
but in all the beautiful differences of this world, in all those faces and places that don’t
look like me at all. Amazing, isn’t it? For me, that is a good thing, you know, because
as much as I like standard American food, especially Southern food, which is willing to
fry up anything that moves, I love other kinds of cuisine, other creative and different
ways of using this plant or that piece of meat, and I love it because it makes life richer
and, frankly, a lot more tasty, and a lot more enjoyable. Out of that enjoyment at the
dinner table, I can see why our one God, our Creator, seems so enamored, so in love,
with our many, many differences.   Amen.