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Genesis 11:
1-9
September 27, 2009 THE
TOWER OF BABEL: This morning we continue our series of sermons on some of the old, old stories of the bible, and this morning I would have us take a look at the ancient story of The Tower of Babel. Some of you perhaps have seen the rather depressing movie by the name of “Babel” starring Brad Pitt and perhaps you wondered where it got its title, well, this is probably it, “The Tower of Babel.” Let me hasten to say that the relationship between the movie and the old bible story is not readily obvious, and I’m not necessarily recommending that you see the movie, but if you do, you might contemplate why the movie was named as it was, “Babel” or, as some would pronounce it, “Babel”, with a long “a.” And this difference of opinion about pronunciation is true for the bible story as well. In the Sunday School I attended, it was always referred to as “The Tower of Babel”, with a short “a”. However, in the English tradition – and if you want a reason for this you’ll have to ask my wife – the story is called The Tower of Babel, with a long “a’. …Yet another illustration of how two countries are separated by a common language. With my apologies to those of you who speak the English language, I prefer Tower of Babel, in as much as this story has perhaps at least some connection to the ancient city of Babylon. Also, the word “Babel” is at least close in pronunciation, if not etymology to our word “babble”, what babies do before they speak, and it’s also what you hear too much of on the radio and television talk shows. Tune in the dial to almost any frequency and you can listen to an awful lot of babble. So, with that said or “babbled” if you prefer, let’s take a look at this ancient story. After the story of Adam and Eve and after Adam and Eve received their “eviction notice” from the Garden of Eden, and after Cain killed Abel, and after the story of the Great Flood and the landing of Noah’s Ark, if these things followed chronologically – which they do not! -- things settled down a bit and a civilization began to grow and develop, and the people started feeling pretty good about themselves, indeed, they were feeling pretty “bullish”, and why I have chosen the word “bullish” may or may not become obvious. Anyway this civilization – or so-called civilization was so self-congratulatory that they decided to build a monument to themselves, and so in the middle of Babel or perhaps Babylon, or at least somewhere on the plains between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers they started to build a huge tower. Geometry is important in this sermon, and so think of a vertical on the horizon plane. This tower, sometimes called a Ziggurat (not a cigarette but a Ziggurat) was shaped like the pyramids of Egypt or those of the Mayans in South and Central America, such as what you see on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, and so the pyramid on our own dollar bill might be a reminder of the Tower of Babel. All civilizations sometimes suffer from what has been called an “edifice complex”, and this, apparently was what was happening in Babel. The leaders of this city said, “Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the heavens.” As I said last week, one of the things I love about these stories is that they are not “all about” one thing or another. They are multifaceted and lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. They are not didactic, but rather suggestive. And so this morning, rather than give you one and only one interpretation of this story, I am going to offer several different interpretations so you can decide for yourself what the best interpretation is, and maybe you can think of a very different interpretation, and that’s ok too. These stories are not meant to be sledge hammers by which we drive a point home, but rather a way in which we can come to a deeper understanding of our human condition. With this story of the Tower of Babel, like many others, I suppose, I immediately start to think of some of the tall buildings of our civilization – the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers, the Sears Building or at least what used to be called the Sears Building in Chicago, now called the Willis building. As a child visiting New York City for the first time, I remember the great joy of climbing Rockefeller Center and seeing the majestic Empire State Building and the gleaming spire of the Chrysler building – engineering masterpieces to be sure, and so I can understand the motivation, even the noble motivation of those who set out to build a tall building on the plains between Tigris and the Euphrates or the East River and the Hudson. Being from the plains, the flat lands of Indiana, between the Wabash River and the Ohio River, there was never a tree that I didn’t want to climb, and so I can understand the psychology of wanting to build a tower with its top in the heavens. I understand the importance of the vertical when you’re on the horizontal plane. But, at what point does psychology become pathology? At what point does aspiration become ambition and at what point does ambition become foolish pride? If nothing else, this story of the Tower of Babel should tell us how transitory such things as power and prestige and wealth and empire are. The coliseum of Rome is now in a state of ruin. Nothing is left of the glorious Parthenon except a limestone