Thank you,
Leanne/Jeff, for your reading of the story. I bet most of us have
some pretty negative associations with this old story we call “The
Tower of Babel”. If we learned it in Sunday School or even if
we learned about it in seminary thirty years ago, as did I, we have
probably missed some very fascinating and important developments since
in Biblical scholarship. I was clued into some of this at the recent
Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies.
I won’t have time to go into all of this great stuff this morning,
but I say this to remind us all of the old saw that “a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing.” What little knowledge we have
of this story, or think we have, may in fact be preventing us from
seeing its real meaning and power for us today and even sending us
down the wrong track.
After all, when we think
of the Tower of Babel do we think of much of anything positive? I
doubt it. We were all taught that this is a story about sin, about
pride, about human hubris. We may even have heard interpretations
that focus on the sinful things that happen when humans build cities
or the destructive power in human technologies. Even the name “Babel”
has been translated into English as “babble” and means,
according to one popular dictionary: “a confused sound of voices”,
“a scene of noise and confusion”, “bedlam, din,
clamor, disorder, pandemonium, chaos, tumult, turmoil and commotion.”
My heavens. Nothing good there.
This plays out in many
ways in art, literature and even popular culture to this day. Maybe
some of you saw last year’s blockbuster movie, “Babel”
in which four stories are told and interwoven: a young American couple
on vacation in Morocco, their children at home in San Diego being
cared for by their Hispanic nanny who’s son is soon to be married
back in Mexico, a young deaf/mute girl in Japan and her father struggling
to deal with the death of her mother, and a shepherd family in Morocco
buying a gun to scare away jackals. Spanning continents and countries,
languages and cultures, they are all, as one review put it, “hurtling
towards a shared destiny of isolation and grief…each facing
the dizzying sensation of becoming profoundly lost—in the desert,
to the world, to each other and to themselves—as they are pushed
to the farthest edges of confusion and fear as well as to the very
depths of connection and love.”
All this from the classic
interpretation of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. So let’s
review this story. From the top. From the beginning. Story #1 in this
sermon series. God creates everything and calls it good and scatters
humans across the face of the earth to be fruitful and multiply. Story
#2. God gets angry at the violent ways of humankind, tells Noah to
build the ark, sends the flood waters to wash everything away, and
starts over with the new arc of the rainbow covenant once again embracing
all creation, all humankind, with a promise to never again send down
destruction upon it all. Again God commands them to “be fruitful
and multiply and fill the earth.” God’s instructions to
Noah and his family sound just like a return to God’s original
plan. Spread out, settle in different places, create human civilization.
And they do. Genesis 10 lists sets of genealogies of Noah’s
sons, each getting to the place of their own land or territory and
their own language.
Now, story #3, today’s
story. The descendants of Noah settle in the plane of Shinar. They
decide to build a city and a tower. They want to give up their nomadic
life and settle down. They want to stay together as an extended family,
tiring perhaps of God’s command to scatter across the face of
the earth. (All those of you who hate to travel can relate.) No thank
you, God. Enough of that. We’re staying put. The Bible says
here: “they want to make a name for themselves.” That’s
just to say that they want some continuity. They want to be remembered.
But our common understandings
of what happens next have been called the “pride and punishment”
interpretation of the story. It goes something like this: God is apparently
surprised and displeased by what he sees going on. Not part of the
plan. They think they can build a tower right up to heaven itself
and make themselves like God. Oh, the pride, the sin, the hubris.
God shows them by destroying their great tower and scattering them
across the face of the earth, each speaking a different language so
that they can’t communicate one another and be about such self-serving
schemes ever again. And then, you see, as Christians, we’ve
gone on to say that all this “bad behavior” is overcome
by the miracle of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes and we can
all understand one another again.
But I’ve come to
think, along with some of the wonderful scholars of our day—Walter
Brueggemann of Columbia Theological Seminary, Theodore Hiebert and
Cynthia Campbell of McCormick Theological Seminary, Néstor
Miquez of Argentina and others, going all the way back to Rabbi Ibn
Ezra of the Middle Ages, that a different reading of this text is
possible. Not only possible, but important. Important to the issues
and the challenges we face in our world today. And having a direct
bearing on social policy issues such as the “English-only”
movement.
