These Best-Laid Plans: Genesis 11:1-9
Pentecost Sunday
Now the whole earth had one
language and the same words. 2 And
as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of
Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another,
“Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly.” And they had brick for
stone and bitumen for mortar. 4 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.” 5 The Lord came
down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 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. 7 Come,
let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not
understand one another’s speech.” 8 So
the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the
earth, and they left off building the city. 9 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. (NRSVue)
My
godson graduated from high school yesterday.
It was wild to see because he graduated from a school in the same general
circuit as the school I attended. He
walked in the colors of one of my high school rivals, a place where I went to
compete and talk smack about the mascot and all the other ridiculous things we
pretend we only do in high school. Though
a couple of decades separate us, there was enough familiarity that I could see
echoes of his mother and I overlaid, our choir competitions and basketball
games ghostly against this group of teenagers with their mid-walk selfies and
their decorated caps.
There was
enough familiarity in some of the names I heard last night—Sophia Cook, Alexander
Smith, Logan Duffy, Sadie Jones. When I
walked the school halls, my world was made of names like that. There were plenty of assumptions about anyone
who had anything different, plenty of teachers who tripped over names without
notably European roots. Our district tried
very hard to be uniform, to be one color, one language, one background.
But
it was absolutely magnificent to listen to my godson’s graduation roll call and
just how many of the names in his class would have made mine apoplectic. Jose Esteban-Carilla graduated , DeShay Ndobe
graduated, Nasreen DeYama graduated, Mahmoud Enwidje graduated, and many others
walked across the stage to shake hands and receive that long-awaited diploma. It was marvelous as I watched the progression
of young adults to realize that the area I grew up in doesn’t look anything
like it did twenty years ago, that the high school from which my godson
graduated was as wide as the world, that diversity wasn’t a swear word but a
reality. I will 100% still smack talk
that school’s mascot because rivalries live for a long time, but I celebrate
what it has become and how it refuses to be only one strand, one language, one way
anymore.
It's
Pentecost; happy birthday, Church, happy day-of-getting-accused-of-day-drinking,
happy day of the Spirit getting to shine Her bright Self, happy singular day of
wearing red in the liturgical year. The New
Testament reading for today, Acts 2, is quite the spectacle: “suddenly from
heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the
entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared
among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with
the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them
ability.”[1]
In the
lectionary—the three-year cycle of suggested readings to cover most of the
Bible—the Acts spectacle is joined by this moment in Genesis. The Tower of Babel—a name playing on the
Hebrew word for “confuse”[2]—is
sometimes used as a cautionary tale, either that humans shouldn’t work together
or that diverse languages and cultures are a punishment. Both of these interpretations have done a
great deal of harm over the years of the Church. Pastor John Anderson writes, “An
all-too-common interpretation of the Tower of Babel story sees it as creating a
problem that the Acts 2 story must redeem. What begins at Babel with the whole
earth having ‘one language and the same words’ and being ‘one people’ ends in
multiple languages, confusion, and scattering. The Spirit at Pentecost then
reverses and undoes this, creating a return to a single understood language and
restoring the oneness of humanity while the apostles are ‘all together in one
place.’ Pentecost becomes the antidote to Babel.
“Such a
reading…fails to recognize that at Pentecost there is no return to an original,
single language; rather, everyone hears the gospel ‘in their own native
language’ (Acts 2:6, 8). That is the real miracle of Pentecost: how ‘for one
brief moment, we were shown how it is possible to hear one another, regardless
of our different languages, cultures, ethnicities, and races.’”[3]
Likewise,
the “don’t work together” interpretation is undermined by most of the rest of
Scripture in which God continually calls the various characters into unity and conversation,
every prophet saying, “Care for the people around you, do not abandon them, be
together and create community.”
One of the
many things I love about stories, holy or not, is that the words may not change
but we do. Our understandings of them
do. These two interpretations came from
their time and are no longer useful; the sermon I preach today may not fit in
twenty year, or tomorrow. This is why we
re-read Scripture, why we do Bible study again, why we take days like Pentecost
and Christmas and Easter to preach the same texts over and over: we have
changed. The world around us has
changed. We notice something new.
“Now the
whole earth had one language and the same words.” No, it didn’t. Dennis Bratcher writes, “Chapter 11 opens
with the interesting comment that the whole earth had one language (v.1). The
problem immediately apparent is that all through chapter 10 there have already
been references to other languages associated with various groups of people
(10:5, 20, 31). Rather than scrambling to find some historical or logical
resolution to this discrepancy, this should be a rather immediate clue that we
are not dealing with simple history here.”[4] Genesis 10, sometimes called “The Table of
Nations,” is a genealogy; chapter 9 is God’s covenant with Noah. The Tower of Babel shows up after the world
has been reset by a flood, after a tale of such frustration and anger that planetary
destruction seemed like the best option.
