Babel and Pentecost
These two stories, Babel and Pentecost, cause us to ponder the unity that is disobedience and the unity that is the gift of God, the scattering that is judgment and the scattering that is God’s saving plan.
I
Willa Cather says that the earliest stories in the book of Genesis lay like a faded tapestry in our consciousness. Adam and Eve, the Garden, the Flood, and today’s story, the tower of Babel.
It follows Noah and the Flood. We might have thought that with the catastrophe of the flood, the new covenant, the rainbow and god’s promise, “Never again”, all would be well.
Not so.
There was a time, the story says, when there was an original unity of all humankind and we all spoke one language. As people migrated across the great plain, however, they began to gather in one place. They said to one another:
Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly… Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth.
“Lest we be scattered.” What drove their ambition was fear. Reinhold Niebuhr probed the human spirit and reminded us: the sin of pride has its roots in anxiety. We sense our frailty, our impotence, our vulnerability; we see dimly before us the specter of our own deaths and we grow anxious. To defend ourselves against these threats to our being, we build towers of self-sufficiency and self-protection; we construct erector sets of pride. We try to make ourselves grand! Put our name in lights. Then maybe nobody can put us out.
Towers of brick become our strength. We do not see their folly. Bricks can build a house, but a tower to heaven? Come now. Nevertheless, we build them and think ourselves impregnable, inviolable, invincible, grand. Davie Napier spoofs the tower builders, putting in their mouth a parody of A Mighty Fortress is our God:
All glory be to thee, O ruddy Brick,
Almighty Brick that we have made,
O blessed and burnished Brick,
Our refuge and our strength.
This Brick, this mighty fortress, is our God,
A bulwark never, never failing;
Our shelter from the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing
We could write our own verses to the towers we build: Almighty Buck; O perfect Creed; O blessed and gleaming Bomb; O Party of my choice with its saving political doctrine.
We build our towers and our towers become our gods: if I have enough money; if our military defense is strong enough; if I’m good enough or spiritual enough, then I’ll be safe.
So we build our towers of political correctness and doctrinal infallibility. We mount our psychological towers which explain to us why everybody else is so messed up. Do these make us safer?
If we build ourselves “a new world order” with ourselves at the center where everybody speaks English and buys American, will we be safer?
Peter Brueghel, the 16th century Flemish painter, drew a painting of the Tower of Babel setting it in a Belgian seaport town. The monstrosity of a tower dominates the whole town, casting a huge shadow over half the town in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. The painting shows the tower being built. Everybody in town is conscripted to help build it. Everyone you can see in the painting is working on the tower—except the king and a few citizens bowing down before him. Prominently, halfway up the tower is a huge fat cannon. You don’t just need a tower, you need an cannon, too. Babel.
Here is Babel. A people of one language making sure nothing is beyond their grasp.
The unity is that disobedience is the unity based on human control, on domination, on enforced conformity where everyone lives the same, speaks the same, worships the same and pledges allegiance the same. Babel is the place of Total Control, Final Solutions, and One Way—“My Way or Trailways!”
The citizens of Babel say, “Let us gather everybody together and make them just like us, and we’ll be safe.”
And all because we’re scared; down deep we are scared little boys and girls. “Lest we be scattered.”
II
What does God do with our towers? The text says that God looks way down to the speck we call the Tower of Babel, the one we think reaches the heavens. And God says,
Come let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
And God “scattered them abroad over the face of the earth.”
What is this scattering which is judgment? One way to look at judgment is to see it as something God does to us. The other way to look at it is to see it as the human consequences of our own behavior. I think the latter is what the Bible means by judgment.
The judgment of God means, “This is what happened.”
The confusion of tongues, the scattering is what happens when a community attempts control and domination. It’s like a hand squeezing a lump of clay tighter and tighter until most of the clay is now squeezed outside through the fingers. That’s the story of totalitarian governments and totalitarian denominations and churches and families and relationships.
God said, “let us confuse their language so they do not understand any more.” In the Hebrew, so they do not shema. Shema, It is perhaps the most important Hebrew word. Every service the people recited the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4): Shema Y’Israel, Hear, O Israel. Here was their basic confession of faith.
Shema Y’Israel Hear, O Israel.
Adonai elogeinu The Lord is our God.
Adonai echod The Lord is one.
Just hearing the word recalled the whole verse, just like for Catholic Christians, the Lord’s Prayer is called by the first two words, the “Our Father.”
I think it was the great rabbi Abraham Heschel who said that for the Hebrew their life and identity is in this, “I listen therefore I am.” Not I think therefore I am, or I doubt therefore I am, but I listen. We are God’s covenant people because we are a listening people. We stand before God to hear what god is saying.
The judgment of Babel is that they no longer listen to God nor can they listen to one another. They cannot talk together, worship together, Shema together.
In Babel our language has become distorted. It is used as a method of control. When language is controlled by the “powers that be,” then the disenfranchised begin to develop code language, their own language systems. They may speak the same language but the words mean different things. Brer Rabbit stories carried coded meanings for the slaves that told them Blacks and whites today in America often use the same words but the words have different, sometimes opposite meanings: “bad”, “cold”, “hood”.
