Blessing Babel

May 19^th, 2013         “Blessing Babel”            Rev. Heather Jepsen

Genesis 11:1-9 with Acts 2:1-21

          You might not know that I start my sermon each week on Monday morning.  I hardly have time for one word to settle in before I start brewing on what I am going to say the next Sunday.  Each Monday morning, I meet with a small group of Warrensburg pastors and preachers to read over the texts for the coming Sunday.  This is a great opportunity to start the week fresh, bounce ideas off others in discussion, and start ruminating on a topic for Sunday.  Some weeks I get nothing out of it but a good visit, some weeks it lights me on fire.  This was one of those on fire weeks for me.

          We were sitting in the group and we approached the Genesis text, the tower of Babel.  As the story was read I started to think, wait a minute, this doesn’t feel right.  God punishes the people for seeking unity?  That doesn’t sound like my God.  What is going on here?

          The usual explanations were presented; the people are sinful, the people are proud, the people are seeking to go against God.  I know that story, I’ve preached that sermon.  How many pastors will sit in a pulpit today and tell folks that the scattering at Babel was a punishment that was reversed at Pentecost?  Lots will.  That is the Pentecost sermon.  I know, I’ve preached it multiple times.  But this week, that didn’t sound right to me.

          So after group on Monday, I started digging a bit.  My first thought was that this was some primeval story explaining the origins of language.  I was wondering if perhaps this story existed in early, early cultures and that the Hebrews adopted it for their own sacred text.  That answer gets me off the hook, as suddenly this could be a story about any god (lower case g) and not necessarily the God I worship, the Judeo-Christian uppercase G God.  But, I couldn’t find good support for this theory, and standing in the pulpit claiming this Bible story isn’t about our God, is probably not a good idea.

          So I went back to the drawing board, back to the text.  Look with me at Genesis 11 and tell me where it says the people were sinners, the people were proud, the people were making themselves into God.  It doesn’t say those things anywhere.  It says the people wanted to build a city, and it was a big city with a big tower.  It says the people wanted to have a lasting legacy, a name for themselves.  They did not want the name “God” they wanted their own name.  And they wanted to be united.  They wanted to be with other people like them.

          And God comes down, with the heavenly court, and mixes them up.  “Let’s mix up their language,” God says.  The word “confuse” balal in Hebrew, can also be translated mix.  God seems to worry about what people might do if they are too united, if they are too much the same.   And God scatters the people over the earth in a variety of places with a variety of tongues.  Nowhere does God say that the people deserve punishment, nowhere does it say that the mixing is wrong or bad; in fact there is no mention of sin anywhere in this story.

          So I started thinking, what if the diversity of language, the so called punishment of Babel, wasn’t punishment at all.  What if it was a blessing?  What if God’s desire for humanity is diversity.  Diversity is a blessing, diversity is good, diversity is the divine will for humankind.  How boring would we be if we were all the same?  Wouldn’t a creator God value difference and diversity?  If this story is about judgment, then I am inclined to say “That’s not my God.”  But if this story is about blessing, then that sounds like a God I know.

          So if this story is about the blessings of God, about God’s will for humanity and creation to exist with diversity, then that changes the traditional reading of the Pentecost text as well.  Rather than being two stories back-to-back, Pentecost a reverse of Babel (which you read in almost every commentary) I want to look at these two stories side by side or facing in the same direction, Pentecost a blessing of Babel.

          Let’s look at the Pentecost text in Acts 2.  “When the day of Pentecost had come they were all together in one place.”  Who were all together?  The traditional reading is that the disciples were all together, this miracle happened to the twelve of them.  But the text doesn’t say it was the disciples.  It just says, “they were all together”.  Back up to verse 15 in chapter one and we read that Peter has been addressing the early church and the crowd numbered 120 people.  Perhaps this is the “they” who were all together.          If the spirit of God came upon the whole early church community, 120 men women and children, that is a lot different than it coming on just the 12 apostles.  I think the text supports this alternate reading, as “they were all together in the same place”, “tongues of fire rested on each of them”, “all of them filled with the Holy Spirit.”  Why does it have to be the traditional interpretation of just the 12?  Why can’t everyone who was there, all persons of the early church, be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit?  Now that is a Pentecost event!  And that is a mark of God, blessing in diversity.