skeleton, beautiful though it still is. The Mayan Civilization must have been unbelievably well-developed, but now it is shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the key words in the story of the Tower of Babel are where the builders of this tower say, “let us make a name for ourselves.” In other words, they wanted to build this tower not because it would serve some useful purpose, but only because it would prove how shrewd and powerful they were. How many have we known who have done what they did not because it would be beneficial to someone else or because it would advance the cause of civilization or even because it brought them pleasure but simply because they had that insatiable hunger to be seen and known? How many families, corporations, churches, economies have collapsed on the altar of human ambition, “Come.. Let us make a name for ourselves?” Of course, inevitably, this story brings me to the Pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes and of course the sins of Bernie Madoff. But in pointing our fingers at Bernie Madoff, maybe this story of the Tower of Babel should remind us that what Madoff did may in fact have been a microcosm of our all too fragile economy, that given too much greed and profiteering just for the sake of profiteering, this psychology, this pathology may have turned our whole economy into a house of cards. I’m reminded of a line from an old song by Bob Dylan that may have come from the spirit if not the lyrics of Woody Guthrie: Buildings going up to the sky, People going down the ground. A reminder that all of our civilizations are measured not by the height of our skyscrapers but rather by the depth and breadth of our compassion, our collective desire to bring the engines of prosperity not just to the few but to the many. I also need to say, and here is where I would steer this story of the Tower of Babel in a different direction, what we say about our civilization as a whole could also be said about the church as an institution. Sometime recently someone asked me whether or not I would want our church here in Old Lyme to become one those so-called “mega-churches.” There are a couple here in this state that might fall into that category, and I know very little about them, but these are churches that are more like small cities – thousands and thousands of members. There’s one out near where my mother lives in Arizona that measures up to what is called a Mega church, and they spend about $15,000 a year on Crispy Crème donuts for their coffee hour, just to give you a feel for their immensity. I also remember a story that Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farm in Georgia, used to tell. He met a preacher from a nearby church who bragged about having the tallest cross of any church around. Seeming to be impressed, Clarence asked him how much the church spent for the cross. To which, the preacher boasted, “$10,000 and the mortgage is all paid off!” Clarence responded, saying, “Brother, you got gypped; back during the time of Jesus, people were able to get those crosses for free.” By comparison to some churches, our church is just a tiny little country church, and yet by comparison to other churches, with our human resources and financial resources, we might very well be seen as being a “mega church.” So, for me, the story of the Tower of Babel is also a helpful reminder that getting bigger and bigger is not the ultimate value. So-called “Mega churches” no doubt do some very good things, just as there are some very small churches that fritter away their precious resources, and so the size of our congregation or the height of our spire, as beautiful as it is, is not, in and of itself, a measure of virtue or Christian faithfulness. For me, rather than 2 or 3 thousand, I would rather have 2 or 3 deeply committed to making this a better world in which to live, 2 or 3 who take the life and teachings of Jesus seriously, 2 or 3 who are willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and their energy and their resources to bring more love into this troubled world, 2 or 3 who are passionate about the same things that Jesus was passionate about – giving people a second chance, teaching people about God’s love and grace, overcoming the boundaries that so divide us, making, building a world where children can laugh and play and pray and never be afraid of being homeless or hungry or bereft of friendship. And if, in pursuit of those values, we go from being a “mega church” to a “mini church”, I say, “thanks be to God!” The story of the Tower of Babel also has some interesting theological implications and these may lead us into yet another interpretation of this story. According to the old cosmology – and it’s really not all that ancient, because I know there are plenty who still cling to this idea – but in the cosmology of those at the time this story of the Tower of Babel was composed, people thought of God as being “up there” some place, and so those who were building this tower, those who wanted to “make a name for themselves”, it was as if they wanted to elevate themselves even above God. Humanity would overtake Divinity, and in time, such notions as Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, the Overman or the Superman, Zarathustra would be born, and humanity would no longer have any need of Divinity. God would become obsolete and irrelevant. This is sort of a philosophical Tower of Babel, and the