What's All the Babblin' About?
What’s All the Babblin’ About? by Rev. L. John Gable
May 15, 2016 – Pentecost Sunday
Given your understanding of the nature of God and the teaching of Scripture, what would you say is God’s intention and desire for humanity – unity or division? Solidarity or separation?
My suspicion is that most of us would say unity and solidarity, right? If that is the case then what is the lesson we take from the passage we read this morning about the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 where the people seemed unified but God decided to scatter them?
Recall, this story comes after the Noah story where God instructs the sons of Noah to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”, that is repopulate the earth after the flood, and before the call of Abraham story in Genesis 12 where God tells Abraham and Sarah that they and their offspring will be blessed by God to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. So what is the point of the Tower of Babel story?
Whenever I read any of the stories in the opening chapters of Genesis I picture a family of nomads sitting around a campfire one night when one of the children asks, “Father, where did the stars come from, and the sun, and the moon, and the land and the sea?” The elder would scratch his beard and say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” So on this particular night the child asks, “Why do people live in different lands, in different nations and speak different languages?” Again the old man would tell a story about the time when all the people lived in one place, were of one nation and spoke one language until God scattered them and confused their language after they tried to build a city and a tower that reached all the way up to heaven. “What’s wrong with that?” the child asks. “Oh, there is nothing wrong with building” the old man replies, “but they were doing it for the wrong reasons. They said, ‘Let us make a name for ourselves’. They wanted to do it for their own sakes, to make themselves look strong and powerful, and they forgot their need for God.”
“So what did God do?” the child asks. God said, “Look, they are one people and they all have 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. Let us go down and confuse their language there so they will not understand one another’s speech.” And that is what God did, He scattered the people to different lands, into different nations, with different languages. That is why the tower is called “babel” because the people were confused.
Understood this way the scattering of the nations was a form of punishment for human pride and self-sufficiency and hubris. Understood this way it would seem that God is opposed to unity and solidarity. But can that be right?
Let’s let Scripture speak to Scripture on this point. Our second lesson comes from Acts 2- a story appropriate for this Pentecost Sunday.
It is now 50 days after the Easter day and the disciples are still in Jerusalem, in part out of obedience to Jesus’ command for them to stay in the city, but effectively still in hiding, still trying to figure out what to do next. The city is full of visitors from nearly every nation gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost, the festival day celebrating the giving of the Law.
We know the story. The disciples are all gathered together, “of one accord”, in unity, the Greek word for “unity” is the root of our word “symphony”, when suddenly the room is filled with a violent wind and tongues of fire rest on each of them. In that instant they were filled with the Holy Spirit of God and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them ability, such that all of those visitors from other nations could understand what the disciples were saying in their own native tongues. As we heard in the Genesis story there was great confusion here as well, and understandably so, but by the end of the day, after Peter had stood up to explain who Jesus was and the saving work He came to do, 3000 people came to faith. Despite all of their differences – language, nation, culture – they were united as one by a common faith in Jesus Christ. This was the birth of the Church. The scattered nations of the earth re-united under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
These two stories from Scripture – the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 and the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 – are often linked together suggesting that Pentecost repairs or un-does the brokenness and punishment of Babel, and I agree with that, except to say that I believe both stories have a lesson to teach us as the Church today.
In answer to the first question I asked you, “What is God’s desire and intention for humanity – unity or division, solidarity or separation?” the consistent answer of Scripture is “Yes, both”, as long as they are done for the right reasons.
Let’s talk about the “wrong” reasons for a moment so we can close on the positives.
Think in terms of the Church, including Tab, including you and me, what is the “downside” of our being too scattered? When scattered we lose out on fellowship and mutual support – both of which are essential to the Christian life. We also miss out on the shared teaching of the Church which can be both encouraging and challenging or a corrective to us. I always agree with myself, my own way of thinking, my own interpretation of Scripture, so I need you – members of the Body of Christ – to encourage me when my understanding is correct and to correct me when it is not. That we can only do together, I cannot do that on my own. As Christians we were never intended to do this life of faith alone – too scattered, too separate – God designed us to do this life together. In the life of faith, just as we need God, so we need one another, so going to Church, being a part of the Church together is not optional, it is essential. Of course there are other “downsides” to separation, isolation, loneliness, insufficiency, but what about unity? What fault could there possibly be with being united?
