The story of the Tower of Babel reminds us that we weren’t made for dominance and isolation, but to scatter God’s glory throughout creation.
Genesis 11:1-9
Well, this is Memorial Day Sunday, the day when we stop and remember those who have fallen in the service of our country. When I was a kid I remember my grandparents, who were teenagers during the war, calling it “Decoration Day.” We spent time on that Monday decorating graves of soldiers, but also of loved ones in the local cemetery. I have been privileged over the years to speak and to offer prayer at many Memorial Day ceremonies in cemeteries across the nation. It’s always a solemn and humbling event.
For most Americans, Memorial Day marks the traditional beginning of the summer and there are picnics to be had, meat to be grilled, and relaxing to be done. The events at the cemeteries are less attended, and many people have a vague understanding of what the day is really about. And yet, this is as important a day as we have on our calendar, for it causes us to remember the sacrifices of brave men and women. But in another way, it causes us to remember with deep reflection the reasons those sacrifices took place.
This summer also marks the centennial anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and in preparation for that commemoration I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this period of history, which is often not given a lot of attention. We see lots of movies made about World War II, for example, but it’s really World War I that has shaped the modern world more than any other event in history.
Barbara Tuchman’s classic book The Guns of August describes the beginning of the war and the political situation like this: “Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.” Great powers like Germany, France, and Russia were poised on the brink of a major war for decades, with Germany and Russia at the literal and figurative center of it all. Philip Jenkins, in his new book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, sees the ambitions of some of the Great Powers as being almost messianic in character as “the quest for communal unity and strength, enforced by the purging of unwilling elements and pervasive themes of sacrifice and blood” that led nations like Germany and Russia to “claim a vanguard role in new messianic movements seeking global dominance.”
In 1914, as the war was beginning, our own United States was seeking a neutral, isolationist position, which had been the case since the days of George Washington. American presidents were careful to keep their affairs internal. It wasn’t until German U-Boats began attacking American shipping in 1915 that President Woodrow Wilson committed US troops to the war, where 323,000 became casualties—a figure that represents a small fraction of the more than 37 million killed, wounded, and missing on both sides during the entire four years of the war.
The quest for dominance and the elusive security of isolation are foundational human drives that are both legacies of Adam’s sin. As we continue our series in Genesis, we see that things didn’t change that much after the flood, which Joe so powerfully described last week, and they haven’t changed much since. In Genesis 11, we see that the humans have gathered together in an isolated city to “make a name” for themselves—to not be scattered, but to memorialize their own dominance and isolation, as prideful humanity is wont to do, even at the cost of millions of lives.
Before we dive into this story, we need to take a moment to consider when this story in Genesis might have been written. Most of us grew up hearing that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. That’s the traditional view. Many scholars, however, have suggested that Genesis is actually more a patchwork quilt of traditions from various periods in Israel’s life—from the time of Moses all the way to the years after the Exile to Babylon. It’s hard not to see this when you read the text closely and consider the subjects. Many of the stories in these first few chapters of Genesis, in fact, seem to be poking at Babylonian myths and imperial power. The Noah story, for example, is a striking contrast to a similar flood story in Babylonian mythology. We’ve already seen how the story of Adam’s creation mocks the Ancient Near Eastern practice of incarnating gods into idols made out of dirt. It’s hard not to see this story about the tower of Babel, set in “Shinar” which was a Hebrew name for Babylon, as another tale that pokes the empire and its ambitions in the eye and reminds the reader again of God’s creative plan.
Everybody “migrated from the East” to Shinar, Genesis says. The Israelites would have made that journey themselves in the 6th century BC, being taken from their homes as Babylonian captives, and being forced to become like them as strangers in a strange land. Could it be that this story, perhaps an echo of a more ancient story, is editorializing that event?
The Babylonians were part of a series of empires that dominated the Mediterranean world, and they built what was undoubtedly the greatest city in the region. The city’s location between the rivers did not offer much stone for building, so the builders baked bricks out of clay for their construction (“Come let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly,” as Genesis puts it). The legends of the temples and hanging gardens of Babylon are impressive, all built from this brick. Much of the construction, however, was dedicated to the various ways in which the Babylonians worshipped their gods, including huge towers called ziggurats, which were like a stairway to the heavens where the gods could be contacted and worshipped. Hammurabi, one of the great heroes of Babylon’s past, had built a massive ziggurat in Babylon that would have still been there at the time the Israelites were brought to the city in exile. No doubt they saw this massive brick monument to a pagan god and, if this is when Genesis was written, it’s no stretch to see that they would have used it as a symbol for human pride, imperial dominance, and the human desire to rule the whole earth.
