The Undoing Of Babel
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Several years ago, my wife and I took a vacation where we drove to Mexico City in an old Volkswagen van. Neither of us speak Spanish, but along the primary route down and in Mexico City itself, we had no trouble communicating because many people there spoke English. After spending a few days in that city, we decided to make our exit from Mexico by driving up a highway along the west coast of the country. That route provided us many attractive views of the Pacific Ocean and, as we got farther north, the Gulf of California, the body of water between the Mexican mainland and the Baja peninsula.
As we got away from the more populated areas, we found fewer people who spoke English. We were carrying most of our food in the vehicle, so we didn't have to negotiate restaurants away from the main cities, and we were able to purchase gas for the van without much difficulty, because both we and the attendant knew what we were after. We had learned to understand the money exchange, and had memorized a few Spanish phrases that enabled us to ask where the bathrooms were, to say, "Thank you," and to convey that we didn't speak the language. We ambled along without too much problem.
Then one day, spotting a beautiful and mostly deserted beach, we decided to stop and swim. After we were there a few minutes, we noticed a man and a boy some distance out in the water, and they seemed to be trying to push a raft of some sort toward the beach. They appeared to be having some difficulty, so I waded out, grabbed hold of the raft, and helped them maneuver it to shore.
They were quite appreciative and the man began speaking rapidly in Spanish, pointing to the rocks placed on the raft. Adhering to the rocks were oyster-like shells, and as the man continued to speak, he pried open a shell and pulled out the material inside. I guessed that this was abalone, and the man handed the material to me, indicating with his hands that I should eat it, raw, something I wasn't accustomed to. At the same moment, my wife was saying to me in panic, "Don't let them give me one of those!"
But I gathered that this was their way of saying, "Thank you,"and I didn't want to appear rude, so I ate it. Then the man launched into a new monologue, which, of course, we couldn't understand, but he was using his hand to point toward a hut not far way and was making motions that finally led me to believe he was inviting us to join his family for dinner.
I would have loved to accept the invitation and to have the experience that such a visit would bring, but because we couldn't communicate effectively, I felt the whole thing would be awkward and exhausting. So using my own hand motions, I indicated that we had to be moving on, and after a profuse exchange of "Gracias,"we made our way back to the van and drove off.
It was an occasion where I wished for some sort of device such as the one that supposedly exists on the old Star Trek series -- a little machine called the Universal Translator. In the series, it takes the language of any interplanetary species and converts it accurately so that the individuals involved can communicate freely. Of course, Star Trek is science fiction, and I have my doubts that such a device will ever be invented that will handle every language automatically and accurately. Communication is never a simple thing.1
But thinking about the difficulties of communicating across language barriers brings us to the stories from our two scripture readings for today.
Once upon a time, so the older story tells us, the whole world spoke the same language. The people had heard God's command to fill the earth and spread out over the land. Some, however, thought they knew better than God. They didn't want to scatter over the earth, so they built a city with a high tower, one designed to cause them to be praised as a great people, and to make them powerful enough to defy God's command.
What they were doing was an act of rebellion against God, so God came amongst them and confused their language so that they could no longer understand one another. Work on the city and tower became impossible, and in the end, the people scattered as God had wanted in the first place. The city and the unfinished tower came to be called Babel, which actually meant "gate of God," and was an early version of the name Babylon, but it sounded much like the Hebrew word balal, which means "confuse." Because of what happened at that place, the word Babel came to mean confusion. We could say that at Babel, the Lord made babblers out of the people by confusing their language.
That old story is a myth, probably told by ancient people to account for the existence of an unfinished tower somewhere or to explain why the people of the earth do not all speak the same language. But it is significant that the people imagined the world before Babel as one where everyone could understand one another. The way God meant the world to be from the beginning, so the thinking went, was that people could communicate clearly and without confusion.
