“Towers of Babel” based on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts…

June 5, 2022
by Sara Baron

If you hear the story of the
Tower of Babel and scratch your head in confusion, I believe that is
a sign you are hearing it right. “Why build a tower?” “Why
was God upset about a tower?” “Huh?”

The context clue that I believe
we need to understand the story is that some of ancient Israel’s
neighbors were really into building HIGH “towers” You may think,
perhaps, of the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, or the Babylonian ziggurat
which was a huge temple, sort of like a pyramid, built as a worship
complex for their deity.

So, in the midst of an old, old
myth trying to explain why different peoples spoke different
languages, the Ancient Israelite’s also managed to sneak in some
propaganda against their neighbors. So, that’s why a tower, and
since those towers were parts of other faith traditions, that’s why
God was said to be jealous.

I rather like this confusing
ancient myth. I appreciate the question, “why can’t we communicate
with each other” and I even like the premise that if we could just
communicate well, we could do anything. I find this to be a story I
go back to, as I think of various things that confuse language or
communication, and I associate them with the Tower of Babel.

To some degree, I think the
story claims that the Tower was a sign of arrogance, and arrogance
needed to be tapped down. More directly, it claims the people were
getting too powerful, and God was jealous of their power, but that
doesn’t sound like good theology to me.

The Tower of Babel story tries
to explain what separates us from each other, why we can’t work
together, perhaps even why we so easily perceive ourselves as groups
of “us” and “them.” These are some big, important questions!
I’d like answers too! (I’d rather not blame God.)

What keeps us from working
towards the common good? Why do we perceive others as “others,”
and sometimes as enemies? What keeps us from seeing that justice for
any moves us towards justice for all? Why DO we throw each other
under the bus?

When we are clearly hardwired
for connection, made by God for connection, why does it so often
fail?

Why are there wars? Why is there
hunger? Why is there abuse? Why is there violence?

Why can’t we just care for each
other, and use the abundant resources of the earth for good?

It is hard to consume the news
without landing on these questions. Why is Russian invading Ukraine?
Is it about power? Money? Prestige? Why are there so many mass
shootings? What has happened in the lives of the shooters to lead
them to their actions?

We don’t even need the news. We
can just look around. Why is there a need for a free community
breakfast in one of the wealthiest countries in the world – why do
we have a society that allows people to go hungry when it doesn’t
have to? Why are beloved children of God homeless, when it would be
LESS expensive to house people than it is not to?

Relatedly, why is mental health
care hard to access when so many people need it? Why are so many
people self-medicating with drugs that lead to addiction – what is
aching in them, and how could things be different so it wouldn’t
ache?

As a note, I believe that the
answer to a lot of the questions I’ve asked is actually “trauma”
and the extent to which we can become informed about trauma and
responsive to people in their midst of their trauma MAY WELL be the
extent to which we are useful at changing the world towards the
kindom.

There are smaller, and still
important, pieces of separation too. The ones we all experience.
Friendships that fall apart. Distance from family members.
Disagreements in groups we’re part of, sometimes ones that create too
much conflict to keep the group together. Violations of core values,
that can’t be overcome. Experiences of God as distant. And those
hurt too. And those matter too.

The Tower of Babel story invites
us into these questions, it invites us into the heartbreak under
these questions. Because it isn’t an intellectual exercise to say
“why is there war?” Even from afar, it is heartbreaking to know
what is happening to human beings because there is a war. It isn’t
an intellectual exercise to say, “why do families fall apart?”
It is heartbreaking to see families fall apart, and the stories I
hear tell me the pain can last for generations.

There are so many ways to
distract ourselves from these questions, and from the pain under
them, but I don’t think we do ourselves any good with avoidance. I
think we have to face the heartbreak, and sit with it, to hear it out
and letting God move us to healing.

And, being me, that’s what I
hear in Pentecost. It is, I hope, easy to see that the story of
Pentecost is an undoing of the story of the Tower of Babel. People
from many different places can suddenly understand each other.
Communication is restored. The preaching of Peter suggests God is
active with the people, all the people, erasing divisions between
them. Peter says even nature will take note of the difference!

And where does it end? With
healing. “Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be
saved.” For some of us (me) the word “saved” has been laden
with layers of problematic meaning. I have to be intentional in not
running away from the word, and in reminding myself what it means to
the Bible.

Peter wasn’t talking about
heaven and hell. Peter was talking about a wonderful combination of
important things: healing the sort of healing that goes right down
the core of a person’s soul as well as their body, and also to their
RELATIONSHIPS and connections to community; along side something we
might call freedom, but is so much more – freedom from fear,
freedom from oppression and freedom from oppressing, freedom from
continued cycles of abuse and violence and brokenness. Peter was
talking about life with God, at the very best it can be.

Peter is talking about life in
the kindom of God, and how it changes everything. The “saving”
he is talking about is the undoing of all the things we’ve been
taking about with the Tower of Babel and SEPARATION.

Saving, here, is connection,
relationship, full and abundant LIFE.