This may be the background of the Tower of Babel story. In it, the prideful humans seem to act a lot like they’re building an empire. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The goal of empire is etching a ruler’s name in the history books, securing territory and strengthening its borders. This has been the way of empires since the beginning. In the ancient world, empires went forth to capture territory primarily so that it could keep a steady flow of resources and slaves coming back to serve the city, and everywhere they went they spread their common language and name. Alexander the Great, the great Macedonian conquerer who emerged a little more than two centuries after Babylon, enforced Greek as the primary language of his empire, so much so that nearly a millennia later Greek was still the lingua franca of the Roman empire. Roman emperors made sure that coins circulating through the empire had their faces on them as a way of reminding their subjects whose name they must obey. “Making a name for ourselves” is a thread that runs through the history of the whole world.
This is a story that would remind its ancient readers about the pride of empires, but in the main it’s a story about humanity in general and our continuing failure to heed the command of God. Remember the beginning of the Genesis story—God creates a temple and places humans in it to be his priests, serving and protecting it. He commands them to “be fruitful and multiply” and “fill the earth” so that his righteous reign can be expended to every corner of it. By Genesis 3, however, humans hide in fear and isolation as a result of their sin, their rejection of God’s righteous rule. God judges the world in a great flood and after the waters recede he gives the family of Noah the same command—“be fertile and multiply on the earth.”
But instead of scattering, the humans cluster. Instead of lifting up the name of God, the humans want to make a name for themselves. Instead of remembering that the whole point of God’s creation was God coming to dwell with his people, they build a tower to try and get closer to the heavens. It’s comical really. Look at verse 5—“The Lord came down to see the city and tower, which mortals had built.” Their puny effort hasn’t even come close to reaching God, who has to come down in order to see it!
The people of this city are “one people” and they have “one language.” They are fearful of scattering, as God commanded. Normally, we think unity and speaking a common language is a good thing, and it certainly can be. But when that unity and language is used outside of God’s will for us, we have a problem. In Genesis 11, as in many places in history, we find a people who are unified and organized against the purposes of God. As Walter Brueggeman puts it, “This is a self-made unity in which humanity has a ‘fortress mentality.’ It seeks to survive by its own resources. It seeks to construct a world free of the danger of the holy and immune from the terrors of God in history. It is a unity grounded in fear and characterized by coercion. A human unity without the vision of God’s will is likely to be ordered in oppressive conformity. And it will finally be in ‘vain.’” Dominance and isolation.
It’s interesting to note that the vast majority of the 65+ million men who fought in World War I were from Christian countries, the exception being Turkey. Many of those 37 million casualties were the result of Christians killing other Christians—Christians of different languages and cultures slaughtering one another from trench to trench in no-man’s land. How is that possible? Well, it’s possible when humans, even humans who ostensibly believe in the same God, allow dominance and isolation, fear and security, to guide their actions, rather than obedience to God. The sinful human impulse is that everyone should be like us, talk like us, act like us—and we will fight to keep it that way.
The Babylonians deported many Israelites to Babylon where they were forbidden at various times to conduct their religion or speak their language. They were to look and talk like Babylonians. During World War I, the Turkish Ottoman Empire killed a million and a half Christian Armenians in a terrible genocide. A few decades later, Adolf Hitler exterminated six million Jews because they didn’t fit his ideal Arian profile. Hutus murdered Tutsis in Rwanda because they weren’t like them. We see the pattern repeated over and over again to greater and lesser degrees. Whether we pick up a machete or erect a border fence, our human impulse is to keep those like us in and keep those not like us out. Dominance and isolation.
But this is not what we were created for, and Genesis 11 tells us that God will not stand for it. In verse 6, we see God act. “There is now one people and they all have one language. This is what they have begun to do, and now all that they plan to do will be possible for them.” This sounds a bit like God is scared of what they might accomplish, but it’s actually more a comment on what kind of havoc they will wreak on the creation if allowed to be united with their isolationist concerns for self-preservation. Their sin concentrates their efforts on creation-threatening tasks—sin that continues to rear its ugly head in our world.
So God counters their efforts in a way that gives them no choice but to obey his command. “Come, let us [that is, the heavenly court] go down and mix up their language so that they won’t understand each other.” Then the Lord dispersed them from there over all the earth, and (verse 9), the place was named Babel—an interesting play on words. The name they wanted to make for themselves (Babel meaning “gate of God”) now becomes a name for confusion.
Whether or not this is the story that gives us the origins of language is not the point of the text. The point is that God opposes the human impulse to cluster for purposes of dominance or isolation. Notice how the citizens of Babel begin with the word “Come.” In Genesis 12, when God speaks to Abraham, the dominant word in Scripture from there on becomes “Go.” We were never meant to draw battle lines or fence lines, we were meant to go and spread abroad the purposes of God in every language and culture. We were not meant to stave off the rest of the world with a strong fortress, mighty towers, and stacks of weapons. We were made to be fruitful, to multiply, to speak the language of God’s grace to the whole world.