When you think about it, that's not a far-fetched idea. Consider how much trouble we have in life because of communication difficulties -- even between people who share a common language. How many marriages, for example, have problems because neither of the partners talk to each other about what's actually on their hearts, or when they do talk, one doesn't really listen to the other, or one lectures the other? Or even further, when both parties are trying to communicate and are working at paying attention, they still hear each other through the filters of emotion, weariness, momentary lapses, different understandings of the meaning of certain words, resentments, preconceived notions, defensiveness, self-centeredness, and so on.
But communication difficulties are not limited to marriage. Back when my wife was in college, she had to write a paper for a geography class. The professor handed out a sheet with the topic of the paper, but when you read it, you were left wondering what in the world he was talking about. My wife talked to a couple of her classmates, but they were as much in the dark as she was. She showed the sheet to me, and I was baffled as well. It happened that I knew the geography teacher at the local high school, so I suggested she talk to him about it. She did, and though that teacher wanted to be helpful, he wasn't sure what the professor was looking for, either.
Finally, my wife decided to simply answer the question as literally as possible, which resulted in a paper only a page and a half long. When she got to class, she discovered that most of her fellow students had papers ten to twelve pages long, so she was convinced that she had misunderstood the assignment, but having nothing else, she handed the paper in.
At the next class, the professor was angry that students had wasted his time with such "claptrap," as he described it. He said that only one student had done the assignment correctly, and he held up my wife's paper, with an A on it.
But the failure in that case was actually his. He had not communicated clearly, even though he was convinced that he had.
You no doubt have your own stories of miscommunications. Sometimes they are humorous, but often they are serious and result in damage to relationships, to partnerships, to friendships, and to other ways in which we humans try to connect with one another.
The other story from our scripture readings is the account of Pentecost, the celebration of the day when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus. The major miracle of that day was one of communication. After the Holy Spirit fired up those followers of Jesus in the upper room in Jerusalem, they rushed out into the streets and began preaching. Because Pentecost was a major festival in the Jewish religion, the city was filled with pilgrims from every corner of the Roman Empire. The reading from Acts spells out the diversity of nationalities: "Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...."These groups had no common language; each group spoke its own, but when the disciples of Jesus started preaching, all speaking Aramaic, everybody understood. The miracle was an undoing of Babel.
The story of Babel is often read on this Sunday of the year because it stands in contrast to the events of Pentecost. At Babel, the people started out with the ability to understand one another in a common language. They lost that ability and communication ceased. At Pentecost, people who did not speak the same language understood the gospel message clearly.
That reminds us that one goal of Christianity is to help us understand one another and to communicate without filters. But that is only part of the story. Jesus told us that we need to love our neighbor and our enemies. You see, it's possible to clearly understand someone but to disagree profoundly with them. I suspect that the Israelis and the Palestinians each have some pretty clear understanding of what the other side wants, but they do not agree that what the other side wants is valid. They have not yet communicated in the love that can set both sides free.
There is a sense that what Pentecost shows us is unrealistic. We can hardly envision a day when all communication barriers come down, and where there is no misunderstanding among humans. In fact, life as we experience it is more like the Babel story than the Pentecost account. Israelis vs. Palestinians, parents vs. children, husband vs. wife, employer vs. employee, student vs. teacher, "jocks" vs. "freaks,""preppies" vs. "Goths," and on and on. Even in the church, we find denominations that can't agree with one another and there are sometimes strong disagreements within single congregations.
But Pentecost is the event that started the church worldwide. Our beginning is marked by an event where factions were overcome and people of diverse backgrounds and languages not only understood one another, but were brought together with a common goal. Acts tells us that some 3,000 people became Christians that very day.
And so, though we have all too much experience with the inability to communicate clearly and with misunderstandings and disagreements, we also have the hope that Christianity holds out before us that the love of Christ within can break through those separating barriers. I suspect that if there is one thing that will be different in eternity it will be that communication and agreement will be givens.
