The Burden of Babel

Genesis 11:1-9

Wednesday, 28 March 2018

Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

Let us pray. Lord God, you are omniscient and immutable. Beyond our understanding, you seek what is good for your Creation. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer, so that we may better love you with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds and with all our strengths and love our neighbors as ourselves. We ask this through the mercy and merit of Jesus Christ our Savior, who by his redemption and ascension is the mediator of our faith and worship, and the interpreter of our words and actions. In his name, we pray. Amen.

I was walking through Cape Town with my Xhosa friend. We were headed to the market to get some fruit, minding our own business, sticking to the sidewalks, and keeping our voices politely quiet, even though the strident streets were filled with cackling birdsongs, construction sounds, and the rumble of cars. Last time I went to this market, I went alone, and nobody seemed to care. But together, we were glared at as if we were committing some kind of crime. When a black woman and a white man walk city streets together, they should not have to feel the resentment of racist passersby who cannot seem to embrace the slow and steady progress of post-Apartheid South Africa.

It’s natural to cling to whom or to that which we find familiar. We cheer for our cricket team; we vote for our candidate during elections; we pray for our soldiers where they rage against the dying of the light. We care for our own on every level. But tell me: does loving one’s own need transform into hating the Other; does democracy need decline into political duality; does distinction need devolve into discrimination?

We have forgotten the pivotal anti-Apartheid philosophy of Ubuntu. Ubuntu says, “I am because we are.” As a collective, we recognize both diversity and unity in humanity, for we need not have the same skin color or socioeconomic background to witness the lack of requirements it takes to be human. Therefore, we each bear a tremendous responsibility in shaping the lives of each of those with whom we interact, for we are more of what we are—more real, more human, more imago dei—because of the Other. As C.S. Lewis put it, “I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

We must recognize otherness as ordered by God in the divine story. On the plains of Shinar, while the Tower of Babel was being built, the people were of one language, one culture, one ethnicity, for they all had descended from the sons of Noah. As the story suggests, this global community intended to settle in one place and in a tower that reached to the heavens. Beyond such ambition was an intent of self-exultation, an inflation beyond the limitations of earthly life. And they wanted not to be scattered, so they perverted finite goods, like the fruits of sociality and proximity, into idols. Behind this shroud of right spirit, the people began construction.

“But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.” God saw all of humanity’s self-exultation, its attempt at immortality, its pre-Flood-like wickedness. At the core of God’s frustration was probably the singularity of their global community, for it contradicted God’s imperative to “fill the earth” from Genesis 1:28. But what the people in Shinar know not is their mutable limits and the immutable will and omnipotence of God—oh, how the Lord must wince at the pride we take in the futility of our own worldly achievements!

In confounding our language, God does not admit any form of divine fear of humanity; rather, God expresses divine fear for humanity. In fearing for us, God actively reaches into Creation to complete the necessary forms of civilized humanity. While we might see this as a limitation of our potential to do good, the dispersion is equally a divine prevention of greater potentials to do evil, for there is no guarantee that humanity would seek what is good in a world-unifying culture. So, while we do not have the eternal knowledge needed to see what would have happened if the tower in Shinar had been built, we can assume that God’s confounding of our language was for our own good.

One commentary put it like this: “The fragmentation of humanity is a positive step forward, because the divine plan of redemption requires a particularized instrument, a nation rather than what contemporary pundits refer to as the ‘global community.’” (RENO) Of course, “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” Therefore, death and resurrection were already on the heart of God.

But if the Lord intentionally scattered and diversified humanity, we cannot see the other as vile by their particularities. We cannot hate simply because of difference. For at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit did not speak only English only to white men. No, the Spirit empowered the disciples to speak in the languages of those by whom they were surrounded. The Spirit reached into culture, rather than demanding culture reach out to the Spirit.

This goes hand-in-hand with the Church in Southern Africa’s Declaration of Faith, which says that Christ “became human and lived and died and rose in triumph to reconcile both the individual and the world to God, to break down every separating barrier of race, culture or class, and to unite all God’s people into one body.” (UPCSA 2008) In no way does this imply that Christ seeks to dismantle diversity. No, it declares that Christ understands difference, underscores it, and undoes the Shinar-structures we have built between.

The imago dei commands us to recognize that God is within ourselves and within the Other, for we were all made by God and made in God’s image. Thus, diversity should be seen for what it is: a manifestation of the Creator’s inspiration. By scattering the Babel-builders, God rejects the standardization of community and accepts a plurality of worship, for “a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal.” “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” It matters not if you are a black or white, woman or man, similar or different.

What I’m trying to say is this: that which God created is Good, and all things are created by God. Therefore, beyond the challenges that we will face, we must be able to recognize that God-given potential is universal. To reveal the beloved-ness of another is to embody the love of Christ. Seek we the imago dei in the Other as they search for God, for our holy order is not to transform people to be like us but to transform people to be like Christ.

If we believe that faith can only be lived in the ways in which we do it, or that we need to dress in certain clothes or speak with certain words, then we deny the very reason behind our existence. See, our God is a God of communion, of three persons in one. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct members of the Trinity. In this way, the Church is one body in one Spirit, but consists of many distinct members, some different from you, some different from me, but all loved by God and saved by Christ Jesus.

You might be wondering what Jesus has to do with this Old Testament narrative. Why have we spent so much time talking about the New in the Old? The way I see it, the Gospels and the story of the Tower of Babel are bookends. With the scattering of the people in Shinar, Scripture’s primeval history comes to an end and sets the stage for the story of redemption: the covenant that begins with Abraham and is fulfilled in Christ. Babel was the end of part one. But Jesus is alpha and omega. Therefore, we must look ahead in order to understand biblical hindsight. We peer into the real reason for Babel and everything that follows the scattering in Genesis 11.

“What can be known about God is plain to us, because God is revealed naturally. Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things the Lord has made.” Two important distinctions can be drawn from this passage from Romans 1. The first: Christ’s consuming love transcends culture in ways that foil anyone’s claim to possess exclusive access to God, which wasn’t even the case in the Old Testament, as we see beginning with Melchizedek in Genesis 14. The second: by Christ’s free gift of salvation, we all become beloved children of God. Creation brings to all an awareness of the Divine.

Mercifully, this message demands no global community. Christ accepts and assures our diversity. And who can claim superiority over another if we all stem from Adam, the sons of Noah, and the people in Shinar, whose singularity and self-exultation were going to bring about neither an ability to better love God with all their hearts and with all their souls and with all their minds and with all their strengths nor an opportunity to love their neighbors as themselves. In our current and God-designed state of difference, we must be willing to see the imago dei in the Other, for when we embrace that a Xhosa woman and a white man can walk together down a Cape Town street to the market, then we begin to live into the understanding that God is love.

As the retired South African Anglican Archbishop and social activist Desmond Tutu once remarked, “Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among God’s people?” May we live in full embrace of divinely-inspired difference and with the understanding that each of us bares the imago dei, the image of our Creator.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.