J
esus taught his disciples how to cross the Maginot line of human dominance and isolation. His own people, the Jews, had walled themselves off in his day, circling the wagons against the Gentiles and especially the Romans who occupied their land. Such was their own unity that they dare not speak to or eat with a Gentile, lest they defile themselves. But Jesus is a boundary breaker, a scatterer of God’s grace and we see that in today’s Gospel lesson. A centurion, a representative of Israel’s enemy occupiers, comes to Jesus pleading that his servant is ill. Jesus offers to go and heal him—a major boundary crossing offer. The centurion, however, knows that this is an issue. “I don’t deserve to have you come under my roof,” he says. “Just say the word and my servant will be healed.” This is a statement of extraordinary faith by one who isn’t supposed to have it. He isn’t like Jesus and his people. And Jesus turns to his fellow Jews and says, “I say to you, with all seriousness, that even in Israel I haven’t found faith like this.” This Gentile soldier, who may have participated in the deaths of some of Jesus’ fellow Galileans during the many tax revolts that took place there, put aside his faith in security, isolation, and dominance and instead trusted Jesus for the life of someone close to him.
That’s boundary crossing faith—barriers of language and culture broken.
But then Jesus turns to his fellow Jews and says this: “I say to you that there are many who will come from the east and west and sit down to eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” We must not miss the power of that statement—that the table of the kingdom will be open for people of different languages, different cultures, different races. But (verse 12) “the children of the kingdom [those who were supposed to go and welcome others not like them, but didn’t] will be thrown outside into the darkness.” Dominance and isolation have no place in God’s kingdom. We don’t kill or exclude those who aren’t like us, we embrace them.
Turn ahead to Acts 2 and the story of Pentecost and we see Jesus equipping his disciples for that mission. We’ll be reading this again in a couple of weeks but notice what happens. When Pentecost comes and the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, what happens? The people gathered from many tribes and nations all hear the good news about Christ in their own language! Babel is reversed! And the rest of the story of Acts is the story of how that small group of disciples scattered from place to place sharing the news, in many languages and cultures.
But we forget this. The Christians in Flanders Fields 100 years ago forgot this. The Christians who picked up machetes in Rwanda forgot this. The German Christians in Nazi Germany forgot this. And we forget it too. Look at the ways in which the church has tried either dominance or isolation, even today. We try dominance by meshing our Christian faith with the secular politics of a political party or nation until they are one and the same, or we focus on isolation—setting up a Christian ghetto where only Christian schools, Christian music, Christian books, and Christian language is allowed.
But Jesus said “Go—go into all the world and preach the gospel to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you.” It’s a command to scatter; a command to learn new languages; a command to break boundaries; a command to share the way of peace, the way of God’s kingdom.
In 2010 I had the privilege of taking a trip with my doctoral class to South Korea. On the first day we were there, our hosts took us to a cemetery on the outskirts of Seoul. It was freezing that day as we walked among the tombstones, but it didn’t take long to notice that the majority of the names were in English– the graves of some of the first missionaries to bring Christianity to Korea. Korea was not very open to the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but these bold missionaries came anyway. They had to learn the language, they faced persecution by the government authorities, they had to learn a culture very different from their own. Most of them died there in this foreign land, never again seeing home. They gave their lives to the command of God—to scatter, to go, and to multiply their faith. Now, a little more than a century later, the largest Christian churches in the world are in South Korea, including the largest Methodist Church (Kwanglim). That day in the cemetery was a different kind of Memorial Day and one that I will never forget.
We honor our war dead today, and well we should. I hope you’ll find time to go to a cemetery today or tomorrow and just walk among the stones, remembering what defense against dominance and isolation costs in human lives. We have the flag here in the sanctuary today in their honor. But I also invite you to consider that young men and women dying in armed conflict not God’s plan for his good creation. No, God wants us to scatter, to come to a different sort of unity—not a unity of nation, of race, of power, but rather a unity of purpose around the purposes of God for us and for his creation. God hasn’t given us a world to fear, but a world in which to shed abroad his love. He has not given us a world to exploit, but a world to serve and protect. He has not given us the power of kingdoms ruled by czars, Kaisers, princes, and Presidents. He has given us the power of his own kingdom, where there is no tower trying to reach God but, rather, God dwelling with us and reaching out to us.
My prayer is that if we, the church of Jesus Christ, will recapture that boundary crossing mission, as Jesus did, and embrace our citizenship in God’s kingdom, then the world will one day no longer need to give up its youth to the gun and the grave; that Memorial Days can turn into homecoming days; that people will come from the east and west—not for battle or for building monuments, but to sit together at the table of Christ.
That is what we were made for.
In the Prayer Book for the Public and Private Use of Our Soldiers, which was issued to American doughboys on their way to the front in 1917, there is this prayer for “Right Decision:”
ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.
May that be our prayer, too, on this Memorial Day Sunday. Amen.