The fact is, however, that sometimes we see it happen even now. We could call it a foretaste of eternity, but it's also the reality that can occur when we give Christ full rein in our lives. Here's one example:
Writer, Anne Lamott, attends a Presbyterian church in northern California that has a racially mixed membership. In one of her columns, which I heard on an NPR broadcast,2 she told about a man who began attending their church after he was diagnosed with AIDS, which he'd contracted from a male partner. The newcomer was white. Because of the AIDS, this man was weaker and more diminished each time he appeared in church. What's more, shortly after he started coming, his partner died of the disease. The man later said that Jesus slipped into the hole in his heart left by his partner's death.
In that church, there was a black woman in the choir who was very devout, but she was standoffish toward this afflicted newcomer. Raised in the South by fundamentalists, she had been taught that his way of life -- that he himself therefore -- was an abomination, and it was difficult for her to see him any other way. She was also a little afraid of contracting his disease. But he came to church almost every week for a year, and won just about everyone else over. Then, however, he missed a couple of weeks, and when he came back, he was emaciated and far gone.
On that Sunday, the first hymn was, "His Eye Is On The Sparrow," and when the congregation stood to sing, this man, rotting from AIDS, was unable to rise. He sat there holding the hymnal in his lap. After a moment, however, the black woman went to his side, bent down and lifted him up.
Hear the end of the story in Lamott's own words:
She held him next to her, and he was draped over and against her like a child, and they sang. And ... the black woman and the man with AIDS, of whom she was so afraid, were trying to sing. But they both began to cry.
Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers; but as she held him up, she suddenly lay her face against his, put her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his and let all those spooky fluids mingle with hers.
Lamott comments that she didn't know if what had happened was "an honest-to-God little miracle," but that it was "plenty of miracle" for her. But of course it was a miracle, the miracle of Pentecost, the undoing of Babel.
That kind of communication, you see, is a godly thing. It's no mere coincidence that the day the church was born, the day the Spirit filled Jesus' followers, was the day some people discovered they could communicate the love of God across previously uncrossable barriers. It was no accident that Pentecost undid Babel.
That's what the activity of the Spirit within us always empowers us to do. May we be open to let the Spirit work within us and God's love come through us.
__________
1. My thanks to Carlos Wilton for this illustration, The Immediate Word, June 8, 2003.
2. I heard this broadcast sometime in the spring of 2003, but it comes from a column Anne Lamott wrote for Salon Magazine, January 6, 1997, called "Knocking on Heaven's Door." www.salon.com/jan97/lamott970106.html.
As we got away from the more populated areas, we found fewer people who spoke English. We were carrying most of our food in the vehicle, so we didn't have to negotiate restaurants away from the main cities, and we were able to purchase gas for the van without much difficulty, because both we and the attendant knew what we were after. We had learned to understand the money exchange, and had memorized a few Spanish phrases that enabled us to ask where the bathrooms were, to say, "Thank you," and to convey that we didn't speak the language. We ambled along without too much problem.
Then one day, spotting a beautiful and mostly deserted beach, we decided to stop and swim. After we were there a few minutes, we noticed a man and a boy some distance out in the water, and they seemed to be trying to push a raft of some sort toward the beach. They appeared to be having some difficulty, so I waded out, grabbed hold of the raft, and helped them maneuver it to shore.
They were quite appreciative and the man began speaking rapidly in Spanish, pointing to the rocks placed on the raft. Adhering to the rocks were oyster-like shells, and as the man continued to speak, he pried open a shell and pulled out the material inside. I guessed that this was abalone, and the man handed the material to me, indicating with his hands that I should eat it, raw, something I wasn't accustomed to. At the same moment, my wife was saying to me in panic, "Don't let them give me one of those!"
But I gathered that this was their way of saying, "Thank you,"and I didn't want to appear rude, so I ate it. Then the man launched into a new monologue, which, of course, we couldn't understand, but he was using his hand to point toward a hut not far way and was making motions that finally led me to believe he was inviting us to join his family for dinner.
I would have loved to accept the invitation and to have the experience that such a visit would bring, but because we couldn't communicate effectively, I felt the whole thing would be awkward and exhausting. So using my own hand motions, I indicated that we had to be moving on, and after a profuse exchange of "Gracias,"we made our way back to the van and drove off.