Unity and solidarity as a group, a people, a Church can be great and beneficial unless that shared identity becomes exclusive and isolating. As soon as the group becomes so clearly identified as “us and them”, “the insiders and the outsiders” it begins to run counter to the good purposes of God. In our Genesis story the people became so confident in themselves, in their own abilities, in their own shared language and common desire to do something great in order to make a name for themselves, “let’s build a city and a tower to heaven”, they began to think they could do it on their own, without anyone else’s assistance, including God’s. Over confidence, human hubris and self-sufficiency which says, “I’ve got this God, I/we don’t need your help” invariably leads to futility, if not catastrophe, both for individuals and for groups, including the Church. A cautionary flag should go up for each of us if ever we find ourselves saying, “We’ve got enough. We don’t need, or worse yet, want them.” The unifying principle of “We know what we like ‘cause we like what we know” can easily degrade into “We know who we like ‘cause we like who we know.” That kind of unity is corrosive and cancerous for the Body.
We can see that both separation and unity when mis-used can run counter to the purposes of God. So what are their proper uses? What can the Church today – you and I – learn from these lessons from Scripture?
For starters, scattering was one of God’s first commandments, “Go and be fruitful and multiply” was spoken not only to Noah and his sons and their wives, but to Adam and Eve before them. Just after the Tower of Babel story we will hear God’s great commission to Abraham and Sarah to go and bless all the nations of the earth in God’s name, which is a prelude to the great commission Jesus will later give to His followers, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Scattering/separation/division are all part of God’s plan to evangelize the world, to spread the Gospel of salvation to every people in every nation and every tongue. Therefore, we must be a scattered and diverse and dispersed people; yet without losing the essential source of unity which binds us all together as one.
Jesus’ great prayer for His disciples, for the Church, in John 17 is that “they might all be one”, united, unified. Paul will write in Ephesians that Jesus has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us”. The unity of God’s people is at the heart of God’s intention and desire for us, but how can that be when His people are so different, so distinct, so separated from one another?
That is the miracle of Pentecost. Those first believers didn’t look anything alike. They came from different backgrounds, different nations and cultures, had different experiences, even spoke different languages. So what brought them and held them together? Their common faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That is the distinctive in the Church, then, now and always. A shared faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is sufficient to make any other distinctions between us seem trivial and insignificant. The One who unites us is greater than anything that seeks to divide us, unless of course we allow those differences to divide us. The great scar on the Christian Church through the ages, and unfortunately still today, is that we have allowed our differences and distinctions – theology, worship style, culture, skin color, and you can add to the list – to divide us and keep us apart rather than being united by our common faith in Christ. Out of pettiness we have chosen to divide what Jesus came to restore and unite. As Bible translator and missionary J.B. Phillips writes so powerfully, “When one considers all the highly organized powers of evil arrayed against the Church it seems little short of madness to perpetuate our divisions… Many people are hungry for God, many people long to know the transforming power of Christ, but outside the Churches themselves probably not one person in a million cares two straws about the niceties of the differences which divide Christ’s Church.” God desires us to be neither confused nor divided, so in order to align ourselves with God’s purposes in creation, in Pentecost, in the eternal vision of the Kingdom of God, we must be committed to unity in the midst of our diversity and dissention without division in every aspect of our life together.
When the Church refocuses our attention and commitment to the One who calls and unites us we will shine like stars in the darkness and the world will take notice. We will be an anomaly, a welcome anomaly, in a world that promotes hatred and violence, discord and division. I believe people will flock to the Church once we show evidence of the unity we confess in Christ. This was certainly the experience of the early Church. They were demonstrating a unity and togetherness that was confusing to those who didn’t yet understand what had happened to them. The early Christians were described in this way in a letter to a man named Diognetus, the confusion of the writer is evident, but so is his curiosity. He writes, “They have no cities of their own…but at the same time they exhibit the constitution of their own commonwealth as something quite paradoxical. They reside in their homelands, but as aliens. Every foreign land is home to them; every homeland a place of exile. It is they who hold the world in unity.” Ah, if only the world could say that of the Church today because we are the only ones who can do it, hold the world together, not by our own might or power or understanding or good will, but by the power of the very Holy Spirit of God given to each of us at Pentecost. That would really get people talking wouldn’t it? And what would they be babblin’ about? They would be saying that there is a group of people called followers of Jesus who love one another, despite their differences, because they love Jesus more.
May it be said of us and may it be so. Amen.