Because, you see, if diversity
and all these cultures and languages and so forth are a result of
sin and punishment, of course we see them as something bad, as a big
problem we really ought to fix. And then, you see, even subconsciously,
our efforts to “fix this problem” might be heartless and
cruel.
But what if the story is
about something else? As the new scholarship is suggesting, there
is nothing in the text itself that points to the “pride and
punishment” interpretations. Instead, this is a story that explains
the origins of the diversity described in Chapter 10 in those genealogies.
The problem God sees when God sees the tower is not the tower or the
city but the fact that God’s people have suddenly refused to
scatter. They have chosen to stay together and consolidate into one
community, one culture, one language. The problem is not the sin of
pride, but the sin of disobedience and the willful ignoring God’s
command. Their sin is in their attempt to create and preserve homogeneity.
So what does God so? Our
translation says that God “confused” their languages.
But that word “confuses” can also be translated as “mixes”
or “mixes together”, like when a recipe calls for mixing
the ingredients together. All the negative connotations of “confusion”
fall away and the story becomes simply an explanation of why God wants
there to be a diversity of language and culture. God intends diversity
and the multiplicity of languages and cultures that come from God’s
people scattered across the face of the earth.
You see where this goes?
It’s wondrous and beautiful. The story of Babel becomes a gift,
especially to the likes of us who live in a metropolitan area where
the latest statistics show that a whopping 53% of us speak a language
other than English at home and in our private lives—not only
Spanish, but Korean, Vietnamese, Armenian, Swedish and dozens of other
languages, 91 among our children in the Los Angeles Unified School
District.
So the questions is, is
all this diversity a problem or gift? A barrier or an opportunity?
Some of both, I suppose. I often tell about the time I was trying
to order some take-out food and instead of the green salad I thought
I was ordering I got a grilled cheese sandwich! Sometimes we talk
right past each other and sometimes it’s exasperating and sometimes
it’s humorous. But why trade it for anything else? Our calling,
as Charles Wesley put it, is to “serve the present age”,
in all its splendor and multiplicity.
I also want to share an
inspiring thing I learned about John Wesley at the Oxford Institute
that I wrote about it in my current Sentinel newsletter column. I
learned that John Wesley took language study seriously as a way to
communicate with the diversity of his parishioners while he was over
here in Georgia. He had already learned German in order to translate
hymns. He also studied French, though (to my regret) didn’t
think much of it, calling it “the poorest, meanest language
in Europe; that it is no more comparable to the German or Spanish
than a bagpipe is to an organ.”
Wesley also studied Spanish
and Italian. And the purpose of all of his language study was to read
the holy writings in German, Spanish and Italian, to converse with
his Spanish and Italian speaking parishioners in Georgia and to lead
worship for them.
This is a side of Wesley
I’d never known. He’s actually quite a role model for
us. Just like I’d never learned some of the wondrous alternative
readings of the story of the Tower of Babel.
God intends diversity and delights in it. God ordains a variety of
communities, cultures and languages. God sends us out to share God’s
blessings with one another. And in Jesus Christ, through the Holy
Spirit, God creates a new humanity who, in our scattering, still belongs
to one another and to God, a beautiful mix of different people and
different cultures and different languages, hearing Good News in ways
we can each understand, finding life in the gift of grace.
Let us strive after true
communication and communion with one another. Let us embrace the humility
and reverence that come as we meet those different from ourselves.
For the God who creates and scatters, who unites and divides, holds
us all within one great loving arc of covenant and intends blessings
upon us all.
Notes:
Walter Brueggemann. Genesis.
Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982.
Cynthia Campbell. A Multitude of Blessings: A Christian Approach to
Religious Diversity. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
John Dart. “Is the
Tower of Babble Wobbling?” Christian Century, August 7, 2007.
Anna Gorman and David Pierson.
“Not at Home with English”. LA Times. September 13, 2007,
p. 1.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
"The
City of Babel: God's Gift of Diversity"