It was an occasion where I wished for some sort of device such as the one that supposedly exists on the old Star Trek series -- a little machine called the Universal Translator. In the series, it takes the language of any interplanetary species and converts it accurately so that the individuals involved can communicate freely. Of course, Star Trek is science fiction, and I have my doubts that such a device will ever be invented that will handle every language automatically and accurately. Communication is never a simple thing.1
But thinking about the difficulties of communicating across language barriers brings us to the stories from our two scripture readings for today.
Once upon a time, so the older story tells us, the whole world spoke the same language. The people had heard God's command to fill the earth and spread out over the land. Some, however, thought they knew better than God. They didn't want to scatter over the earth, so they built a city with a high tower, one designed to cause them to be praised as a great people, and to make them powerful enough to defy God's command.
What they were doing was an act of rebellion against God, so God came amongst them and confused their language so that they could no longer understand one another. Work on the city and tower became impossible, and in the end, the people scattered as God had wanted in the first place. The city and the unfinished tower came to be called Babel, which actually meant "gate of God," and was an early version of the name Babylon, but it sounded much like the Hebrew word balal, which means "confuse." Because of what happened at that place, the word Babel came to mean confusion. We could say that at Babel, the Lord made babblers out of the people by confusing their language.
That old story is a myth, probably told by ancient people to account for the existence of an unfinished tower somewhere or to explain why the people of the earth do not all speak the same language. But it is significant that the people imagined the world before Babel as one where everyone could understand one another. The way God meant the world to be from the beginning, so the thinking went, was that people could communicate clearly and without confusion.
When you think about it, that's not a far-fetched idea. Consider how much trouble we have in life because of communication difficulties -- even between people who share a common language. How many marriages, for example, have problems because neither of the partners talk to each other about what's actually on their hearts, or when they do talk, one doesn't really listen to the other, or one lectures the other? Or even further, when both parties are trying to communicate and are working at paying attention, they still hear each other through the filters of emotion, weariness, momentary lapses, different understandings of the meaning of certain words, resentments, preconceived notions, defensiveness, self-centeredness, and so on.
But communication difficulties are not limited to marriage. Back when my wife was in college, she had to write a paper for a geography class. The professor handed out a sheet with the topic of the paper, but when you read it, you were left wondering what in the world he was talking about. My wife talked to a couple of her classmates, but they were as much in the dark as she was. She showed the sheet to me, and I was baffled as well. It happened that I knew the geography teacher at the local high school, so I suggested she talk to him about it. She did, and though that teacher wanted to be helpful, he wasn't sure what the professor was looking for, either.
Finally, my wife decided to simply answer the question as literally as possible, which resulted in a paper only a page and a half long. When she got to class, she discovered that most of her fellow students had papers ten to twelve pages long, so she was convinced that she had misunderstood the assignment, but having nothing else, she handed the paper in.
At the next class, the professor was angry that students had wasted his time with such "claptrap," as he described it. He said that only one student had done the assignment correctly, and he held up my wife's paper, with an A on it.
But the failure in that case was actually his. He had not communicated clearly, even though he was convinced that he had.
You no doubt have your own stories of miscommunications. Sometimes they are humorous, but often they are serious and result in damage to relationships, to partnerships, to friendships, and to other ways in which we humans try to connect with one another.
The other story from our scripture readings is the account of Pentecost, the celebration of the day when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus. The major miracle of that day was one of communication. After the Holy Spirit fired up those followers of Jesus in the upper room in Jerusalem, they rushed out into the streets and began preaching. Because Pentecost was a major festival in the Jewish religion, the city was filled with pilgrims from every corner of the Roman Empire. The reading from Acts spells out the diversity of nationalities: "Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...."These groups had no common language; each group spoke its own, but when the disciples of Jesus started preaching, all speaking Aramaic, everybody understood. The miracle was an undoing of Babel.
The story of Babel is often read on this Sunday of the year because it stands in contrast to the events of Pentecost. At Babel, the people started out with the ability to understand one another in a common language. They lost that ability and communication ceased. At Pentecost, people who did not speak the same language understood the gospel message clearly.