America is now engaged in a culture war which is becoming another civil war. It’s like America has become a giant Lite Beer commercial where we yell words and slogans at each other but nobody is listening:
Tastes Great! Less Filling!
Tastes Great! Less Filling!
Pro-Life Pro-Choice
Pro-Family Pro-Person
Liberty Equality
Family values Multi-culturalism
Achievement Justice
Morality Openness
The culture wars are escalation. The doctor killed in Florida because he worked at an abortion clinic is one of its most public casualties, but there are casualties all around. Chuck Colson has called America to a truce in our culture war. I think one of our church’s great missions is to be agents of reconciliation in this culture war. We have both sides in us as well as around us.
The judgment of Babel is the confusion of tongues where we no longer hear one another.
But the scattering of judgment becomes in the providence of God the scattering of salvation. We scatter to the ends of the earth as people of different color and different tongue. The story of Babel tills us that God likes different languages and colors: Asian, African, Indian, European. God likes the different sounds of our voices: French, Japanese, Shona from Zimbabwe, West Texan, German, Russian, Portuguese. In the words of Spike Lee: “Mo’ color is Mo’ Better”.
The unity that God is making is not the unity of Babel—of centralized sameness—but it is a unity of a different origin. The languages and colors are not lost, but we can hear and understand each other. For this miracle we turn to Pentecost.
III
We could not have two stories which are such startling opposite pictures. Pentecost is Babel upside down, inside out, right side up.
Instead of humanity reaching up trying to storm heaven’s door, heaven is coming down to us. Instead of the exertion of human will, we have the anointing of God’s spirit, power from on high. Instead of unity based on centralized control, we have a unity based on the spirit of love poured into our hearts. Instead of one language everyone must speak, we have many languages everyone can understand. And instead of the scattering of judgment, we have the scattering of the saving plan of God called mission.
It was fifty days after Easter. The disciples were gathered in Jerusalem, under orders from the Risen Christ to wait for power from on high.
Then it happened. Like the rush of a mighty wind, with something like tongues of fire resting on everybody’s heads. Here is the language of mystery: metaphorical language—it was like this or like that. Amid something like wind and fire, the Holy Spirit descended and filled everyone, and they began to speak in other languages.
Then Pentecost moved from inside the room out into the streets. Jews from every nation who had come for the Jewish holiday heard the disciples speaking in their own native languages.
There were two miracles happening on Pentecost. First, there was the miracle of speaking. The good news of Jesus Christ would be spoken in every tongue. Here was a miracle as a sign of things to come. How many thousand languages and dialects is the New Testament translated into today?
But there was a second miracle. It was the miracle of hearing.
Each one heard them speaking in their own language.
They could shema again, hear again, listen again, understand again. The key verb in the Pentecost story is the verb to hear:
each one heard them speaking in his own language (v.6)
how is it that we hear (v.8)
we hear then telling in their own words the might workds of God (v.11)
give ear to my words (v.14)
when they heard this they were cut to the heart. (v.37)
Then repentance happened; then baptism happened.
Look closely. The miracle of Pentecost is not that all languages become one—that’s the conformity of Babel. It is that although the languages are different we begin to hear one another. Instead of demanding that everyone speak my language, we sit down together and begin to teach each other our own language. That takes patience and humility and good will. Like a missionary going to Indonesia and learning a language so the New Testament can be translated and the gospel told. Like a Christian sitting down with a Buddhist or communist and learning each other’s language.
Our unity as the people of God is not that we speak the same language but that we can listen ot one another. We can shema again, understand again, hear again.
Last week some of us went to our Cambodian congregation’s worship service. It was all in the Cambodian language. They sang a hymn which was set to a Cambodian folk tune. They had their different instruments and different rhythms. We listened as they sang, but there was a place in each verse of the song when they sang “Hallelujah”. We knew that word and we began to sing their song with them. Pentecost. We could Shema together. Next week they will worship with us.
Conclusion
There is a scattering that happens after Pentecost but it is not the scattering of judgment of Babel. It is the saving plan of God called mission:
Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations.
Every congregation totters between Babel and Pentecost. It must be decided every generation, every year whether we will be a Babel church or a Pentecost church.
The energy of Babel is centripetal: it sucks everything to its center—people, possessions, power. The church of Babel is the mega-church, not the mission church, the super-church, not the servant-church.
The energy of Pentecost is just the opposite: it is centrifugal: It casts its goods to the world. It sends its people and its resources beyond itself so that the good news of God can go wherever God’s children are. This is the Pentecost church: not the greedy, acquisitive, anxious, compulsive gather of all resources to itself but a sharing of them with the world following the One who said,
And you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth. (Acts 1:8)
From here on Tucker’s Hill on the near southside of Fort Worth to the ends of the earth, Broadway! Pentecost.
1) B.D. Napeir, Come Sweet Death, “The Tower”, (Boston: United Church Press) 1967, pp. 68-69.