story of the Tower of Babel is not so much an admonition to be humble, but rather a reminder that we are all sometimes humbled by life’s experiences. None of us are ever the supermen or superwomen we sometimes think ourselves to be, and more than we think, more than we think we are all standing in the need of God’s Love and God’s Strength and God’s mercy. No matter how straight our backbone is, no matter how lofty and ethereal our thoughts might be, no matter how great our human skills might be, we all sometime see our work come to naught, we all sometimes see all that we have tried to do come crashing down around us, turning all of our proud boastful philosophical words into nothing but…. Babble. But thankfully, that’s not the end of the story, but maybe only just the beginning, for when those towers come crashing down, it is then that we can clearly see that what keeps us upright, what restores our uprightness is not our ego but our dignity, not our foolish pride but our integrity. There are many other interpretations we could discuss, but there’s one more I would like to share, and it also has to do with ancient cosmology, the old and I would say antiquated notion that God is up there, or only up there. Whether it was intended or not, I think this story of the Tower of Babel was a way in which people were trying to shed themselves of their old theologies, their old notions about where God was. The old God, or perhaps I should say, the old understanding of God doesn’t come off too well in this story. The people of Babel, the story says, all spoke the same language; they were perfectly in tune with another, which certainly must have facilitated the building of that tower. Anyone who has ever built anything knows that communication is often one of the first casualties. On some projects the architect and the builder might as well come from separate planets and the owner is suddenly thrown into a world of a strange vocabulary, like the word “tomorrow”, it might mean the next day but it might also mean 3 weeks from the next day. But in Babel, that was not the case. Everyone was on the same page, and so the building of the Tower was ahead of schedule; it was a thing of beauty, not only the tower itself but the harmony of those who were building it. The world had never seen such togetherness. Now, listen to the language of the bible and the implicit theology in how God supposedly responds to this wonderfully harmonious human enterprise. And the Lord came down
(and please notice the The God or the gods who are portrayed here are shown to be jealous, petty and defensive of humanity’s enormous potential. Now, some would say that this was simply a story in which people tried to understand why there are so many different languages and cultures and why it is that working together for common cause is so very difficult. No doubt there is some truth to that interpretation, but for me, I think that in this story humanity is trying to re-imagine who and where God is. Not the old polytheism with all the gods up there someplace, jealous of Prometheus, jealous of our enormous human potential; not a God or Gods that can be reached by climbing up Jacob’s ladder; we don’t need a tower or a spire to reach God, and so the Tower of Babel might be thought of as a Tower of theological Babel, a story that necessitates a re-thinking of where God can be found – not “up there” or at least not only “up there” but also down here, and when you think about that geometry, if you think about this relocation of God on the horizontal plane, if you think about taking God out of the skies and think of God as being on the plane or the plains on which we live, the implications for the earth and creation and human community are enormous. But rather than use this story to hammer that point home, I think I will close elliptically by sharing one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost. As I share this poem, think of the Tower of Babel and think of the geometry of your own theology. Where is God for you? Up there and out there some place, remote, distant, disconnected from the earth, or do you think of God as being more like what the theologian Paul Tillich called “The Ground of our Being.” Do you think of God as being detached from the earth, or do you think of God as being more like the loving energy, the reservoir of love in which we live and move and have our being? What is the geometry of your own theology? The poem is entitled “Birches”, and it is about a boy who loves to climb trees in the New England forest. Maybe he too was born on the plains, in the flat lands, and so climbing trees for him was like being able to see what was on the other side of the world. Maybe, in our pursuit of happiness, we need both the horizontal and the vertical. He loved to climb not just any tree but the beautiful snow white birch, those to which you can climb to the top if you are strong enough, but because of the nature of the tree, once you’re up at the top of the tree, by your own weight you are brought back down to the earth once again. And so here’s the conclusion to that poem: So was I once myself a swinger of
birches. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place
for love: And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear
no more, One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. Amen
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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