That reminds us that one goal of Christianity is to help us understand one another and to communicate without filters. But that is only part of the story. Jesus told us that we need to love our neighbor and our enemies. You see, it's possible to clearly understand someone but to disagree profoundly with them. I suspect that the Israelis and the Palestinians each have some pretty clear understanding of what the other side wants, but they do not agree that what the other side wants is valid. They have not yet communicated in the love that can set both sides free.
There is a sense that what Pentecost shows us is unrealistic. We can hardly envision a day when all communication barriers come down, and where there is no misunderstanding among humans. In fact, life as we experience it is more like the Babel story than the Pentecost account. Israelis vs. Palestinians, parents vs. children, husband vs. wife, employer vs. employee, student vs. teacher, "jocks" vs. "freaks,""preppies" vs. "Goths," and on and on. Even in the church, we find denominations that can't agree with one another and there are sometimes strong disagreements within single congregations.
But Pentecost is the event that started the church worldwide. Our beginning is marked by an event where factions were overcome and people of diverse backgrounds and languages not only understood one another, but were brought together with a common goal. Acts tells us that some 3,000 people became Christians that very day.
And so, though we have all too much experience with the inability to communicate clearly and with misunderstandings and disagreements, we also have the hope that Christianity holds out before us that the love of Christ within can break through those separating barriers. I suspect that if there is one thing that will be different in eternity it will be that communication and agreement will be givens.
The fact is, however, that sometimes we see it happen even now. We could call it a foretaste of eternity, but it's also the reality that can occur when we give Christ full rein in our lives. Here's one example:
Writer, Anne Lamott, attends a Presbyterian church in northern California that has a racially mixed membership. In one of her columns, which I heard on an NPR broadcast,2 she told about a man who began attending their church after he was diagnosed with AIDS, which he'd contracted from a male partner. The newcomer was white. Because of the AIDS, this man was weaker and more diminished each time he appeared in church. What's more, shortly after he started coming, his partner died of the disease. The man later said that Jesus slipped into the hole in his heart left by his partner's death.
In that church, there was a black woman in the choir who was very devout, but she was standoffish toward this afflicted newcomer. Raised in the South by fundamentalists, she had been taught that his way of life -- that he himself therefore -- was an abomination, and it was difficult for her to see him any other way. She was also a little afraid of contracting his disease. But he came to church almost every week for a year, and won just about everyone else over. Then, however, he missed a couple of weeks, and when he came back, he was emaciated and far gone.
On that Sunday, the first hymn was, "His Eye Is On The Sparrow," and when the congregation stood to sing, this man, rotting from AIDS, was unable to rise. He sat there holding the hymnal in his lap. After a moment, however, the black woman went to his side, bent down and lifted him up.
Hear the end of the story in Lamott's own words:
She held him next to her, and he was draped over and against her like a child, and they sang. And ... the black woman and the man with AIDS, of whom she was so afraid, were trying to sing. But they both began to cry.
Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers; but as she held him up, she suddenly lay her face against his, put her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his and let all those spooky fluids mingle with hers.
Lamott comments that she didn't know if what had happened was "an honest-to-God little miracle," but that it was "plenty of miracle" for her. But of course it was a miracle, the miracle of Pentecost, the undoing of Babel.
That kind of communication, you see, is a godly thing. It's no mere coincidence that the day the church was born, the day the Spirit filled Jesus' followers, was the day some people discovered they could communicate the love of God across previously uncrossable barriers. It was no accident that Pentecost undid Babel.
That's what the activity of the Spirit within us always empowers us to do. May we be open to let the Spirit work within us and God's love come through us.
__________
1. My thanks to Carlos Wilton for this illustration, The Immediate Word, June 8, 2003.
2. I heard this broadcast sometime in the spring of 2003, but it comes from a column Anne Lamott wrote for Salon Magazine, January 6, 1997, called "Knocking on Heaven's Door." www.salon.com/jan97/lamott970106.html.