And of course, the blessing of diversity continues.  The sound of all these people, 120 people, speaking in a multitude of languages, with energy and fire, is a cacophony.  The gathered crowds, from every nation under the stars, come together to witness what is going on.  And the miracle occurs as each one hears those blessed by the Holy Spirit speaking in their own native language.

If Babel is punishment, and Pentecost is a reversal of Babel, then wouldn’t everyone be speaking the same language?  But that’s not what happened at all.  If Babel is a blessing, and Pentecost confirms the blessing of Babel, then God is at work confirming the beauty of diversity.  God is at work, affirming all of these people, from all places of the earth, with all sorts of languages as good and as people of God. 

         The miracle of Pentecost is the blessing of diversity.  It is a repeat of Babel.  Those who were the same, those who were the early church, those who were all Galileans speaking in their own dialect, are once again dispersed, and blessed with the ability to speak other languages.   Pentecost is a blessing of Babel!  God’s desire for humanity is not sameness, is not uniformity, is not one people with one language.  No, God’s desire in creation is diversity.  And diversity is a blessing from God, given at Babel, given again at Pentecost!

So where do we go now?  To the church of course!  Pentecost is typically thought of as the birth of the church.  This is the story of how the church was born.  And how was the church born?  With unity and uniformity and no talking, and sitting straight and still in your pew?  No, that’s not how the church was born.  Like all of us, the church was born in a mess.  It was loud and confusing and weird and scary because everyone there was different and everyone there was speaking a different language.  The church doesn’t look like this, with folks all dressed the same and doing the same thing.  No, the church looks like Times Square.  With everyone going every which way, looking different, talking different, and doing different things. 

The miracle of Pentecost and the miracle of the church, is that we can be diverse, we can be different, we can even say different things, and still be the same thing, still be the church.  Like two people headed toward the same goal, we don’t need to walk the same path.  We can get there going two different ways, and both still get there. 

In the brown bag Bible study we are talking a lot about the Reformation, and this time we are in now of re-forming again, or as some call it, “The Great Emergence.”  Perhaps, we can find the blessing of diversity again there, in that conversation. 

So often as modern Christians, we lament the vast numbers of denominations.  Seriously, how many denominations are there, how many in the reformed family, how many in the Presbyterian family?  They are legion.  And we always assume that’s a bad thing.  But what if it isn’t?  What if denominationalism, when we do it right, not when we fight, is a blessing and not a punishment?  What if the reformation was another Babel, another Pentecost, another breaking up of unity to ensure the blessing of diversity?  And what if we are in another breaking up time right now?  Perhaps this age of unrest and non-unity is a blessing from God?  Perhaps we have been too united and now we are called to embrace diversity within the church again.  Perhaps we are called to go out into the world, in diverse ways, bringing the message of God to people who are not like us.  And perhaps we are called to bring the message of God in languages where it hasn’t been spoken before, outside the church in social media or other new gathering places.

  O sure, it’s a scary idea in a scary time.  That is a unifying theme in all these stories.  I am sure that the people of Babel were scared when they were dispersed over the earth.  And I am sure that the people of Pentecost were terrified when everyone suddenly started speaking different languages.  Why else would Peter reference the end of the world, “with blood and fire and smoky mist?”  We humans like sameness.  Change and diversity are scary!

But maybe we just like sameness because it is easy.  We like to tell a story where sameness and unity is right, is a blessing, is ordained by God.  But what if that is not the true story?  What if God’s actual design is diversity that appears as chaos, authority that appears as lack of authority, and church that appears as non-church?  What if God’s actual design is that we move out of our comfort zone and move into a new way, a different way of being church all the time?  Would that not be the work of the Holy Spirit – birthing church in a new way again over and over?

I am not the only person feeling the unrest in the world of church right now, and I certainly don’t have any answers.  But I do feel Pentecostal energy and fire around these questions.  Perhaps the Holy Spirit is trying breathe new life into us, a new blessing of diversity.  I certainly hope so.  Amen.