Chapter ten gives us the list of Noah’s descendants, of how his family
repopulated the world and built new cities and became new peoples, each with
their own ideas and languages and cultures.
If this chapter is telling us something that isn’t factual, why? What does it give the story?
Bratcher
continues, “The unity of these people is not something positive, because they
are unified around the wrong center. The focus of their unity is their own
ability to establish themselves in the world apart from God (note the same idea
in a scathing prophetic denunciation in Habakkuk 1:11, 16). Here echoes the
same problem that was evidenced in the Eden story: they aspire to become like
God, themselves establishing their place in the world and implementing their
own rules by which they live in that world.”[5]
“‘Come, let
us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us
make a name for ourselves’.”
Like my
high school that imposed uniformity in the name of unity, like any organization
that erases difference and calls it agreement, the people who gathered to say
they were all the same were undoing the fantastically wild creation of
God. From the very beginning of our
Scripture, Genesis 1, we are told that the world is filled with various and
sundry things: God made the light and the dark, the heavens and the earth, the
land and the sea, birds and sea monsters and cattle and bugs—so many bugs, the
“wild animals of the earth of every kind,”[6]
the humans, and called every single thing good. Nothing about creation can be fit into a tidy
box or a well-crafted tower, no matter how good the plans for it are because God
doesn’t work in boxes. God doesn’t work
in uniformity. God works in the infinite
weirdness of God’s imagination that refuses to sacrifice the marvelous for the
pliable.
““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.’”
This is
what the “punishment” reading often hangs on, that people were too close to God
and it freaked God out. But we who
listen to these words a few thousand years later are well aware of what humans
have done, of what we propose to do. We
know how vast our own cruelty is, how easy to erase inconvenient differences. Perhaps God understood that this first seed
of monotony had to be crushed before it sprouted, before we could return to the
kind of evil washed away under Noah’s boat, before we looked at the vastness of
creation and said, “We could make this smaller.” This, too, is why we re-read Scripture: to
wrestle with the ways that God comes into our stories in ways we do not like
and to ask each other whether we, too, are building a beautifully planned tower
in which to put God so we can know where the Holy is, right where we expected
it.
“Now there
were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at
this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them
speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are
not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of
us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of
Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both
Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them
speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed, saying to
one another, ‘What does this mean?’”[7]
The
disciples in Acts have spent fifty days in intermittent visits with the risen
Christ, wrapping their minds around this incredible shift in understanding what
Jesus meant in all those teachings of His.
They’re gathered together in one place, speaking one language, and maybe
they, too, were thinking, “Let’s build ourselves a system to understand this,
let’s build a temple to contain this, let’s make a name for ourselves as
followers of the Way so that we know what it means.”
And bless
Her, the Spirit practically blows the roof off the place and sets them a little
bit on fire. They do not speak the same
language, but they have the same message: this is the story of Jesus the Christ
Who taught, fought, and loved, Who was wrongly accused, cruelly crucified,
miraculously raised. This is the Good
News: that no one is anything other than God’s beloved, that the tower of
sameness is dismantled, that the Spirit’s wings are wide as the world and there
will be all sorts of names and histories and languages and cultures, that the
Parthians and Egyptians and Judeans and Arabs are all welcome here, that God is
never so small as to exclude people or make them into something they are not so
that they fit.
It's Pride
Month, Church, and there’s a lot of conversation about how we queer folk are
dangerous because we’re different.
There’s a lot of conversation about how disabled folk are useless
because they’re different, or how those youth at the graduation ceremony are
annoying because they’re different, or how people of color are less than white
folk because they’re different, or how immigrants are unworthy of basic rights
because they’re different. Burn that
nonsense in the fire of the Spirit, tear those towers of ignorance down,
because God has swept through God’s people and said, “Look, I am doing
something new;”[8]
“where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, when I told the sea
where to stop?”[9] Were we building bricks while God was
building a world, telling ourselves that our plans were so good that even God
would have to acknowledge them instead of listening for the rush of wind that
changed everything?
We gather
today to celebrate one of the two sacraments The United Methodist Church has,
communion. Part of our liturgy is that
we join the saints and the people around the world, and y’all, they don’t all
speak English. This holy meal is unity
without uniformity, is fire without burning, is plans thrown to the Spirit-filled
wind because Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” of a different way, of
a life in which the vastness of what could be can never fit into a single
tower, a single identity, a single method.
We come to this table shining in all the infinite ways of being we have
because all are welcome, all are welcome, and God delights a
thousandfold in saying every single one of our names, different and beautiful
and holy. May we learn to embrace that,
too. Amen.
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