These stories, held together,
offer us space to reflection on disconnection and connection,
miscommunication and good communication, brokenness and healing.
And, I hope, they invite us, again, into the kindom. To live with
connection, communication, and healing. To pay attention to what
brings full and abundant life, including the need to sometimes sit
with our heartbreak until it releases us, and then to seek, once
again, full hearts, by the grace of God. May God help us. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

June 5, 2022

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May 30, 2021
by Sara Baron

“Come, Holy Spirit”

In Easter evening the disciples were locked up together in a house, afraid of what would happen to them. It was into that enclave that stories of resurrection started to be told. And, it was in that enclave that some experiences of resurrection happened. According to Acts, the disciples were mostly together in that room for a rather extended period of time, praying, and …. just a little bit… starting to organize. As time went on, there were more people gathering together, functioning together as an extended family, but still they were gathered together in a tight circle, in Jerusalem.

And then came Pentecost.

Pentecost was and is a Jewish festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest. Faithful Jews had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, just as faithful Jews had gathered for Passover, 50 days earlier. It was another of the 3 festivals that was a traditional pilgrimage feast.

A colleague of mine suggested that the first Christian Pentecost story, the one we read in Acts, required those days apart from the world.

Of course, at this point, we may scoff at 50 days. 😉 To the scoffers, I’ll offer a reminder of the 40 years of wandering in the desert, which the Bible also said was necessary to “get the people ready.”

As you may know, I do not believe in a God who punishes. I do, however, believe in a God who is willing to use any situation as a jumping off point for good. ANY situation. Those ideas can get confusing sometimes for people, because talking about what God does with a situation can SOUND like “God created this situation for good” but I don’t mean that! I just really believe that God is willing and able to enter any situation and seek the best possible outcome from that point, and often God is far more creative than we’d be able to imagine!

In Acts, 50 days after Easter, The Holy Spirit showed up, with gusto. God’s Spirit is a part of the understanding of the Divine in the Hebrew Bible as well, but the way the Spirit shows up is new. To be fair, the symbol of fire as representing God’s presence isn’t new, the burning bush helps us out there. And “tongues of fire” is a phrase that comes from Isaiah 5. The wind a symbol of the Spirit isn’t new either. But added up, it IS new.

God’s Spirit shows up, sounding like a rushing wind, looking like divided tongues of fire, and imparting the gift of being understandable to people of many nations, languages, and cultures. Robert Wall in the New Interpreter’s Bible says, “God’s spirit is poured out upon a community of believers. The Holy Spirit is not a ‘personal’ gift from God that each believer privatizes – ‘you can have your Spirit if I can have mine.’ This same Spirit of one God ‘appeared among them – on each of them’ as the distinguishing mark of a people belonging to God. The restoration of Israel is the work of this Spirit sent by God as promised (see 1:6) which is why the first auditors of the miracle of tongues were ‘devout Jews from every nation’ (2:5).”1

I must admit that this year I was particularly astonished by the list of the places the devout Jews were from. It served as a profound reminder of the history of the diaspora, of the people of Jewish faith being displaced, which is especially notable when Judaism has an especially strong theology as being people of the (promised) land.

This fits the history of the Jewish people, of course. They settled on land that was a crossroads between civilizations, and as Empires expanded they expanded to include the crossroads. As Empires contracted, other Empires expanded, and a long, difficult history of independence, tributes, colonization, and external control ALREADY characterized their history by the time of Jesus. Wars had come and gone. Empires had come and gone. And each time, people had come and gone, dispersing the “people of the land” to many lands.

It fits, as well, that dispersed people of the land would have a tradition of pilgrimage to come back home to the land.

These themes of place feel so strong in this story this year. The followers of Jesus being so afraid that their world contracted to a single room, or perhaps a home. The devout Jews being so broadly scattered and making such profound efforts to come “home” to worship. The ways that distance separated them even when they were in Jerusalem, by dress, and culture, and LANGUAGE.

The idea of a miracle of understanding. Of course, it makes sense to think about Christian Pentecost as being the antithesis of the Story of the Tower of Babel. In the Tower of Babel story, God was afraid the people had too much power together and seprated them with language. In the Pentecost Story, God’s Spirit blesses the people with connection and the capacity to speak and be understood. It could be said that God has gained trust in the people (and then it becomes a question of if we’ve earned it or God just gave it because God’s like that.)

Sometimes I yearn for the miracles of Pentecost, most often when I am speaking with someone whose language I share, but with whom I’m clearly not managing to communicate. The barriers of assumptions, connotations, life experience, expectations, values, and fears can make “shared language” distinctly insufficient for shared communication.

Yet, we are the inheritors of the Pentecost story. As one person put it, in Christmas we get the story of “God with us.” At Easter we learn that “God is for us.” At Pentecost we tell the story that God is IN us. The Spirit residing in and among us makes it possible for us to do God’s work in the world, to share love, to build the kindom – and sometimes even to understand and be understood.

While the pandemic continues around the world, and right here at home, in the United States many people are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are making it possible to for life to change again. It may make sense to think of us as emerging from an overly small room. (Acknowledging, of course, the many who cared for us so well that they never were able to protect themselves. I hope for front line workers there is an emerging from fear.)

I believe that God is up to good among us, now, as God was up to good among the disciples then. I’m not arrogant enough to claim I know what God is up to, but I can sense…. something. This sermon is the last one I’ll preach exclusively online, at least for a while and perhaps for always. While we will keep online worship, we will also offer an informal outdoor worship service starting next week. Like the disciples, we’ll be in the city, able to be heard by those walking by. Maybe, God’s Spirit will make us audible in a new way as we emerge. But whatever God is up to, I know it is good. Amen

1Robert W. Wall “Refections on Acts 2:1-13” in New Interpreter’s Bible Vol X, ed. Leader E. Keck et al (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), p. 57.